A cairn is the name given to those piles of stones found in the mountains that serve as landmarks and guides for those who venture there; anyone passing by a cairn is expected to add a stone to it. The Ensemble Cairn has been in existence since 1998. With a dual focus on rigorous ensemble and chamber music, the repertoires performed by the Ensemble Cairn are open to other aesthetic forms and artistic practices: jazz, circus arts, visual arts, dance, literature, video, and more. The concerts are conceived as inner journeys in which each audience member is invited to imagine a sensory relationship with sound.

Cairn’s artistic collaborations include composers and artists from a wide variety of backgrounds, such as , Gérard Pesson, Philippe Leroux, Tristan Murail, Noriko Baba, Thierry Blondeau, jazz musicians Marc Ducret and John Hollenbeck, Jozef Dumoulin, harpsichordist Violaine Cochard, singers Cristina Branco, Juliette Allen, and Léa Trommenschlager, video artists Pierre Nouvel, Boris Labbé, and Yannick Jacquet, choreographers Alban Richard and Hervé Robbe, circus artist Sylvain Julien, and painter Raphaël Thierry...

Cairn performs regularly on stages across France and internationally. He has also been invited to numerous festivals: Présences (Radio France), Manifeste (IRCAM), Festival d’Automne in Paris, Musica in Strasbourg, Borealis in Bergen (Norway), Archipel in Geneva, and the Prague Quadrennial; it has been hosted by major institutions: Royaumont Abbey, Noirlac Abbey, Ferienkurse (Darmstadt), Tage für Neue Musik (Zurich), and the Villa Medici (Rome). The Ensemble Cairn currently comprises eleven musicians, with Jérôme Combier serving as artistic director and Guillaume Bourgogne as music director.

Between 2012 and 2022, the Ensemble Cairn was affiliated with the Théâtre d’Orléans. Since then, it has been based in the Centre-Val de Loire region and receives funding from the Drac. The Ensemble Cairn also receives support from the Centre-Val de Loire Region under the program for specialized ensembles. In 2022, it premiered Philippe Leroux’s opera, an Angers-Nantes-Opéra production, “L’Annonce faite à Marie,” based on the eponymous text by Paul Claudel.