Composer and electroacoustican

Biographies Proxima Centauri ARTS COUNCIL

 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 Proxima Centauri.

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. More recently his approach has focused on the use of a gestural grammar to apprehend the sound phenomenon in its entirety whether in an instrumental or electronic situation.

In his series of metamorphoses, 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 (Bordeaux University) on percussion gesture recognition. In 2004 he was appointed associate researcher at LaBRI.

In 2021–2022, he produced a virtual reality version of his work Analog, thereby launching Proxima Centauri’s “Scènes Virtuelles” catalogue.

His career as a composer and electroacoustic musician has been accompanied by a variety of teaching experiences, in particular at the Bordeaux Conservatory where he taught electroacoustic composition from 1991 to 2021. From 1994 to 1998, he taught contemporary musical aesthetics at Cefedem; from 1999 to 2004, he was a lecturer in musical acoustics at the University of Musicology of Bordeaux III; and from 2004 to 2011, he joined the teaching staff at Musikene, the High School of Music of the Basque Country in San Sebastian. In 2003, he was appointed professor of composition at the High School of Music of Catalonia in Barcelona (ESMUC), where he taught until 2023.