Associate Professor at the University of Iowa, Jean-François Charles is a composer, a clarinetist, an electronic musician, and a Max Certified Trainer. Creating at the crossroads of music and technology, he has performed dozens of concerts with his Spectral DJ instrument.
Recent highlights include a new soundtrack to Lotte Reiniger's movie the Adventures of Prince Achmed, co-composed with Nicolas Sidoroff and Ramin Roshandel, and premiered at the Marées Max festival (2026); 12 concerts of the 33-minute suite The Blues and the Material Truth with Red Cedar Chamber Music (2025); the album Tenebrae, reviewed as "Five stars: A fascinating excursion into Charles’ mind, superbly engineered" in Fanfare Magazine (2024); the album Missa brevis Abbaye de Thélème, starring Anika Kildegaard (2023), and the associated award-winning Agnus Dei music video; a full soundtrack to the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame movie starring Lon Chaney, co-composed with Nicolas Sidoroff (2023); the award-winning album Jamshid Jam, a duet with setar virtuoso Ramin Roshandel; the opera Grant Wood in Paris, commissioned by the Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre (premiered in 2019); and Aqua ignis, a musical chemistry work with scientific glassblower Benj Revis (2018).
As a clarinetist, Charles has performed with artists like Maurice Merle, Douglas Ewart, or Gozo Yoshimasu. He worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen for the world premiere and studio recording of Rechter Augenbrauentanz (Stockhausen-Verlag CD #59). His album Electroclarinet was awarded prizes at the Global Music Awards in both categories Contemporary Classical Album and Composition/Composer. The music was reviewed as full of drama and drive (Dolf Mulder, Vital Weekly) or colorful and jazzy, giving the listener a plethora of timbral explosions (Lori Ardovino, The Clarinet Journal).
He studied at the National Institute for Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon, then at the Strasbourg Conservatory with Italian composer Ivan Fedele and clarinetist Armand Angster. He earned his Ph.D. in music composition at Harvard, where he studied with Hans Tutschku, Chaya Czernowin, Julian Anderson, Michael Gandolfi, Helmut Lachenmann, and Gunther Schuller. His article A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing using Max/MSP and Jitter published in the Computer Music Journal has helped many electronic musicians integrate spectral sound processing into live performances, compositions, or their own software creations.