Gregorian chants, sacred polyphonies of the XIVth century, Persian improvisations

This program associates the sacred song of the western Middle Ages with the mystic poetry of the East, improvised, according to the learned tradition of the Radif, the Persian classic song, on texts of the big mystic poets of medieval Iran.
In 2009, Radif is registered as immaterial cultural heritage of the humanity by the UNESCO.

Programme for 6 singers
Duration : 1h20

This program gives voice to the feminine figure of the medieval West and the East of today in a music of the ecstasy and the delight. Pray for peace is inspired by the angels, the mediators of the invisible, who populate the sky of the Christians, as that of the Jews and the Muslims. The word angelus comes from Greek aggelos, it corresponds to the mal’ak in Hebrew and in Arabic which means messenger.
This program consists of Gregorian pieces and anonymous polyphonies of the XIVth century having a dialogue with the exceptional voice of Sara Hamidi, improvising, like an invocation wich comes from the other heavens, for the time of a peace prayer. The voice of the women was often kill in the world. It is it even today in numerous countries, as should be a witness this young Iranian singer who breaks the prohibition made for the women occur in public and chooses the exile rather than the silence.
Sara Hamidi improvises according to the model of Radif, taught orally as the tradition requires it.
In Radif, it is about characteristic melodic motives for every mode. The interpreter has to know them by heart to use them as material of his improvisation.
Iran is the country of the archetypal poetry. The singer chooses the texts on which he will improvise. In this program, Sara Hamidi will sing the poetry of Khayyâm, Haafez and Rûmî.
This meeting, o how much symbolic, highlights the affinities of two civilizations of the medieval world. Breath, melismas, sound arabesques, ornaments and modalities find themselves in both traditions. So they can answer, unite without becoming confused nevertheless ever.

Participative creation

Voices, instruments, circus, video, amateur and smartphone choruses

Cultural actions for amateur choruses (adults & children)

The hypnotic music of Steve Reich has a dialogue with that of Pérotin, Pink Floyd and Stockhausen. The public is in the heart of the creation of Jonathan Bell which encloses this show.

Singers : Laurence Brisset, Eugénie De Mey, Marie-George Monet, Estelle Nadau, Hélène Richer, Caroline Tarrit,
Percussions : Stan Delannoy, Vincent Martin – claviers : Laurent Durupt, Trami Nguyen  Musical direction : Rémi Durupt
Circus perfomer : Julien Cramillet – visual artist : Hicham Berrada  – staging : Lionel Parlier Computer music design : Jonathan Bell – Sound engineer : Pierre Favrez

Duration : 1h20

CONSTELLATIONS traces out a poetic and oneiric path between dramatic expression and a wide variety of musical styles: a resonant and visual constellation of suns, suspended and evocative like a lunar image in a dreamlike moment.

CONSTELLATIONS is a story of encounters: initially between the Links and De Caelis ensembles, then between Pérotin’s Ars Antiqua music and that of Steve Reich, to create a spellbinding and original work incorporating music, circus and video.

Bringing together musicians and visual artists, the Links Ensemble has set itself the task of inventing new, often participative concert formats. In their desire to encourage amateur choruses to perform contemporary music and make it more fun and more accessible, it was only natural for Links to come together with the De Caelis Ensemble, a specialist in medieval music and contemporary creation.

The two ensembles will be presenting Proverb by Steve Reich, with forays into Pink Floyd and Stockhausen. There will also be modal improvisations inspired by Pérotin’s Organa and Jonathan Bell’s piece Le temps des Nuages, composed for the two ensembles and an amateur chorus to a text by Michel Onfray. Taken from his book Recours aux forêts, published by editons Galilée, it is a poetic and philosophical meditation on the need to set one’s destiny in nature and the cosmos.

Pérotin’s music dazzled the West by its inventiveness. The use of rhythmic forms, numerous repetitions and imitations, gives it a stimulatingly exhilarating, quasi-hypnotic quality. Clearly,  a fertile source of inspiration for Steve Reich.

At IRCAM, Jonathan Bell has developed a process that allows an amateur chorus to receive musical instructions via a mobile telephone, thus gaining access to the creative process without the often formidable barrier of score reading.

