Founded on the initiative of composer Elisabeth Angot and sociologist Célia Poulet, the Rencontres Musicales et Scientifiques aims to forge a link between scientists, artists and the public, through an alliance of concerts and roundtables in a framework allowing an exchange between the artists and the researchers, as well as with an interested public but not necessarily expert.

The starting point of this initiative is based on the desire to offer an alternative to the specialization that affects all areas of social life: disciplinary specialization of research, the profession of composer, interpreters according to the classical or contemporary repertoire, and finally, audiences have, over the years, resulted in the fragmentation of the substantial link between art and knowledge between them and with public space.

The most eloquent incarnation of this atomization is undoubtedly of a spatial nature: to the universities go the symposia, and to the specialized theaters (or at least the specialized programs) the concerts of contemporary music. Audiences lovers of classical music rarely turn to contemporary music, which is the directory being built.

Les Rencontres Musicales et Scientifiques aim to broaden this approach in the research of more complete knowledge of musical phenomenon, by the alliance of different disciplines.

They have many specific features:

• In order to promote arts and scientific knowledge, they take place in a public space. Roundtables are access-free.

• Concerts take place before roundtables and constitute for the public and for the participants something they can use for discussion.

• Participants are from different disciplines: instrumental and mixt composition, electroacoustic composition, musical interpretation, social and experimental sciences, philosophy etc.

• Concerts propose different repertoires: classical music, contemporary music, electroacoustic music.

• Works might be ordered to young composers. 

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Les Rencontres Musicales et Scientifiques are designed for a public of melomanes, researchers, musicians and students. 

"I was invited to participate in 2016 to the Rencontres Musicales et Scientifiques, in Le Thoureil, Maine-et-Loire. These Rencontres reunites international artists and recognised researchers for hight quality communications, roundtables and informal exchanges. 

The reception for scientific communicants and artists is so friendly and rich that it is a real pleasure to share these days with the public. I wish the Rencontres Musicales et Scientifiques continue and become perrenial, for the sake of artists, researchers, and knowledge on links that reunite music and science."

Pascal Terrien

Aix-Marseille university

Professor of education sciences in the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris