Les Thébaïdes : Spiritualité du désert

The De Caelis ensemble presents a tribute to feminine spirituality. A program around the manuscript of Las Huelgas, oriental songs and Sufi songs, through the prism of desert spirituality. With this new album, the famous vocal ensemble De Caelis invites us on a journey to the desert. It is to make us hear the song of those who, one day, chose to isolate themselves from the world to seek God. Following the first Christian hermits (around the 4th century) who found refuge in the desert of Thebes in Egypt, the term Thebaide is any place, even symbolic, where one isolates oneself to lead a life of asceticism and of prayers. The singers of De Caelis make us hear pieces from the repertoire that the Cistercian women of Las Huelgas (a female monastery founded in the 12th century in Spain) sang in the 14th century, Sufi songs evoking the deserts of the Orient as well as two contemporary pieces. Through this music from yesterday and today, the voices of the singers of De Caelis invite us to rediscover through our senses the mineral world of the desert not as a place of death, but as a place of life, conducive to meditation and reflection, a return to oneself which allows listening to Others and opening up to the world.