Specifically created for the performance, the chorus is dispersed among the audience. The spatialised sound leaves the listener immersed in a unique experience.

To lend image and substance to the musical programme, the artists’ collective  has devised a world in motion. An ethereal universe comprised of fascinatingly spectacular poetic colours and forms that bring together the aerial  choreographies of Circus performer Julien Cramillet and the chemo-hypnotic videos of visual artist Hicham Berrada created in real time on stage. CONSTELLATIONS will explore all the theatre’s public areas to offer an astonishing sensorial adventure that has to be felt and experienced in total immersion.

Musical entertainment in the courts of Avignon and Florence at the end of the XIVth century.

Pieces of G. de Machaut, P. de Vitry, P. de Caserta, J. de Senlèches, J. Solage, F. Landini…

Voices, organetto and clavicytherium.

Programme for 3 female voices, , 1 organetto, 1 clavicytherium

Duration : 1h15

At the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, the courts of Avignon and northern Italy played host to brilliant artistic circles where the greatest musicians shone. Crafting a treasury of musical “gems” through technique and stylistic erring, they invented unusual and entertaining combinations. It was customary to sing and play, especially among ladies. The clavicytherium and the organetto accompany this programme.

The pieces of the program result from the Codex Chantilly, one of the richest collections of French music of the XIVth century, of the Codex Squarcialupi, consisted in Florence at the beginning of the XVth century containing some music of the Italian XIVth century, and the Codex Faenza, copied at the beginning of the XVth century, which presents one of the most former music collections for keyboard.

Special birthday program for the 20th of De Caelis.

J. Cage, S. Reich, G. Aperghis, creations of Régis Campo and Jacques Rebotier. and anonymous composers from the 13th  and 14th century,

Staging : Eric Louviot
Songs, motets and UVOs (unidentified vocal objects)

The Ensemble plays with words and notes through the imagination of composers from yesterday and today.

For five female voices

Duration : 1h20

On the occasion of his 20 years, De Caelis proposes an adventure for all ages public around the Anthem, the very fashionable musical form in the Middle Ages: the Chatterers, or how to make of a small defect the subject of the program …

In the Middle Ages, language was considered as “natural music”. The word motet, motetus, comes from the French “mot” meaning word. Highly popular during the 13thcentury, it played cleverly with musical discourse and dialectic art. It superimposed and intertwined different texts and different languages, bloating, spluttering, rambling, mocking or praising at will. A veritable Tower of Babel, a masterpiece of rhetoric or merely gay banter, the motet allowed the musician’s enthusiasm to shine through by exploring new possibilities of notation.

The recent pieces of this programme share this spirit and the taste for experimentation and the extraordinary. They use language as the raw material of music.

This programme is intended to be both scholarly and entertaining, with the contemporary pieces and texts giving pride of place to humour and theatricality.

For five female singers, amateur chorus and electronic soundtrack.

Smartvox of Jonathan Bell, concert – performance ().

French pieces of the Notre-Dame School of Paris (XIIth et XIIIrd centuries)

A melting pot where get involved sacred texts from the Bible, contemporary music, new technology and early music. In a hyper connected world, Jonathan Bell takes an artistic look by puting the alive, the sensitive at the heart of the human-machine relation.

Duration : 1h20

A cutting-edge technology for musical creation. Jonathan Bell invented a transmission tool allowing for the orchestration of numerous human and electronic sources. The performers, five vocal soloists and an amateur choir, use their smartphones and headphones all connected through wifi, in order to participate together to the elaboration of the same piece. He thus conceive a human-machine dialogue, as well as a machine-mediated dialogue between humans, both a technical and poetic achievement. Each performer is provided with auditory cues: pitches, rhythm and text. The composer therefore finds an affinity with the musical practice of Middle Ages, in which hearing was of greater importance than sight.

In his musical writing, Jonathan Bell carries the influence of the French spectral school. The harmony is generated from the analysis of sound spectra, and uses a mixture of natural voices and synthesised sounds. The choir rehearses the piece with the De Caelis ensemble, and can therefore fully join the performance during the concert .

