Album Release: Richard Beaudoin, 'Digital Memory and the Archive'

On February 3, New Focus Recordings in New York will release Digital Memory and the Archive, the latest album of compositions by Assistant Professor Richard Beaudoin. Recorded in the United Kingdom by cellists Rohan de Saram and Neil Heyde, the compositions are based on micro-temporal analyses of recordings by Martha Argerich, Pablo Casals, Alfred Cortot, Claude Debussy, Glenn Gould, Thelonious Monk, and Maggie Teyte.

Next month, Prof. Beaudoin will deliver two talks in Europe relevant to the work featured on the album: a lecture in Vienna on March 6 at Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien at the seminar (New) Organologies: Theories of Bodies and Instruments and a concert-lecture in London on March 10 in the Angela Burgess Recital Hall at the Royal Academy of Music titled Dialogues with Recordings: Digital Memory and the Archive.

To round out what has clearly been a busy sabbatical for Prof. Beaudoin, he reports the completion of the manuscript of his book Sounds as They Are: The Unwritten Music in Classical Recordings. The monograph—which alongside its 90,000 words includes 70 graphic musical examples and 40 embedded audio excerpts—will be published by Oxford University Press as part of their Oxford Studis in Music Theory series.