Digital memory and the archive
I have been working with the American composer Richard Beaudoin, professor at Dartmouth College, on a series of projects for more than a decade. In 2023 we released an album of a set of solo cello pieces (and a duo) based on microtiming analyses of iconic recordings. (See the ‘Work’ page of this website for details of Digital Memory and the Archive). We are both fascinated by what has been captured in sound recording documents from the past (and what is being captured now) and have sought to develop ways of making this part of our own artistic practice. Richard has written a very substantial body of work from this perspective and you can read about his approach on his website.
Our work together began in 2009, leading initially to a quartet disc for New Focus Recordings (paired with a piano disc recorded by Mark Knoop, largely based on the same material).
https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/richard-beaudoin-microtimings
Glenn Brown The Real Thing (cover image used with permission)
Richard and I wrote an article about the ideas and experiences captured in one of the quartet pieces here – The Handless Watch: On Composing and Performing Flutter echoes
The recording of You know I’m yours on this page is a live performance from the Alba Festival in Edinburgh (2017), and Bacchante was recorded as part of an experimental project at the University of West London: ‘Classical Music Hyper-Production’, led by Simon Zagorski-Thomas, with Emilie Capulet, Andrew Bourbon and Amy Blier-Carruthers. They’re very different renderings than the ones captured on the disc and may serve, I hope, to demonstrate that the micro timing serves just as much to engage responses as to capture details!
The title for the recent set of cello pieces (Digital Memory and the Archive) is taken – with permission – from a collection of essays by the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, who challenges us to respond not just (or even principally) to the ‘content’ of what we capture and archive but explicitly to address media as material in itself. Amongst other things, Ernst advances a case for something he calls ‘media-critical antiquarianism’. He sees something that transcends mere fetishizing of objects in the antiquarian instinct to try to bridge the gap between the physical presence and discursive absence of the past captured in physical media by ‘touching and tasting’ the immediate, material object:
‘Antiquarianism acknowledges the past as artifactual hardware, so to speak, upon which historical discourse operates like a form of software.’
‘The phonograph as media artifact not only carries cultural meanings like words and music but is at the same time an archive of cultural engineering by its very material fabrication – a kind of frozen media knowledge that – in a media archaeological sense – is waiting to be unfrozen, liquefied.’
Below you can watch a filmed performance of The Real Thing from 2010. This is built on Martha Argerich’s 1975 recording of Chopin’s op. 28/4 (like most of the disc linked on this page, and a large number of Richard”s other pieces, including Unikat). The title, however, is a reference to a painting by Glenn Brown (2000) which in turn responds to Frank Auerbach’s Head of J.Y.M. (1973). Glenn and Richard have become firm fiends and his extraordinary paintings have been cover images for both of our discs so far. Glenn’s love of and engagement with the past through his masterly reimagining is a fascinating and inspiring model. I was gobsmacked by the exhibition of his work at the Tate in Liverpool in 2009 only a few months before Richard and I began to work together on the pieces.
The image on this website’s ‘Work’ index page is a photograph of a plaster cast of a column from Delphi, exhibited in the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition and now on permanent display in the Louvre. It was the inspiration for Debussy’s ‘… Danseuses de Delphes’, the first of the Préludes (1910) and the source for Richard’s Bacchante. That it is a ‘copy’ that inspired Debussy appeals to us both…