Matthew Burtner: Noise Plays Burtner (review)

Alaskan-born composer Matthew Burtner specializes in chamber music and interactive new media. He is the inventor of the Metasaxophone, the Mobile Interactive Computer Ensemble (MICE), and the Network-Operational Mobile Applied Digital System (NOMADS). For over a decade he has worked with the San Diego–based ensemble Noise and with Innova Recordings. The present compact disc harnesses these two forces, joined together in three electro-acoustic and electroacoustic-inspired works in which noise features prominently. The Noise ensemble is an instrumentally mixed sextet with flute, violin, cello, guitar, piano, and percussion. Here they are joined with the composer on the saxophone and with an additional member on the computer.

Burtner worked in Paris at l’Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and with Iannis Xenakis’s Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC) system at the Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu). His work at these two institutions profoundly impacted his approach to computer music composition. He was able to use technological tools that were unavailable at most other institutions. This was especially true with the UPIC system, which provided him with a real-time composition environment to transform graphics into sounds. It also affected the way he composed his scores for acoustic instruments, providing them with an iconic sense of time.

According to the liner notes for this compact disc, “Burtner’s interest in the whole world of sound originated from his childhood experience growing up in Alaska where the snow, wind, and sea create a ceaseless soundscape.” These elements served as the background for an ecoacoustic work entitled Snowprints (2001), the second piece on this disc. Burtner creates a sense of place by mixing recordings of snow and acoustic instruments. The recordings of snow, taken during different conditions and at different times of day, were utilized in the creation of a fluctuating noise bed that acoustically supports and surrounds the instruments. Each instrument has a computer-generated counterpart, produced with physical modeling and granular synthesis techniques.

Snowprints begins in a spectral manner with a low-frequency fundamental that gives way to high-frequency overtones. When he first began working with computer music, Burtner saw it as a way to create different sound resources, produced at the spectral level, which could blend with instrumental timbres. Snowprints amply demonstrates this principle. The spectral treatment is occasionally disrupted with dissonant breaks in the texture, and embellished with breath tones and microtones performed by the ensemble. Both the electronic and the acoustic sounds are shaped by synthesis and filtering techniques. One gets the sense that the constant hiss/noise drone serves as a frame from which the music emerges. It also colors the music in the sense that it conjures the experience of listening to recorded music with a low dynamic range (LPs, cassettes, etc.). The intentional use of noise in this case presents the listener with an intriguing contradiction, especially if the listener is a composer or sound engineer and routinely filters out such noises. Ultimately, I would say that Burtner conjures a sense of nostalgia without hinting at loss or melancholy, two concepts that are normally associated with it. At one point in the piece Burtner uses a simple repetitive pattern that increases in speed until it begins to sound as if it were produced with granular synthesis techniques. Toward the middle of the piece the composer introduces slow hocketing rhythms between the flute and cello, playing pitches that are rendered tonally unstable because of glissandi and microtonal inflections. This piece is a tour de force featuring all of the composer’s techniques found elsewhere on the disc, but here they become solidified into a unified whole.

The first piece, Polyrhythmicana (2002), lays out Burtner’s compositional terrain, especially with respect to his approach to rhythm, in a five-movement, 15-min composition. For this piece, the composer designed...