Music, Humanities, and Science: Instrument Making (MuHAS) – International Summer School

This summer school intends to bring together young researchers (doctoral and post-doctoral candidates) from the 4EU+ Alliance and beyond, for a week of training during which they will participate in theoretical courses and practical workshops. They will learn how to consider a wide range of tools and skills from a common base of multi-disciplinary knowledge.

The first thematic summer school on Music and Science  organized in partnership with the Institut Technologique Européen des Métiers de la Musique Le Mans will focus on instrument making. Through a series of workshops and conferences, it will focus on two major instrumental categories, plucked strings and wind instruments. These instrumental categories will be explored from several vantage points, from the humanities, sciences and hands-on practice, thus articulating music, musicology, acoustics and instrument making. These convergent perspectives raise several questions and learning objectives, as well as multidisciplinary aspects. We will collectively question and evaluate these multiple approaches, which can be structured around a specific object while touching on several major themes, and which will expose multidisciplinary questions:

• The status of the facsimile and the question of historically-informed performance practice: this theme addresses issues related to the modeling of musical instruments, their historicity, and in fact also draws on various sources, texts (such as treatises, methods and chronicles) and iconography, explores the relationship with repertoires and playing techniques, and finally brings together heritage and conservation issues.
• Instrument-making and playing: around this question linked to the technical gesture (both of handcraft and performance), inseparable from questions of materiality, we will address issues related to playing and to the perception of sound and music; materiality and its symbolic, economic and ecological properties; the contribution of new technologies to instrument making; the analysis and representation of sound. We will also cover the articulation between instrument making, and tuning and pitch adjustment in order to create or restore sound aesthetics. The latter appears as the result of artistic choices, technical constraints, empirical choices - in other words - a series of multiple parameters, both objective and aesthetic, which will be analysed through the prism of a fruitful multidisciplinary approach between musicological, acoustical and instrument-making perspectives.

Through its first summer school "Music, humanities, and science: instrument making", an innovative program supported by 4EU+ and Sorbonne University, the Collegium Musicæ aims to promote multidisciplinary studies on music, between sciences and humanities. For this reason, the costs including participation, equipment and supplies, accommodation and meals are covered by the Collegium Musicæ. Travel costs and registration fees (100€) are for participants. 

• Murray Campbell, Professor of Acoustics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh
• Claudia Fritz, CNRS research fellow in musical acoustics, in the LAM team of Institut Jean le Rond ∂'Alembert, Sorbonne University
• François Gautier, Professor at the Acoustics Laboratory of the University of Maine and at the National Engineering School in Le Mans
• Florence Gétreau, Emeritus senior researcher at the CNRS in organology, history of instrument collections, social history of music and musical iconography
• Inga Mai Groote, Professor of musicology, University of Zurich
• Miguel Henry, Professor of lute and related instruments, Pôle Supérieur Paris Boulogne-Billancourt
• Dimitris Kountouras, assistant professor in the Music department of the Ionian University (Greece), in theory and practice of the flute, and music director of the early music ensemble Ex Silentio
• Iwona Lindstedt, Director at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Warsaw, specialist in the theory and history of 20th and 21st century music
• instrument makers for the workshops (to be specified) 

• Date: 29 August to 02 September 2022
• Venue: Institut technologique européen des métiers de la musique (71, avenue Olivier Messiaen, 72000 Le Mans - FRANCE / 1h by train from Paris Montparnasse). 
• Accommodation: Ibis Hotel (Quai Ledru-Rollin, 72000 Le Mans - FRANCE)
• Registration fees: 100€ 
• Language: English