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Richard Beaudoin: Étude d’un prelude X – Second String Quartet

Two items are presented here as the product of a single research process: the recording of Richard Beaudoin’s Étude d’un prelude X – Second String Quartet and the co-authored article ‘The Handless watch: on composing and performing Flutter Echoes’, Divergence Press, 1 – Temporalities in Contemporary Music (March 2013).

There is a significant body of literature developing around Beaudoin’s compositional methodology for these pieces (and the microtiming process developed by Olivier Senn et. al.). The very particular challenges this music presents to the performers had not yet been addressed. There are fundamental questions these compositions raise about how performers control the shaping of time that have implications for our understanding of a very wide range of repertoires.

An extended research event was presented at the Academy exploring the specific interpretative questions posed by this repertoire (with the members of the Kreutzer Quartet, Mark Knoop, Olivier Senn and Richard Beaudoin). The Divergence Press article further explores some of the questions raised in this event in connection with the most archetypal of the quartet pieces, Flutter echoes.