North Attleboro High School Alumni Association

Richard Beaudoin
Young Alumni Award
2009

There are few alumni, young or otherwise, who have approached the level of accomplishment of Richard Beaudoin, Class of 1993. Rick's commitment to the field of music is, plainly put, remarkable. In his final performance of his high school career, Rick Beaudoin wrote the poem, "We, the Trees", and composed an accompanying musical score which he preformed as part of the graduation activities. This final performance would only foreshadow the excellence in music composition that was to come.

Rick Beaudoin studied composition in London at the Royal Academy of Music, and in the United States at Amherst College and Brandeis University, where he earned his PhD. His works have been commissioned and performed by some of the finest musicians in Europe and America. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and has worked at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Rick's 2003 settings of poems by the late John Updike were premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York. While living in Europe, Mr. Beaudoin's music was performed in London's Royal Festival Hall.

Since returning to the United States, Beaudoin’s music has been performed in Weill Recital Hall in New York, at Boston's Institute for Contemporary Art, and by pianist Marilyn Nonken and the Chiara and Lydian String Quartets. His work has been heard recently in Germany, England, Italy, Portugal, Holland, Israel and Canada as well as around the United States. In May 2005, he was invited to Christ Church Cathedral at Oxford University to attend a concert that included four of his new works. Currently, Mr. Beaudoin's work can be heard at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Germany's Konzerthaus-Dortmund, London’s St. John's Smith Square and throughout North America. In April 2008, the Staatstheater-Kassel produced Mr. Beaudoin's chamber opera, Himmelfahrt, based on a text by Heinrich Heine. The first act of his opera-in-progress based on Herman Melville's Pierre was staged in August 2007 at London's Arcola Theatre, starring Joseph Kaiser and Annette Dasch. Later this year, the pianist Constantine Finehouse will release a new CD entitled Backwards Glance, pairing two of Beaudoin's works with two by Johannes Brahms. His latest song-cycle was written for the renowned German soprano Annette Dasch.

Rick Beaudoin has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, most notably the Theodore Holland Award from London's Royal Academy and the Ira Gershwin Prize for Music and Theater Arts from Brandeis University. Mr. Beaudoin’s scholarly writing has been published by Perspectives of New Music and Organised Sound.

Rick currently holds the post of Lecturer on Music at Harvard University. He resides in Amherst, MA, with his wife Lea and children: Celia and Louis. Rick's work in the realm of music approaches a true vocation. That is, he has responded to his calling, or "vocare", with all his heart and soul. The promise so evident during his final performance while a student at NAHS over fifteen years ago has clearly been realized.