Thélème

PERFORMING MUSIC FREELY

Founded in 2013, Thélème brings together musicians who offer an open and original interpretation of early music. Around its foundation of voice and lute, the ensemble includes instruments from different periods – viola da gamba, saxophone, ondes Martenot, modular synthesizer – and works with authors, actors, dancers, choreographers, and other creative minds. Thélème thus explores a shifting musical territory, aiming to invent a coherent language and to offer new listening perspectives, the opposite of the museal.

Devoted to Renaissance polyphony, the ensemble is particularly enthusiastic about sixteenth-century secular music, shaped by the development of music printing. Thélème is fascinated by the context in which these works were created and performed and how they were used. Secular music was originally a private form of entertainment intended primarily to delight its performers. This practice would become fertile ground for new, subersive forms characterized by pleasure. Thélème’s goal is not to reproduce these avant-garde secular works that highlight Renaissance contrasts between elegance and humor, finesse and obscenity. Rather, through blending genres and sheer audacity, the ensemble aims to bring this music to our time, to integrate its modernity with the present. Thélème embraces the past by maintaining a living dialogue with early works and nurtures a fruitful anachronism.

Thélème is the recipient of the prestigious Gramophone Award (Early Music, 2022) for the album “Baisiez Moy” (Aparté).