Thélème, Jean-Christophe Groffe, Sting
Biography Thélème, Jean-Christophe Groffe, Sting
ENSEMBLE THÉLÈME
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.
Jean-Christophe Groffe
was born in France and now lives in Switzerland. He first studied classical guitar, then musicology in France. During his studies, his interest in the voice and especially vocal polyphony was awakened. He then devoted himself to singing and took lessons from Howard Crook in Paris. He is particularly interested in Renaissance and Baroque music, which is why Jean-Christophe Groffe also studied singing at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis with Evelyn Tubb and Gerd Türk. He also had lessons with Andreas Scholl, Anthony Rooley and Andrea Marcon and obtained a diploma in singing, ensemble music and pedagogy. He studied choir conducting in France with Daniel Bargier and with Hans Martin Linde in Basel. Enthusiastic about stage work, Jean-Christophe Groffe has participated in numerous music theater projects in Paris, Zurich, Basel, Rouen and Tours as a soloist, ensemble singer and choir singer. He has also sung under the direction of renowned conductors such as Ton Koopman, Frans Brüggen, Masaaki Suzuki, Andrea Marcon, Pablo Heras-Casado, Christopher Hogwood, Mariss Jansons, Bernard Haitink, Charles Dutoit, Marek Janowski, Alan Gilbert and Heinz Holliger. Jean-Christophe Groffe, who is also interested in new music of the 20th and 21st centuries, is a member of the ensemble SoloVoices, a vocal quartet specializing in contemporary music. In addition to his activities as a singer, he leads choirs in Basel and the surrounding area, teaches singing at the Muttenz General Music School and gives lectures on the interpretation of French music at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Jean-Christophe Groffe is the founder and director of the professional ensemble Thélème. At the heart of his work is understanding the artistic and sociological context and direct access to the sources. For him, the performer's attitude towards the music is crucial. He sees music as a contemporary object and does not want to recreate a past universe.
Sting (Gordon Sumner)
born 2 October 1951, better known by his stage name Sting, is an English musician, singer, songwriter and actor. He was the principal songwriter, lead singer, and bassist for the new wave rock band the Police from 1977 to 1986, and launched a solo career in 1985. Sting incorporated heavy elements of jazz, classical, and worldbeat into his music, writing lyrics that were literate and self-consciously meaningful, and he was never afraid to emphasize this fact in the press. For such unabashed ambition, he was equally loved and reviled, with supporters believing that he was at the forefront of literate, intelligent rock and his critics finding his entire body of work pompous. Either way, Sting remained one of pop's biggest superstars for the first ten years of his solo career.
