a multimedia saxophone performance event
(dis)Locations (2007) by Matthew Burtner
alto saxophone, computer sound and video
Live video stills from (dis)Locations.
Program Notes
(dis)Locations reorients the saxophone through extended media. The body of the instrument - physically dismantled and reassembled in the video - mirrors a process of audio dislocation that projects musical material through various resonant spaces. The piece relocates the listener inside the saxophone, listening to the instrument projected at itself. Thousands of small loops were cut together creating pulses, glitches, scratches and cross-rhythms as the audio recycles. The multiplicity of a body filtering itself ignites illusions of space and throws into question the physical situation of the "instrument." Dislocation in the piece affects both place and time through musical form. Like fallen leaves, small fragments of the saxophone body were scattered around the Virginia forest. The video tracks the discovery and reassembling of the saxophone, as if the instrument grows directly from nature.
About the Composer
Matthew Burtner's music has been described by The Wire as "some of the most eerily effective electroacoustic music I've heard," and 21st Century Music writes "There is a horror and beauty in this music that is most impressive." First prize winner in the Musica Nova International Electroacoustic Music Competition, his music has also received honors and awards from Bourges, Gaudeamus, Darmstadt, Prix d'Ete, Meet the Composer, ASCAP, Luigi Russolo, American Music Center, Hultgren Biennial, and others. His music has been commissioned by Spectri Sonori, Musik i Nordland, Phyllis Bryn Julson and Mark Markham, the Peabody Trio, Augsburg Kulturburo der Stadt, Heidelberg Ministerium of Arts/ Trio Ascolto, and Ensemble Noise among others.
Burtner's instrumental and electroacoustic music explores ecoacoustics, interactive media, extended rhythmic, and noise-based musical systems. His music has been recorded for DACO (Germany), The WIRE (U.K.), Centaur Records (USA), Innova (USA), and the Euridice Label (Norway). Two solo CDs, Metasaxophone Colossus (2004) and Portals of Distortion (1999) are available from INNOVA Records. His original computer music research is presented regularly at international conferences, and has been published by journals such as Organized Sound, the Journal of New Music Research and the Leonardo Music Journal. He has been composer-in-residence at Musikene in San Sebastian, Banff Centre for the Arts, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and the IUA/Phonos Institute in Barcelona.
Burtner is currently Assistant Professor of composition and computer music at the University of Virginia where he is Associate Director of the VCCM Computer Music Center. A native of Alaska he studied philosophy, composition, saxophone and computer music at St. Johns College, Tulane University (BFA 1993), Iannis Xenakis's UPIC Studios, the Peabody Institute of JHU (MM 1997), and Stanford University's CCRMA (DMA 2002). At Stanford he studied and worked closely with Max Mathews, Jonathan Harvey, Brian Ferneyhough and Jon Berger. In 2005 he is an Invited Researcher at IRCAM in Paris, Artist in Residence at the Cite International des Arts, and Composer-in-Residence at Musikene.
Since 1999 Burtner has developed the Metasaxophone, a project involving imbedded computer systems and augmented performance. Paul Wagner of the Saxophone Journal has described the metasaxophone as "a new instrument with new and exciting textures for the saxophone world... the music is as mysterios and fascinating as the instrument itself," and Scram Magazine writes "If Burtner's saxes were flesh, they'd be bionic: wired for feedback loops and computerized programs...Burtner explores the outer edges of live performance potential."