Thélème

FREE MUSIC ENSEMBLE

Since 2013, Thélème has brought together musicians who want to offer an open and original interpretation of early music. The ensemble brings together instruments from various periods—violas da gamba, saxophones, ondes Martenot, and modular synthesizers—around the voice and lute, and collaborates with authors, actors, dancers, choreographers, and creative minds of all kinds. Thélème thus explores a shifting musical territory with the desire to invent a coherent language and offer new listening perspectives that are the antithesis of the museum-like.

The album “Baisiez Moy” (Aparté) was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Award (Early Music) in 2022.

With a strong attachment to the polyphonic repertoire of the Renaissance, the ensemble takes a keen interest in secular music, which flourished in the 16th century thanks to the development of music printing. Thélème is fascinated by the contexts and customs that gave rise to these works. Unrelated to any form of concert music, secular music was originally a private entertainment intended above all to delight its performers. The meaning of this practice became fertile ground for the emergence of new, subversive forms, always characterized by pleasure. There is no intention to reproduce these avant-garde secular works, which highlight the contrasts of the Renaissance between elegance and humor, delicacy and obscenity, in an identical manner: the aim is to make this music heard today, to combine its modernity with the present through a mixture of genres, incongruity, and impertinence. Thélème embraces the past by maintaining a lively dialogue with ancient works and cultivating a fertile anachronism.