Rate My Professor Jean-François Charles

Jean-François Charles is an Associate Professor of Composition and Digital Arts in the School of Music at The University of Iowa, where he also holds the position of Composition/Music Theory Co-Area Head. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in music composition from Harvard University earned in 2011, with the dissertation titled Music Composition: An Interactive Approach. He previously obtained a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute for Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon, France, and studied composition with Ivan Fedele and clarinet performance with Armand Angster at the Strasbourg Conservatory. At Harvard, Charles studied with distinguished composers including Hans Tutschku, Chaya Czernowin, Julian Anderson, Michael Gandolfi, Helmut Lachenmann, and Gunther Schuller.

Charles is a composer, clarinetist, electronic musician, and Max Certified Trainer who creates works at the intersection of music and technology. He has performed dozens of concerts using his Spectral DJ instrument. Notable compositions and projects include the 2024 album Tenebrae, the 2023 polystylistic Missa brevis Abbaye de Thélème released on the New Flore Music label featuring singer Anika Kildegaard, a co-composed soundtrack for the 1923 film Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney, the award-winning album Jamshid Jam in duet with setār virtuoso Ramin Roshandel, soundtracks for Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda No. 5 & 6 (2021), the opera Grant Wood in Paris commissioned and premiered by the Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre in 2019, and Aqua ignis (2018), a musical collaboration with scientific glassblower Benj Revis. As a clarinetist, he has performed with artists such as Maurice Merle, Douglas Ewart, and Gozo Yoshimasu, and contributed to the world premiere and recording of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Rechter Augenbrauentanz (Stockhausen-Verlag CD #59). His album Electroclarinet received awards from the Global Music Awards in the Contemporary Classical Album and Composition/Composer categories. Key scholarly publications include "A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing using Max/MSP and Jitter" in Computer Music Journal (2008), "Using the Axoloti Embedded Sound Processing Platform to Foster Experimentation and Creativity" (2018), Petrasonic, a Musical Exploration of Iowa's Geology (2021), and "Sonic Print: Timbre Classification with Live Training for Musical Applications" (2020). His research has garnered 65 citations on Google Scholar. Charles received a $7,620 ITTA grant in 2024 for enhancing art-science collaborations.