An atypical immersive concert, combining archaeology and musical creation: amid video projections of prehistoric paintings, Ensemble Calliopée presents works by contemporary female composers inspired by these pictorial works, some of which date back 30,000 years.

The origins of Préhistophonia lie in the Musée de l’Homme’s Préhistomania exhibition, which presented – during the 2024-2025 season – women’s drawings of cave paintings from all over the world. These cave and parietal paintings inspired Karine Lethiec to embark on a singular archaeo-musical journey as part of her Ensemble Calliopée residency at the Musée de l’Homme: Immersed in the video creations of Julien Hanck, who filmed the pictural works in the exhibition, the spectator discovers them as if strolling through the museum, to the sound of Karine Lethiec’s viola and Kryštof Mařatka’s archaic trans-instruments. Five female composers and one male composer were asked to each write a musical piece in resonance with one of these thousands of years old paintings – either for viola alone, or with the addition of instruments from Kryštof Mařatka’s unpublished collection, with prehistoric replicas: flutes made from vulture and mammoth bones, horns, pebbles… So many instruments that allow us to imagine the sounds of Prehistory! At the same time, Karine Lethiec has devised a narrative and tells us about the links between these musical works and the prehistoric paintings that inspired them, the fabulous saga of these extraordinary masterpieces and the expeditions undertaken, a human adventure in the discovery of the origins of art.

Ahead of the “Préhistophonia” concert on June 29 at the Scène Adamoise (L’Isle-Adam), the Musée archéologique du Val d’Oise in Guiry-en-Vexin is hosting a musical discussion on June 28 at 2pm, with scientists Jean-Louis Georget and Egidia Souto, curators of the Préhistomania exhibition, in partnership with the Frobenius Institute in Franckurt, where most of the pictorial works come from, and artists Karine Lethiec and Kryštof Mařatka, performers and designers of the project. This will be an opportunity to hear an excerpt from the immersive concert to be given the following day, and also to learn more about the five female composers involved in the project, composer Kryštof Mařatka’s archaic trans-instruments, the expeditions undertaken in the 20th century to discover them, and the formidable adventure of the women painters who have taken them up in the four corners of the world.