Download - CCRMA - Stanford University

• Strum for four-channel tape (19991
Many of the sounds in Strain are barelv audible, the details just beyond reach. Others are noisy.
marginal, the kinds of things composers usually work to exclude from their pieces. Perhaps here
they find their place.
Strain is based almost entirely upon recorded speech. I chose to camouflage and obscure this
material for a number of reasons - not least because I Wasn't willing to listen to recordings oi
my own voice over and over again while working on the piece. If the texts leave only indirect
traces of tiieir presence, they animate the music nevertheless, creating the rhythmic structures and
sonorities of the composition.
Strain uses its four loudspeakers as a quartet of voices, producing a coherent sense of ensemble.
An artificial space is not a goal of the piece, and there is no panning or reverberation of any kind.
The loudspeakers are in no way "humanized" through this procedure, but I feel that their material
presence becomes an explicit feature of the piece.
C. Matthew Burtner
• Stone Phase for computer-generated tape (1999)
• Frames/Falls for amplified violin, amplified double bass, and electronics (1999)
• Noisegate 67 for computer metasaxophone (1999/2000)
• Oceans of Color for 27 solo saxophones (2000)
• Signal Rums for prepared piano, bass drum, and electronics (2000)
A new CD. "Portals of Distortion: Music for Saxophones. Computers and Stones" (Innova 52G).
was released in February 1999. The Wire calls it "some of the most eerily effective electroacoustic
music I've heard:" 20th Century Music says ""There is a horror and beauty in this music that is
most impressive:" The Computer Music Journal writes "Burtner's command of extended sounds
of the saxophone is virtuostic.His sax playing blew me away:" and the Outsight Review says
"Chilling music created by an alchemy of modern technology and primitive musical sources such
as stones...Inspired by the fearsome Alaskan wilderness. Burtner's creations are another example
of inventive American composition."
Chris Chafe
• Transect for CD (1999)
99% pure synthesis. Transect is another study to create "chamber music" using the current technology.
Ingredients of lines, articulations and phrasing were created by playing the synthesizer
with a synthetic player whose bow arm loosely mimics the physics of the real thing. A bowed
string and a throat were combined for the instrument. A year in the mountains of Alberta and
California, and the mid-life interests of the composer figure into the story line, which is like the
title, a section traversing.
• Whirlwind I and II (1998)
Violist Ben Simon wondered what it would feel iike to be wired into the same computer rig that 1
developed for my celletto piece. Push Pull. He is the first violist to be so inclined and I took that as
his consent to be subjected to further devious experimental situations, from which the first version
took shape. The result is an antiphonal setting, in which his two violas (one of them electronic)
are paired with musical settings from the electronics. The overall setup is a sort of solo version of
Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, a duo of quartets in which an acoustic group trades-off with an
electronic one.
The positions of the two violas are tracked by infrared to give the soloist control over events
generated on-the-fly by the computer. In creating these materials. I wanted to establish a feeling
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