Richard Beaudoin and the microtiming method
How to both interrogate and reinterrogate musical material
Danick Trottier
Composer Richard Beaudoin (1975) has developed in the last few years a compositional method centered on microtiming linked with the scholarly works of the Music Performance Studies Group of the Lucerne University of Music in Switzerland. The microscopic data of the recording of a musical performance, obtained by the Lucerne Audio Recording Analyzer (LARA), are the basis to compose using an existing musical frame, which is subjected to a spectral timing through which it is recognisable or not. The current article recounts the genesis of Beaudoin’s compositional method, focusing on the works that are relevant in the evolution of that method since 2009. Thus, the composer renews the relation to the works of the past through a new way of appropriation, namely by the manipulation of a musical frame through which musical tradition and performance act are summoned, but also by the questions that drive him in his artistic trajectory.
