Talea Ensemble

In the language of the 14th-century, “color” means the melodic, “talea” the rhythmic pattern. With the aid of this compositional terminology, the secular world emancipates itself from the realm controlled by the church. For centuries, composers harked back to this dynamic relationship. Talea is the title of a legendary work by the French composer Gérard Grisey. It was this composition that inspired the name of the Talea Ensemble, a New York ensemble for contemporary music. He guides the little ensemble through a rousing meandering sequence of shades of sound that give a completely new meaning to the ideas of talea and color. Visiting musikprotokoll for the first time, this year they are performing Grisey’s legendary piece Talea in an absolutely exquisite setting: a premiere by Georg Friedrich Haas entitled Monologue for Graz is flanked by two works by young composers associated with Columbia University, the composer Zosha di Castri and William Dougherty and Haas’s tria ex uno, in which the relationship between music around the year 1500 and the early 21st-century is the formative narrative. In other words: Talea plays Talea.