An ancient part fulfills the program: pieces of the 12th and 13th Century, monodies and polyphonies of the Ars Antigua. This innovative art of unprecedented beauty found imitations throughout Europe, and so was later called École de Notre-Dame de Paris, with anonymous masters as well as Pérotin and Léonin.

The Smartvox project allows unexperimented music readers to participate to musical materials hitherto reserved to experts. Our ambition is to discover this music from the inside, through experimentation. Smartphones give here autonomy to each singer, and allows them to tune and keep in time with each other, even in complex microtonal or polyrhythmic passages. The setup allows here professional singers to convey their knowledge and passion through a direct interaction with singers of all levels, immersed in an unknown soundworld.

This process also permits new forms of concerts and music making. The listener is immersed in a mobile sonic architecture. A choreography of slow movements, also guided by the smartphones’ screens, will evoke at times forms of rituals. Some light projections will also underline the movements of the choir, thus adding to the visual dimension of the concert.

En partenariat avec l’IRCAM.

Jonathan Bell était sur France Musique l’invité de l’émission Le Cri du Patchwork de Clément Lebrun du 27 février 2018 pour expliquer son travail avec l’ensemble De Caelis et présenter son système Smartvox.
Retrouver l’entretien de Jonathan Bell dans la deuxième partie de l’émission :

An exceptional program between sacred and profane that pays tribute to two great female figures of history: Eleanor of Brittany and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

For 5 unaccompanied women’s voices

Duration: 1h15

Program premiere : 26th of September of 2015 in the Royale Abbey of Fontevraud

Monophonic and polyphonic parts of the Gradual of Eleanor of Brittany (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) precedes “The song of William of Aquitaine”, piece of the composer Philippe Hersant, inspired by a poem by William IX, grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine (ordered by the Fontevraud Abbey).

In this program they are from the Gradual songs from the Mass for the Vigil of the Assumption, sequences and two polyphony, improvised polyphony as it was in then. Joined the program three pieces of English origin that could have been sung in fondations from Fontevraud in England, as Amesbury where Eleanor of Brittany was born in 1275. Gradual of Eleanor of Brittany is exceptional. Richly illuminated, it consists 301 sheets. After a stay at the English convent of Amesbury, Eleanor of Brittany arrives at Fontevraud in 1290 and pronounced her vows there. She becomes the sixteenth abbess in 1304 and at his death in 1342, she bequeathed the Gradual with her coat of arms. This is a unique source for the study of the practice of Gregorian chant in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In 2013, Xavier Kawa Topor and Françoise Baudin, directors of the Fontevraud Abbey – Cultural Encounter Centre, ask Oulipo poets to imagine that read Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 2013, a book is published that opens with an enigmatic poem written by William IX, first troubadour and grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Farai a verse from dreit nien, that is to say “I make a nothingness pure singing. ” It is this text that Philippe Hersant chose to set to music. Two songs of troubadours held him company, one of Guiraud Riquier (1254- 1292), one of Guirault Bornelh (1162 to 1199).

Ecoutez l’émission de France Culture “Continents Musique” avec l’ensemble De Caelis sur Le livre d’Aliénor et la thématique “Les femmes, le pouvoir et la musique”

From secret to sacred between yesterday and today.

Hildegard Von Bingen (1098 – 1179) / Zad Moultaka (1967-)

Hildegard’s ecstatic song stimulates the language of today. Zad Moultaka inlays the very depths of his cultural inheritance with flashes of light, diamonds, mortar fire and passages of sound-bearing light. Linking these pieces together, crossing the layers of memory and of time as one crosses walls, he cuts a path into our imaginations.

Hildegard von Bigen, Symphonia harmoniae celestium revelationum (XIIth century).
Zad Moultaka, Ubi es, for 5 female voices, electronics and a bass drum (2014).
Programme for 5 unaccompanied female voices, electronics and a bass drum.

