On Sunday, April 12, 2026 at 3:00pm (pre-concert talk at 2:00pm) at Bombyx (130 Pine Street) in Florence, Marseille-based Ensemble Télémaque brings a striking new transatlantic project to the United States, Sounds, Tears and Skins, a program of four newly commissioned works by American composers David Dominique, Yu-Hui Chang, John Aylward, and Kate Soper, exploring migration, exile, and identity through a deeply interdisciplinary lens.
Developed through the ensemble’s October Lab, an international platform for boundary-crossing musical creation, the project marks Télémaque’s first collaboration with U.S. artists, forging a dialogue between contemporary composers and four 20th-century literary figures: Claude McKay, Mary Jayne Gold, Franz Werfel, and Antonin Artaud. Each experienced displacement and marginalization, and their writings, rooted in both Marseille and the United States, serve as the foundation for these new works.
Blending spoken text, voice, and instrumental writing, Sounds, Tears and Skins reflects on fractured histories of migration and the unsettling parallels to our present moment. The result is a layered, intertextual performance that asks urgent questions about belonging, identity, and cultural memory.
The U.S. performances this spring will be followed by additional performances in Marseille in autumn 2026, continuing this transatlantic exchange.
Ensemble Télémaque presents
Sounds, Tears and Skins
SCHEDULE
Doors: 1:30 pm
Pre-concert talk: 2:00pm
Concert: 3:00pm
In 2018, Ensemble Télémaque created the October Lab, an international platform for musical creation that aims to produce and disseminate new works that transcend styles and trends. To this end, commissions are awarded to composers from around the world, built around continually renewed themes.
Sounds, Tears and Skins marks Ensemble Télémaque’s first collaboration with artists from the United States. Led by Raoul Lay, the ensemble is commissioning this year a new generation of American composers: David Dominique, Yu-Hui Chang, John Aylward, and Kate Soper, who are developing new musical works based on French and American texts that were written in, or left a significant imprint on, both Marseille, France and the United States.
The project also establishes a dialogue between four literary figures of the twentieth century: Claude McKay, Mary Jayne Gold, Franz Werfel, and Antonin Artaud — all of whom experienced various forms of discrimination and alienation linked to either their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or ideological and political convictions.
Through the 20th Century histories these literary figures trace, our project explores the notions of travel and migration of marginalized communities who are connected by their intersections with the U.S. and Marseille, France. Our project asks our commissioned composers to respond to the fractured moments in history that their authors experienced and the frightening similarities to our present day: comparisons that raise profound questions.
Our event will consist of four works in which spoken and sung voices will engage in dialogue with the instrumental writing, allowing the intertextuality of the diverse literary figures represented to resonate.
In spring 2026, Ensemble Télémaque will travel to the United States to perform the works of the four commissioned composers in concert, before welcoming them again in Marseille for new performances in autumn 2026.