Alain Roudier

Alain Roudier (b. 1955, Paris) is a French pianist, organologist, restorer, and collector of stringed keyboard instruments, an expert on historically informed performance techniques and early fortepianos. He founded the Ad Libitum instrument collection and research center, publishing many articles and monographs, including The History of the Erard Piano and Harp in Letters and Documents (2015) from Cambridge University Press, which he co-authored. He grew up in Paris and first studied piano at the École Normale de Musique de Paris with Blanche Bascourret de Guéraldi (1896—1982). Roudier traveled to Africa in 1978 when he was twenty-three and volunteered for a year as a music teacher at the French Cultural Center in Brazzaville, Congo. In 1983, he studied with Alain Planès before Roudier became Menahem Pressler's student (between 1985 and 1988) in Bloomington, USA. Alain grew interested in historical instruments after participating in Festival de Besançon in September 1988, where he supervised the "Autour du Pianoforte" exhibition and shared the stage with Paul Badura-Skoda, who brought several antique pianos from his collection. In 1989, Alain Roudier participated in Festival de Meursault with Jörg Demus, followed by Biennale des Instruments Anciens (1990) in Avignon. Roudier gathered a massive collection of the XVIII-early XIX century instruments over the years. In 1993, he established an Ad Libitum association to preserve, study, and promote early European pianofortes' historical and musical legacy. Besides over 80 antique keyboards regularly used in performances and recordings, Ad Libitum holds a unique research library — centered around precious "Erard·Pleyel·Gaveau" archives that Alain Roudier uncovered in the early 1990s and rescued from imminent destruction. He became the legal guardian and first researcher to catalog and study over 12,000 objects, such as letters, technical drawings, account books, photographs, and workshop inventories. Alain organized several educational programs, like "Sébastien Erard, l'aventure du Pianoforte" 1995 masterclasses at the Museum of Fine Arts in Besançon. From 1994 to 2015, he worked at Museo del Pianoforte Antico in Italy, collaborating with pianist Temenuschka Vesselinova, among others. Roudier retired from Ad Libitum in 2019 and presently lives in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, where he teaches privately and works on his next monograph dedicated to further discoveries on Sébastien Érard and his family's new biography.