Duration : 1h15

A co-production between De Caelis and the Festival de Saintes.
This programme has benn recorded and edited by L’empreinte Digitale.
GEMME ED13241 © L’empreinte digitale 2015
www.empreintedigitale-label.fr

English music of the 13th and 14th centuries

Programme for five unaccompanied female voices 

Duration : 1h

The English Channel has always been a link between France and England just as much as it has separated them. Love and hate were constantly at war in the hearts of those who dwelt on those shores. After the Norman conquest — or invasion, depending on the point of view taken — of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, the lands beyond the Channel became French-speaking and continental in culture. From that time onwards Norman French was spoken by the intellectual and social upper class; it remained the language of breeding and of culture until the end of the Hundred Years’ War.

This programme demonstrates the great variety of musical genres used during the 14th century by English musicians. Apart from the two large manuscripts of St. Andrews (1230) and Old Hall (1415), there are only fragmentary sources remaining of other works composed in the British Isles during that period; nonetheless, these two large manuscripts give a very clear picture of the musical culture of almost two centuries.

Musical styles travelled rapidly during the 13th century and Parisian polyphony of the Gothic period, otherwise known as the school of Notre-Dame, swiftly became established in England. The Parisian style and its techniques were pushed to their limits, this taking place well after organum and the conductus had been abandoned elsewhere. Hybrid genres such as the conductus motet and the trope motet were created. The blending of all these genres as well as the frequent use of canonic imitation, of passages vocalised on one syllable, of the inversion of voices with or without text, of the possibility of using the cantus firmus in the middle voice, and of homophonic technique were all characteristic of the English style of composition. We should also add to this their taste for intervals of thirds and sixths and, of course, the addition of texts in Norman French to works originally set to Latin or French texts.

This programme is made up of motets and conductus from English manuscripts dating from the 13th and 14th centuries.

Love songs, troubadours, minstrels and Persian song

Laurence Brisset, voice and organetto
Estelle Nadau, Eugénie De May, Caroline Tarrit, voice
Taghi Akbhari, Persian song
Navid Saeedi , târ
Bruno Caillat, percussion

Duration : 1h20

Works by Beatriz de Dia, Jaufré Rudel, Uc de Saint Circ, Adam de la Halle, Guillaume de Machaut and others. Improvisations.

The singers of the Ensemble De Caelis invite the Iranian singer Taghi Akhbari and the târ player Nader Aghakhani to debate the arts of love. Their two musical arts, two of the most sophisticated of the mediaeval world — traditional Persian song and Western song of the 12th to the 14th centuries — engage in musical dialogue.

The refined vocal art of Taghi Akhbari reacts and responds to the love songs of the troubadours and minstrels as well to the polyphonic works of Guilllaume de Machaut as he improvises on texts by the Persian poets Khayyâm and Rûmî.

Ghazal is a style of courtly poetry that was often sung and that flourished in Persia during the 13th and 14th centuries. Sensually coloured, its use of metaphor linked earthly with spiritual love.

Trained since his youth in the refinements of Persian song, Taghi Akhbari’s education was oral in character and passed on directly as tradition demanded. Even now he practices his art each day according to tradition by creating improvisations based on the works of Rûmi and Omar Khayyâm.

Cant de la Sibilla, XIVth et XVIth spanish centuries

Les prophéties des Sibylles (2011), Philippe Hersant

Programme for five female voices

Duration : 1h

The echo of the Sibyls has been heard since ancient times; set to music and sung from the 10th century onwards in several regions of the Mediterranean, the song of the Sibyl proclaims the day of the Last Judgement. It is unusual to have these ancient Greek prophetesses delivering their oracles in the heart of the Christian liturgy: in fact, the Fathers of the Church sought to reinterpret the Sibylline oracles, in particular the 8th book that is attributed to the Erythrean Sybil, making them appear to predict the birth of Christ. St. Augustine made a Latin translation of the relevant sections under the title of Iudicii signum.

The Christian text containing the Sibylline prophecy first appeared in the Iberian peninsula during the 11th century; from the 13th century onwards the Song of the Sibyl was sung in the local languages: Occitan, Castilian and Catalan.

This concert allows us to hear once more from the prophetesses who have proclaimed the coming end of the world over the centuries. Philippe Hersant’s Les prophéties des Sibylles, a commission from De Caelis, makes use of two versions of the Catalan Cant de la Sibilla (14th and 16th centuries) as well as polyphonic settings of the Prophecies from mediaeval and Renaissance Spain.