Richard Beaudoin Receives Jerome Goldstein Award for Distinguished Teaching

Assistant Professor of Music Richard Beaudoin received the 2024 Jerome Goldstein Award for Distinguished Teaching. The annual Dartmouth award honors an Arts and Sciences faculty member for outstanding teaching.

Dean Elizabeth F. Smith presented the award at last week's Class Day program for graduating students and their families.

"Professor Beaudoin is a superb and innovative scholar, whose research contributes to the fields of music theory, analytic aesthetics, and sound studies," Smith said. "As for his teaching, the feedback students have shared about his courses is off the charts." 

Smith went on to share some excerpts from student evaluations of Beaudoin's courses, including:

Professor Beaudoin is amazing. He nurtures every student's creativity so that we were all motivated to give the class our all.

He cares deeply for his students and is the most enjoyable and passionate professor I have ever had.

He made the learning environment a delight and the process of learning about something new exciting and welcoming. I wish I could take more classes with Beaudoin and the department at large.

Truly one of the best classes I have taken at Dartmouth and I owe that all to Professor Beaudoin. There is no way to hyperbolize it—this is the best class I have taken in my four years at Dartmouth. Professor Beaudoin is wonderful, brilliant, and a revelation of an educator.

In his new book, Sounds as They Are: The Unwritten Music in Classical Recordings, Beaudoin pioneers a field of inquiry called inclusive track analysis, which recognizes often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music.

"In all my work, I ask a simple question: What can be learned by paying attention to all sounds that appear on audio recordings? It turns out: a lot," he said in a recent Arts and Sciences Q&A about the book.

Beaudoin is also an accomplished performer and composer, whose work has been performed by major artists including Roomful of Teeth, the Kreutzer Quartet, and Boston Lyric Opera.

Courses he has taught at Dartmouth include Modern Classical Music, Early Classical Music, Debussy the Innovator, 19th-Century Music, Visual Music, Timbre and Form, Harmony and Rhythm, Beginning Music Theory, Loving Music Slowly (contemporary theory and close listening), and American Music: Covers, Theft, and Musical Borrowing.