Richard Beaudoin’s Digital Memory and the Archive

Richard and I worked together on this set of pieces, mostly for solo cello, from 2015 until the release of the disc in 2023. You can read a little more about our ‘microtiming collaboration’ from the link on the ‘Projects’ page of this website. The disc below was released on New Focus Recordings in 2023. It was my great pleasure to be able to record the duo with Rohan de Saram, one of the great cellists!

DIGITAL MEMORY AND THE ARCHIVE

I have written about my ‘dialogues with recordings’ in relation to this set in the following chapter:

‘Dialogues with Recordings: Digital Memory and the Archive’, in The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology, ed. Chris Dromey (Routledge, 2023 – forthcoming)

Performing music always summons the ghosts of other musicians. These ‘presences’ can be banished by the immediate creative act but recording inevitably draws them close again. In the pieces recorded here they are hardly ghosts at all, but real presences. Pablo Casals’s artistry has played a fundamental role in my conception of the cello as instrument almost all of my life, but in talking to friends and colleagues about the experience of playing Reproducciò, I found myself describing moments of feeling “Casals’s hand on mine” that go beyond the purely metaphorical.

Richard has written eloquently about the role that microtiming plays in his creative process and the enormous range of possibilities it opens. Here, I simply want to share something of the experience of playing this compendium of dialogues with recordings — as the musician through whom this music is materialised. (The performer as ‘digital medium’ is one possible leftfield reading of Wolfgang Ernst’s ‘digital memory’ of the title; another is Richard’s play on ‘digital’ as relating to the fingers.)

The very unusual control of time in these pieces frequently shackles my habitual approaches to generating and communicating expression, instead providing a new space of its own. Shaping phrases in slow tempos whose flexibility is predetermined, presents a new perspective on performative invention. Some of these pieces no longer breathe with the natural pacing of the ebb and flow of speech, dancing, or walking. The expressive richness of the microtimed relationships between events ushers in a new kind of creation that draws on timbral variety, richness of articulation, and almost inaudible between-the-notes choreography.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously described the Greek poets as “dancing in chains.” In his view, the poets chose to impose constraints in order to conquer them with charm and grace, “so that both the constraint and conquest are noticed and admired.” The six pieces of Digital Memory and the Archive also impose constraints, but these feel to me like opportunities for dialogue rather than conquest. In a less famous aphorism that also draws on the metaphor of chains, Nietzsche writes that man imagines himself to be independent, free, “but what if the opposite were true: that he is always living in manifold dependence but regards himself as free when, out of long habituation, he no longer perceives the weight of the chains? It is only from new chains that he now suffers: ‘freedom of will’ really means nothing more than feeling no new chains.” In challenging implicit assumptions about expression and freedom I hope that experiencing these pieces will afford a special sense of interconnectedness with musical processes, as well as a distinctive kind of contact with the presences that they invoke.

I do not think of these pieces as copies, transcriptions, or arrangements of their sources, despite the specific and exacting replications of certain features. There is perhaps no fully appropriate language that can capture how the making of these pieces speaks through them, but I sense an analog in the instrumental medium that binds this set of pieces together. The cello I play, by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume (c. 1842), is clearly modelled on the ‘Duport’ Stradivari of 1711, played by, among others, Jean Louis Duport, Auguste Franchomme and Mstislav Rostropovich. (Today that instrument is unheard — for cellists it is perhaps as close as one could find for a ‘ghost in the room’.) But ‘my’ Vuillaume is a beautiful instrument in its own right rather than any kind of ‘replication’: it was clearly not intended as a ‘direct copy’. It is my most intimate point of contact with the musical world, and its invocation of an absent presence is a critical part of its unique identity.

Even a ‘direct copy’ has the power to speak. Richard and I both enjoy the fact that the Louvre’s column of the Temple of Apollo, which inspired Debussy to compose “...Danseuses de Delphes” (and which, in turn, inspired Bacchante), was itself a plaster copy.

What matters seems to be the imagination of the beholder...

If you don’t use Spotify this YouTube link also sends you to the album. (However, please note that it sounds best played at full volume with high resolution files. Listening closely is critical!)