Nora Thiele is a multi-instrumentalist, artistic director, composer and shifter between genres, eras and cultures. She works in transdisciplinary projects and creates intercultural concert programmes. Nora Thiele is one of the most versatile musicians in Europe and looks at the musical horizon like a universal genius with unusual foresight. Her entire oeuvre lives from her awareness of music history and holistic contexts. Rhythm and improvisation are central to her work.
Raised in a family of music and theatre professionals, she completed her music studies in Leipzig, majoring in ethnic percussion and piano. She has been a freelance musician since 2004.
Nora Thiele is considered a pioneer in the art of frame drumming and with her sensitive virtuosity is in a line of tradition with Glen Velez and Layne Redmond. Since 1998 she has been working with historical percussion in European music from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Early Baroque. For her projects in the field of global music and jazz she developed a custom frame drum set, which combines tunable natural skin frame drums and cymbals and is a further development of the original drum set.
Nora Thiele is committed to creating a new repertoire for traditional hand drums. She publishes pieces for frame drums. Contemporary composers such as Klaus Huber and Bernd Franke have written works for her with symphony orchestra. Nora Thiele also composes music herself, incorporating instruments from different cultures.
With more than 1000 concerts, Nora Thiele has toured through Europe, the Middle East and China. She has worked with artists such as Cecilia Bartoli, Ensemble Avantgarde, La Folia Barockorchester, Falk Zenker, Lena Chamamyan, Staatstheater Cottbus, Rubén Dubrovsky, Kat Frankie, Nederlands Kamerorkest, Theater Münster, Theater Odeon Wien, Anna Prohaska, SWR Sinfonieorchester, Hugo Ticciati (O/Modernt), Glen Velez and the Yiddish Summer Weimar.
She draws her enormous knowledge of rhythm from decades of intensive study of music from cultures around the world. She has studied traditions from Europe, the Middle East, South India, West Africa and African-American cultures. Nora Thiele has developed her own rhythm theory. This teaches the highest level of rhythm awareness, improvisational skills, coordinated movement and stylistic confidence. She passes on her holistic teaching to students at the HfM Weimar, as well as in workshops worldwide and master classes at music academies.
In her new solo programme, Nora Thiele 2023 combines percussion instruments and piano with loops and electronics into a setup for the first time, creating her own unique sound cosmos.
The transdisciplinary art duo AUREA with painter Larissa Böhler combines live painting on largeformat canvases with improvised real-time music. In 2021, Nora Thiele founded the Co Collective, and performed the piece Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt for four pianos. The collective is focused on rhythm-based minimalist music between classical, pop and improvisation.
Nora Thiele supports equal rights for women and is active in the Music Women Thuringia network.