Jean-Claude Eloy

Of all the works by Jean-Claude Eloy, the 1983 "Approaching the Meditative Flame...", for 27 instrumentalists of the "Gagaku" orchestra from Japan, and two choruses of "Shômyô" Buddhist monks (a work known partially in the West by a double LP album "Harmonia Mundi") and more particularly, "Anâhata", for five traditional soloists from Japan (three instrumentalists and two monk singers), percussions, and a major electro-acoustic part (presented in different festivals in Europe) – are the two works that have aroused the greatest examination, controversy and questioning about the composer’s approach - generating quantities of prefabricated clichés and provoking a more or less soundly argued opposition from a segment of the professional environment. This has occurred in spite of the support, understanding, interest and success with audiences in some striking and symbolic venues of modernity. The works of Jean-Claude Eloy seek to abolish (with all the acoustical and electronical means available to the contemporary composer) the distances within time and space ; they erode and trespass the ancient frontiers between the western tradition (which is not rejected, but entirely integrated) and the non-european musical classical traditions.

Eloy’s works immerse us in a "unique gold" where we recall our adult, adolescent and childhood fantasies, in search of a deep truth, in search of ourselves, within ourselves and within the world. This nomadic, eternal, timeless and above all fundamentally human dimension is what makes the attractive force of the "spirals of the same galaxy" in Eloy’s music. For it itself is on a continual quest for "the Meditative Flame": "... its meditation is the heart, that is, the fullness of the world, the dimension that lights the way and gives us shelter...