Orpheus Institute secures private funding to initiate a new research cluster, led by fortepianist-researcher Tom Beghin

The funding announced today will allow the Orpheus Institute and Tom Beghin to build a research group of high-potential researchers, industrial partners and well-established musicians and interpreters of 18th- and early 19th-century music. This grant reinforces the institute's position as a centre of excellence and as a frontrunner in Artistic Research in Music.

The research cluster Declassifying the Classics – led by Principal Investigator Tom Beghin - explores the ramifications of rhetoric for the historically informed performance of late 18th- and early 19th-century music, both solo and in small ensemble, with a focus on the keyboard in its various technological guises. Engaging technology, but resisting teleology, this artistic research project revisits familiar scores and explores unfamiliar ones to tell “real” stories of men, women and their instruments in a period that we so reverently—but stiflingly—call “classical.”

Absolute premise is the performance on historical instruments—newly built. The new construction of some specific types of keyboards—to fill crucial gaps in our knowledge of the past—happens in partnership with the Early Keyboard Instruments Workshop of Chris Maene (Pianos Maene, Belgium).

The Orpheus Institute feels both fortunate and proud to welcome such a high-level artist-researcher as Tom Beghin. We also thank the project partners; The Fund Baillet Latour for making this ambitious project happen, and Pianos Maene, for contributing their unique and invaluable expertise and knowhow.