News
Mr. Beaudoin’s latest organ work, Summer Canons, commissioned by Choir & Organ magazine (UK), will be available as a free download on the magazine’s website. The canons are a gloss on Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem ‘Der Sommer’, and use the vocal line of György Ligeti’s setting of it a cantus. Choir & Organ will also publish an interview with the composer in an upcoming issue.
Mr. Beaudoin has been appointed Lecturer on Music at Harvard University. His autumn term courses include Composition and Tonal Counterpoint in the Bach style.
On September 18th at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble and tenor Frank Kelley will premiere the ensemble version of Mr. Beaudoin’s Eunoia Songs, setting five texts from Christian Bök’s Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001).
Annette Dasch offered a glimpse of Mr. Beaudoin’s in-progress song-cycle during her Liederabend at the Heidelberger-Frühling on 2 April 2008. She sang “Wir wollen Abschied nehmen unter diesem Baum”, and was accompanied by pianist Ulrich Naudé.
Mr. Beaudoin and philosopher Joseph Moore will present their paper, “Conceiving Musical Transdialection”, at the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in November.
Mr. Beaudoin’s article “Anonymous Sources: Finnissy Analysis and the opening of Chapter 8 of The History of Photography in Sound” appears in the most recent edition of Perspectives of New Music (Vol. 45/2).
Tenor Joseph Kaiser commissioned a song cycle based on poems from Heinrich Heine’s Romanzero. Mr. Kaiser, accompanied by pianist Craig Rutenberg, were to perform the work at venues across the country this spring, including at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in New York. This performance was cancelled due to the illness of both Mr. Kaiser and Mr. Rutenberg.
In April 2008, Mr. Beaudoin defended his Ph.D. dissertation in composition and music theory at Brandeis University, and earned the degree in May. The analysis portion of the dissertation is entitled Boulez-fixe: Construction and Cadence in Memoriale (…explosante-fixe…Originel).
Joseph Moore, Professor of Philosophy at Amherst College, and Mr. Beaudoin have recently completed a scholarly paper on modern notions of musical transcription. Entitled “Conceiving Musical Transdialection”, the paper explores increasingly free approaches to transcription in the 20th century, and connects this practice to poetic developments (Lowell’s Imitations) and to the advent of recording.
The Staatstheater-Kassel in Kassel, Germany has commissioned a chamber opera based on Heinrich Heine's poem, Himmelfahrt, to be produced in April 2008. This opera will paired with Viktor Ullmann's opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, written at Theresienstadt in 1943. Mr. Beaudoin's work is for Tenor, Baritone, Soprano, Choir and Orchestra.
Richard Beaudoin's opera-in-progress based on Herman Melville’s Pierre premiered in August 2007 at London’s Arcola Theatre.
Mr. Beaudoin’s article “Counterpoint and Quotation in Ussachevsky’s Wireless Fantasy” appears in the most recent edition of the British journal Organised Sound, published by Cambridge University Press (12/2).
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