Christophe Havel

After scientific and musical studies in Paris and Bordeaux, Christophe Havel chose to settle in Bordeaux, where he is actively involved in the musical life, including as a co-founding member and artistic director of the Proxima Centauri ensemble, and as the artistic director of the Scrime, since September 2011.
In his early instrumental works - Oxyton (1991) Omotesis (1991) RamDam (1992), his very expressive style was undeniably inspired by the electro-acoustic experience in both the design of the sounds - especially in the details of the morphological writing – and the use of new technologies at different stages of the elaboration of the work.
His work often combined at the time one or several instruments to an electro-acoustic device used live, as in S (1994), which won the first prize at the 6th electro-acoustic composition contest of Braunschweig in 1995.
In reaction to the very expressive nature of his early works, he directed his work towards the composition of dynamic structures where the harmonic and rhythmic materials play an important role and actively participate in the formal dynamics, which gives the works of this period - IT! (1998), Aer [la danse] (1994), cinetic (2000) - a new plasticity. More recently his approach has focused on the use of a gestural grammar to apprehend the sound phenomenon in its entirety - Dissidences (2008-13), Eden (2009), XX (2010), XY (2010) whether in an instrumental or electronic situation.
In his series of metamorphoses, begun in 2000, he develops a form of writing that connects the musicians to the computer in open structures by using mainly synthetic sounds. In this perspective, he is the initiator of a research project at the Scrime (Studio de Création et de Recherche en Informatique et en Musique Electroacoustique) on percussion gesture recognition. In 2004 he was appointed associate researcher at LaBRI (Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique).
His career as a composer and electro-acoustic musician is accompanied by various educational experiences. Since 1991 he has been teaching electro-acoustic composition at the Conservatoire in Bordeaux. From 1994 to 1998 he taught contemporary musical aesthetics at the Cefedem and from 1999 to 2004 he was a lecturer in musical acoustics at the University of Musicology of Bordeaux. In 2003 he was appointed professor of composition at the Academy of Music of Catalonia in Barcelona (ESMUC) and from 2004 to 2011 he was a member of the faculty team of Musikene, the School of Music of the Basque Country in San Sebastian, teaching electro-acoustic composition.