©Frédéric Desmesure
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 from September 2011 to September 2014. From 1991 to 2021, he taught electroacoustic composition at the Conservatoire of Bordeaux.
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 response to the highly expressive character of his early works, he has turned his attention to the composition of dynamic structures in which harmonic and rhythmic materials play a dominant role and play an active part in the formal dynamics, giving the works of this period - IT! (1998), ÆR [la danse] (1994) and cinetic (2000). More recently, his approach has focused on the use of a gestural grammar that allows the sound phenomenon to be understood in its entirety: Dissidences (2008-13), Eden (2009), XX (2010), XY (2010), whether in an instrumental or electronic situation.
In his series of metamorphoses, which began in 2000, he developed a style that brought together the instrumentalist and the computer in open structures using essentially synthetic sounds. With this in mind, he initiated research at Scrime into the capture of the percussionist's gesture. In 2004 he was appointed associate researcher at LaBRI (Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique/Bordeaux Computer Science Research Laboratory).
His career as a composer and electroacoustic musician has been accompanied by a range of teaching experiences. From 1994 to 1998 he taught contemporary musical aesthetics at Cefedem, and from 1999 to 2004 he was a teacher in musical acoustics at the Musicology Department of the University of Bordeaux III. From 2004 to 2011 he was a member of the teaching staff at Musikene, the Higher School of Music of the Basque Country in San Sebastian. In 2003 he was appointed professor of composition at the Escuela Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona (esmuc), where he taught until 2023.