We Spoke

We Spoke  is a contemporary music company based in Switzerland and London. We Spoke : merges ‘we speak’ with ‘bespoke’ and explores the huge stylistic range of contemporary art music. Each production features a major artistic collaboration – with a composer, dancer, visual artist, choreographer, or other creative practictioner - and focuses on one theme , coupling original musical interpretation with virtuosic live performance.

We Spoke  has performed extensively in Switzerland, the UK and South America in cities including Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Zurich, London, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Lima. Following over twenty performances in 2012, 2013 concerts include fondation suisse in Paris, Unerhörte Musik in Berlin, KammerKlang in London, Florence international contemporary music festival and a new residency at the Lima Contemporary Music festival as well as the new production 'Song' to be toured in Switzerland and the UK. 

Georges Aperghis

A Greek composer born in Athens in 1945, he has lived and worked in Paris since 1963. In 1971, after a few instrumental pieces more or less inspired by serial techniques, he composes his first musical play La tragique histoire du nécromancien Hiéronimo et de son miroir. This piece is at the root of much of his future investigations into the relationships between music and text, between music and stage. Thus, he takes part in the great adventure of musical theater that begun in France at the Festival d’Avignon.

A prolific composer with a never-ending inventiveness, Georges Aperghis is building a very personal corpus of works, serious and humorous at the same time, rooted in tradition as well as free of institutional constraints. Knowledgeably opening up unexpected horizons of vitality and ease for his performers, he skillfully reconciles the sound and the visual, as much as he broaches issues embedded in the tragic or derisory aspects of his time.

In October 2011, Georges Aperghis received the Mauricio Kagel’s Prize.

Mark Applebaum

Mark Applebaum (b. 1967, Chicago) is Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Stanford University where he served as John Philip Coghlan Fellow and received the 2003 Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching. He received his Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at San Diego where he studied principally with Brian Ferneyhough. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia with notable performances at the Darmstadt summer sessions, ICMC in Beijing and Singapore, the TRANSIT Festival in Belgium, Stockholm New Music, the American Composers Orchestra’s OrchestraTech, the Unyazi Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa, Sonorities in Belfast, Sonic Circuits in Hong Kong, SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, the Essl Museum in Vienna, the Kennedy Center, at Electronic Music Midwest where served as the 2002 visiting artist, as featured composer at the 2004 University of Michigan Eclectronica Microfestival, and as featured composer at the 61st Festival of Contemporary Music at Louisiana State University.

Jacques Demierre

Jacques Demierre is pianist, performer and composer, his musical and sound work develops itself in various directions : improvised music, contemporary music, sound poetry, sound installation. His compositions and sound realisations are concerned with the activity of listening and with sound space. On the piano, Jacques Demierre has developed a unique operating style, never ceasing to redraw new sound topographies, making us forget the physical weight of the instrument.

He collaborates with many improvising musicians – Okkyung Lee, Thomas Lehn, Martial Solal, Radu Malfatti, Joëlle Léandre, Axel Dörner, Fritz Hauser, Sainkho Namtchylak, Urs Blöchlinger, Irene Schweizer, Hans Koch, Isabelle Duthoit, Brandon Labelle, Jason Kahn, Butch Morris, Carlos Zingaro, Gunter Müller, Jaap Blonk, Barry Guy, Lucas Niggli, Sylvie Courvoisier, Hann Bennink, Rhodri Davis, Martin Schütz, Paul Lovens, Dorothea Schürch, Phil Minton, …-, regularly plays solo piano concerts, and works with Vincent Barras in the field of performance and language art.

William Cobbing

Starting from a sculptural sensibility William Cobbing’s artworks encompass a diverse range of media, including video, installation and performance. People are often depicted as being fused with the surrounding architecture, or buried under layers of clay or concrete, from which they absurdly struggle to extricate themselves. These works allude to the concept of entropy and, underlining the extent to which earthly material is irreversibly dispersed, they give rise to a definitive blurring of the boundaries between the body and the landscape and put any possibility of meaning on hold.

Since 2000 William Cobbing has exhibited internationally, in group shows including A Secret History of Clay Tate Liverpool (2004), Room with a View Gemeente Museum, The Hague (2006), Drifting CloudsFurini Arte Contemporanea, Italy (2007), and solo exhibitions at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2002) and Netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art, Belgium (2007.)