Ensemble Contrechamps

More than forty years after it first performed, the Ensemble Contrechamps has obviously changed, both in its tastes and in its practices. It’s a ship of Theseus, regularly recomposed in new groups of instrumentalists around an evolving core of member players, on the sometimes stormy waves of the written and experimental music of the last fifty years. The Ensemble also grows, extending itself to other bodies, adding other timbres or whole choirs, professional or amateur. Based in Geneva, the Ensemble travels far and wide. This year, more than ever, it will travel to France, Germany, England, Quebec and as far afield as Australia, bringing the echoes of the music it loves – experimental, playful and sophisticated – to every possible ear. And for years, the Ensemble has maintained the organic virtue of pleasure, of constantly challenging its own playing, in the rich and inventive margins of clearly identified „classical music“. So it goes wherever its taste for the unexpected takes it: to worlds of music where scores take on the appearance of graphic rebus, where composers take charge of white, grey and pink noises, and all the playful possibilities of sound. No fear of percussion or electricity – each player explores every version of their instruments, acoustic and electric. Born in an age when modernist musical aesthetics dominated, Contrechamps has not confined itself to playing the compositions of twentieth-century white gentlemen. They know how much the history of experimental music – and music in general – owes to all the others of Modernity.
Agnès Gayraud