Tom Beghin

Tom Beghin combines a career as performer with that of researcher and teacher. His published work spans different media, from commercially released CDs and films to academic essays and books. His work on Beethoven's 1803 Erard piano resulted in the book Beethoven's French Piano: A Tale of Ambition and Frustration (Chicago, 2022, winner of the American Musical Instrument Society's 2024 Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize) and a double CD (Evil Penguin Records, 2020, winner of the 2020 Caecilia Prize from the Belgian Music Press). The year 2017 saw the birth of Inside the Hearing Machine, an amalgam of publications on Beethoven's late piano sonatas and deafness. His monograph The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist (Chicago, 2015) followed his recording of the complete solo Haydn keyboard works (Naxos 2009/2011, nominated for a Juno Award by The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences). He also co-edited Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric (Chicago, 2007, winner of the 2009 American Musicological Society's Ruth Solie Award).
Alumnus of the HIP-doctoral program at Cornell University, Tom Beghin served on the faculties of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Schulich School of Music, of McGill University (Montreal). Since 2015, Prof. Beghin has been Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator at the Orpheus Institute for Advanced Studies & Research in Music, in Ghent, Belgium, and since 2024 holds a professorship again at KU Leuven. His research cluster, Declassifying the Classics, focuses on the intersections of technology, rhetoric, and performance.