Metasaxophone Colossus (review)

Released in the fall of 2004, Metasaxophone Colossus is a tour de force showcase for composer, performer, and instrument-inventor Matthew Burtner. It is a compact disc that pays homage to the great Sonny Rollins's 1956 album, Saxophone Colossus, while bringing together Mr. Burtner's primary work from the last few years and thereby providing a bookend to his 1999 release, Portals of Distortion (innova 526). If you have been anywhere near the computer music scene in the recent past, you have likely heard one or more of these memorable pieces performed live by Mr. Burtner on his elegantly home-brewed Metasaxophone. Anything you give up in hearing them on CD is quickly accounted for by the delight of having them collected in one place. At a time when many alternate controllers and extended instruments surface just long enough for a single piece or performance, it is a rare luxury for us as listeners and scholars that Mr. Burtner has developed a legitimate repertoire for his instrument, one that is both carefully crafted and finely documented on this new CD.

The Metasaxophone is an acoustic tenor saxophone retrofitted with an onboard computer microprocessor and an array of sensors of which Adolf Sax himself would be proud. Jazz is typically offered as the ultimate arrival of Sax's creation, but those of us who play the often-shunned rebel horn of the classical world can appreciate the fact that Mr. Burtner's work pays homage to the vision and passion of Sax as an inventor, as well as to his computer music likenesses, such as Mr. Burtner's former teacher, Max Matthews. But anyone who has seen Mr. Burtner play his creation in person knows that the instrument itself is just the beginning of the music produced on it. Mr. Burtner's playing technique and musical state of mind are fundamentally linked to the Metasax while also being the key factors in the resulting music's transcendence of mere technological novelty to a state of engaging physicality.

Metasaxophone Colossus was officially launched at a CD release party at The Gravity Lounge in Charlottesville, Virginia, early Fall 2004. Joined by special guests on stage and surrounded by an eager audience comfortably settled in with food and drink to the kind of welcoming setting that would benefit much other electroacoustic music, Mr. Burtner presented the entirety of his new CD in an impressively unified display of technical and creative energy. While evident in person, it should be made clear here that the compositions on this disc are not for "instrument plus tape" or even "instrument plus electronics." They are, at least conceptually and usually practically as well, pieces for "instrument plus itself."

The album's first track, S-Morphe-S, is a fitting introduction and a highly effective use of physical modeling synthesis. Illustrating Mr. Burtner's broader reinvention of the saxophone, the instrument in this case is actually not the tenor-based Metasax but rather a hybrid of Mr. Burtner's soprano horn and a convincing computer model of a Tibetan prayer bowl by physical modeling expert, Stefania Serafin. The piece opens with a sounding of the bowl as percussive key taps set it resonating, and the listener immediately senses his or her location as being inside the bowl itself. Experientially, the piece—as it then begins to traverse a fluttering and shimmering high register—becomes largely about the modulation of the size and shape of the bowl. At its most precise, the piece places the listener in the small object of the bowl itself; at its most expansive, the listener could just as easily be in an enormous mountain bowl with sound reflecting off distant canyon walls.

Delta 2 is an emergent feedback piece, its slow evolution relentlessly leading to a prolonged swell of thick and edgy sound. A cross between minimalist pulsing and Hendrix-inspired screeching...