Jean-Claude Éloy

Jean-Claude Éloy (born 15 June 1938 in Mont-Saint-Aignan, near Rouen) is a French composer.

Éloy studied at the Paris National Superior Conservatory of Music, where he was awarded first prizes in piano (1957), chamber music (1958), counterpoint (1959), ondes martenot (1960), and composition (1962). His composition teacher there was Darius Milhaud. He attended the summer courses at Darmstadt in 1957, 1960, and 1961, where he studied with Henri Pousseur, Hermann Scherchen, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. From 1961 to 1963 he attended Boulez's composition masterclasses at the Basle Musik-Akademie.

From 1966 to 1968 Éloy taught at the University of California, Berkeley. By the end of this period, his compositional style began to show the influence of Asian musics, in works such as Faisceaux-Diffractions (1970) and Kâmakalâ (1971). From 1972 to 1973 he worked in the Electronic Music Studio of WDR in Cologne, where he produced Shânti (revised in 1974). At the Electronic Studio of Tokyo Radio (NHK) in 1977–78, he created the four-hour long Gaku-no-michi (1977–8). In collaboration with the French Ministry of Culture, in 1983 he founded a center for musical research (CIAMI), and his compositions return to the use of orchestral and choral forces, while also exploring the live-electronic possibilities of synthesizer and sampler orchestras.

His works have been performed in Europe, Asia, the United States, Canada, and Latin America, under conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Ernest Bour, Michael Gielen, Bruno Maderna, Diego Masson, Michel Tabachnik, and Arthur Weisberg.