lola soulier imera 2024

Lola Soulier

Video presentation of Lola Soulier’s research project at Iméra
Disciplines: Music
Title and home institution: Musicologist and oboist
Category of Fellowship: Annual Residency
Chair: Mucem/Iméra Fellowship
Research program: Arts & Sciences: Indisciplined Knowledge, Mediterranean
Residency length: September 2024 – January 2025

Research Project

Reed/Human Interactions in the Mediterranean Yesterday and Today

Project Abstract

Lola Soulier’s research project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University, aims to explore the sensitive links between humans and reeds. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the study highlights both the technical and spiritual dimensions of the relationship with reeds in ancient Mediterranean cultures and the urgency of reviving the multiple artisanal, agronomic, and musical uses that once allowed societies to live in harmony with this civilizing plant.

Reeds in the Age of Plastic


The reed Arundo donax (also known as Provence cane or music reed) significantly contributed to the development of Eastern and Mediterranean civilizations. This robust and flexible grass was used in diverse ways in Central Asia (Iran, Afghanistan) where it is native, and then in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region where it was spread by humans. It served as scribes’ pens, Roman arrows, musical instruments, medicinal plants, materials for basketry, and weaving loom combs. During the 20th century, various dynamics such as the loss of common lands, artisanal skills, changes in agricultural production, and the industrialization of music altered our ability to interact sensitively with reeds. Once a civilizing plant creating fruitful links between civilizations, it is now overlooked, hunted as an invasive species, and increasingly replaced by plastic in instrument making. However, little research has thoroughly examined the impact of losing the connection to reeds in Mediterranean cultures, even though until the last century, we were still a “reed society,” where the Provence cane could be considered Europe’s bamboo.

The “Reed/Human Interactions in the Mediterranean Yesterday and Today” Project: Reviving Ancient and Traditional Musical and Artisanal Skills


The research project “Reed/Human Interactions in the Mediterranean Yesterday and Today,” led by Lola Soulier at the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University (Iméra), starts from the observation that ongoing transformations in reed-making for wind instrument reeds endanger the last practices of reed cultivation. Just as our reed society has disappeared, the link between musicians and the plant disintegrated during the 20th century. Manufacturing secrets were not passed on, and modern working conditions aimed at standardization and profitability do not allow manufacturers to acquire the empirical knowledge necessary to provide good quality reeds to musicians. Reed makers no longer understand the importance of selecting flexible and elastic music reeds. Consequently, reeds sold on the market are too rigid and dry, lacking necessary vibratory qualities and not preserving well. Musicians, lacking the skills to understand the problem’s origin, turn in desperation to plastic reeds. To revive ancestral skills and revalue the culture and use of this exceptional plant that grows abundantly on the Mediterranean coast, the project proposes an innovative approach by bringing together organology, ethnomusicology, and ethnobotany, as well as artistic and technical disciplines such as contemporary art, early music, and design.

An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Approach to Reinvent Our Relationship with Reeds


For about ten years, Lola Soulier has been exploring the ancient and traditional techniques of making oboe reeds from reeds. She conducts her musicology research on the historical making of double reeds for the oboe, bassoon, and bagpipes by studying both historical sources and the traditions of double reed instruments in Armenia, Brittany, and Languedoc. Throughout her research, she has established connections between instrumental making, craftsmanship, agronomy, art, and design. This interdisciplinary approach enriches the knowledge of the plant, rediscovers ancestral techniques, and develops skills complementary to those of instrumental making.

The Vine & the Reed


The core of the “Reed/Human Interactions in the Mediterranean Yesterday and Today” project is to study in depth the ancient and modern uses of Provence cane in the Mediterranean. Agronomic practices associated with other species than reeds, which involve transforming the plant into a complex cultural product with a long symbolic history, like winemaking, are also a significant part of her research. Winemakers, like musicians, face multiple challenges related to mechanization, digitization, economic pressures, loss of senses, and taste modification. Thus, the comparative approach of these two practices reveals subtle and profound transformations affecting not only agricultural and musical practices but also the relationship to plants and culture.

Reconnecting Sensitively with the Plant


The project consists of two complementary parts. The first focuses on studying collections and historical sources in the Aix-Marseille region. Lola Soulier particularly concentrates on the Mucem collections, which exceptionally preserve the memory of our former reed society. The second part focuses on current possible interactions with the plant and skills, implementing an interdisciplinary field study with artists, designers, musicians, and reed makers for whom the connection to reeds or the ancient culture of reeds proves fruitful. Co-construction workshops will gather researchers, musicians, and artists to develop transformative tools and approaches that consider the sensitive link to the plant and the vibration of the material.

Biography

After completing a double higher education in literature and music, and working as a professional baroque oboist, Lola Soulier turned to musicology with the aim of studying both ancient and traditional techniques involved in historical oboe reed making.

As a professional oboist, she encountered difficulties and constraints in playing copies of Baroque oboes that had been modified from the originals, and in using reeds whose cane quality and manufacture were unsuitable for these instruments. The problems were particularly apparent in terms of playing flexibility and expressiveness. The lack of authenticity she witnesses in her professional practice, far from being a simple question of deontology, seems to her to represent a major obstacle to the beauty and vitality of current interpretations of the early music repertoire.

In 2012, she began experimenting with woodturning and reed making in collaboration with the traditional Languedoc-oboe maker Bruno Salenson (1958–2018) whose reeds were still made on the same principle as early reeds. To further explore and document her research, she enrolled for a master’s degree in musicology and is currently writing her doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris. It is within this academic framework that she gained a deeper insight into these questions, which fall within the fields of organology and ethnomusicology, and has been able to carry out experiments in historical reed making, including the traditional harvesting of reed cane (Arundo donax) with the Armenian duduk reed maker Hovhannes Khudaverdyan. Drawing on the research of her predecessors in the field of Early music and on the study of historic evidence – original oboes, reeds, reed-making tools, written and pictorial sources – she has succeeded in reconstructing ancient reed-making tools and learning ancestral techniques. This approach was very fruitful and enabled her to make reeds that allow her to play historic fingerings on original eighteenth-century oboes and rediscovering vibrant and lively sonorities.

In 2023, Lola Soulier was awarded the Austrian PFS Research Award for her master’s thesis on the oboe in France at the end of the 18th century and published an article on the practice of historical wind and brass instruments for the Bärenreiter handbook Alte Musik heute: Geschichte und Perspektiven der Historischen Aufführungspraxis.

In 2024, as a laureate of the French Ministry of Culture’s call for projects ‘Researches in music 2023: collaborations between young researchers and artists’, she has held the exhibition ‘Conversations with the reed’ at the Komitas Museum-Institute in Yerevan, in collaboration with the Franco-Armenian collective AHA. The exhibition highlighted the close links between man and reed, from the Arax shores to the Mediterranean basin.

Appels à candidature

Les résidences de recherche que propose l’Iméra, Institut d’études avancées (IEA) d’Aix-Marseille Université, s’adressent aux chercheurs confirmés – académiques, scientifiques et/ou artistes. Ces résidences de recherche sont distribuées sur quatre programmes (« Arts & sciences : savoirs indisciplinés », « Explorations interdisciplinaires », « Méditerranée » et « Utopies nécessaires »).