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Echoing the exhibition Les Dieux de la Maison, this programme offers a portrait of everyday domestic music-making from the Renaissance to the Baroque period.
From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the viola da gamba became the instrument par excellence of musical education in Europe. In England, many households owned a chest of viols — a cabinet containing viols of different sizes for ensemble playing.
Oto no Mii-dera (The Sound of Mii-dera) is a multidisciplinary performing arts project that brings together leading artists from a wide range of disciplines, including waka (classical Japanese poetry), shōmyō (Buddhist chant), Noh theatre, shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute), clarinet, and contemporary music.
For many listeners, the Highland bagpipe remains inseparable from its cultural roots and traditions. Yet for the Breton musician Erwan Keravec, the instrument also represents a gateway to unexplored musical territories. A piper, composer and pioneering improviser, Keravec has devoted his career to expanding the horizons of the bagpipe, revealing its remarkable potential far beyond its customary setting.
The piano accompanied Mozart throughout his life from early childhood, when he performed in public across Europe. His keyboard works often resonate with those written for larger ensembles or for the operatic stage, serving as a genuine laboratory for new ideas. In the eighteenth century, however, the piano sounded quite different from modern instruments.
With his Marimba Lumina, an electronic instrument conceived by synthesizer pioneer Donald Buchla, Lukas Ligeti creates a sonic universe that defies categorization.
Drawing on complex rhythms, shifting pulses and sound fragments recorded during his travels — particularly in Africa — he creates music in which electronics become a space where cultures, memory and imagination meet.
The rise of the Baroque transverse flute developed across Europe in the early 18th century. Driven by the maker, composer, and musician Jacques-Martin Hotteterre, it gradually replaced the recorder, thanks to the vast palette of colours and expressive possibilities it offers. Initially associated with intimate works accompanied by lute or theorbo, it gained new momentum from the 1730s onwards with virtuoso flautists such as Michel Blavet and Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin.
Born out of necessity, Japanese boro textiles speak of wear, impermanence, and the preservation of everyday life. Having become collectors’ objects and carriers of cultural memory, they form part of a global artistic history, from Informal Art and Arte Povera to Abstract Expressionism. Robert Rauschenberg once declared: “I want to incorporate into my canvas any object from life.”
James Turrell once remarked: “I use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception.” This programme begins from that idea. Bringing together works for harp and electronics across centuries and aesthetics, this concert explores music not as a fixed object, but as an experience that comes into being through listening. Sound unfolds in relation to memory, attention, space, and time. Resonances linger beyond their source. Familiar gestures return altered. What we hear is shaped as much by perception as by the notes themselves.
The chirping of birds and the glow of the first stars draw us into a captivating nightscape, where voices carrying the rich vibrations of the Baroque repertoire begin to emerge. A shimmering surface evokes the expanse of a lake, while an intriguing hut stands nearby. We find ourselves in the heart of a forest. Two playful creatures—half-human, half-animal—guide us on this nocturnal journey, soon joined by ethereal beings with crystal-clear voices.
Taboo instruments, sometimes dismissed because they are little known, or considered too pure, too free in their effortless maintenance and without physical ostentation, the Glass Harmonica and the Baschet Crystal can nevertheless lead us towards new territories of listening. They are among the rarest instruments and the only ones whose creation requires the use of the four elements: fire, air and earth to shape them, and water to make them sing.
