SPEAKER: Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, Stephanie Zaleski, Isabelle Muller, Lynn Brostoff, Jayme Kurland, Jean-Philippe Echard
EVENT DATE: 2018/04/10
RUNNING TIME: 129 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)

DESCRIPTION:

Technical studies of historical musical instruments remain relatively uncommon in the field of cultural heritage. This program features recent in-depth studies that serve as models of collaborations among curators, conservators and cultural heritage scientists in the field of musical studies. As part of a National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Preservation and Access Grant-funded, collaborative research project involving the Library of Congress, the Catholic University of America, and George Washington University, “Science meets Music: Technical Studies of Musical Instruments” is the first of an annual series. These lectures highlight the NEH-supported study of glass flutes by Claude Laurent in the Library of Congress Dayton C. Miller Collection, along with invited talks that represent groundbreaking, collaborative research with broad appeal to cultural heritage curators, conservators, scientists and musicians.

Speaker Biography: Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford is a flutist and, since 1993, has worked as music specialist and curator of musical instruments at the Library of Congress, where she oversees the Library’s holdings of approximately 2,000 musical instruments for study, performance and exhibit. She holds degrees in music, performance on the flute and archives management from Tufts University.

Speaker Biography: Stephanie Zaleski is a postdoctoral scientist at George Washington University, where her research focuses on developing simple, non-invasive analytical tools to study 19th-century glass in historical collections. She obtained her Ph.D. in chemistry from Northwestern University in 2016 and recently was a postdoctoral fellow with the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2016-2017.

Speaker Biography: Isabelle Muller is a project manager at the Vitreous State Laboratory at the Catholic University of America in charge of research and development programs for the U.S. Department of Energy (glass formulation for Hanford Site tank waste vitrification, long term water leaching of various waste glasses and development of predictive algorithms of the glass properties). She obtained her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris, and was a postdoctoral fellow in nuclear chemistry at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Speaker Biography: Lynn Brostoff holds a Ph.D. in chemistry, master’s degrees in polymer materials science and in art history, and an advanced certificate in conservation of historic and artistic works, with a specialty in paper conservation. For the last 25 years, Brostoff has worked as a conservation scientist at leading museums and libraries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute and the Library of Congress, where she is currently a senior scientist and analytical service liaison.

Speaker Biography: Jayme Kurland is a musicologist and independent researcher based in Northern Virginia. She is currently working on a project with the musical instrument collection at the Library of Congress. Previously, Kurland was the curatorial research fellow in musical instruments at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a curatorial assistant at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.

Speaker Biography: Jean-Philippe Echard is the curator of bowed string instruments at the French national collection at the Musée de la musique in Paris. He studied musical acoustics at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, was a research fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and at the Laboratoire de Recherche et de Restauration of the Musée de la musique, developed methodologies for the observation and the analysis of materials of musical instruments. His doctoral research was on the materials and techniques used to varnish musical instruments in the 15th-18th centuries.

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