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2CD
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XI 130CD
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2006 release. Two CDs for the price of one. There are any number of ways to hear Warren Burt's music for tuning forks; as many ways as there are listeners, probably. The most immediate one is simply to revel in its beauty and enjoy the music as sound. Or, to be more accurate, as clouds of sound; sonic colors that momentarily hover here and there, as they move slowly across the musical horizon. Of course, Warren Burt's music may also be heard as the mature work of a major experimental composer, one secure in his craft, and still filled with a sense of sonic adventure. An explorer in sound. A composer willing to experiment with multiple versions of the same piece, not to mention one who allows chance to determine the precise placement of the composite pitches of his three individually composed lines. Each aggregate of the combinations of tones -- because the tuning is acoustically pure and non-tempered -- sounds clearer and more colorful, with unique personalities, and, sometimes, more of an edge. In this tuning, the chance-determined pairings of the composed lines always ring true, with even the dissonances vibrating cleanly, free of acoustic distraction, and with no sonic clutter to muddy up the sound. And within this microtonal world, sounds combine without losing their individuality, as the music slowly reveals its pitch and rhythm in slow, unhurried, chance-determined clouds of sound. In Warren Burt's hands, these tuning forks become some strange new instrument, complete with its own exotic tuning system, singing its songs somewhere on the verge of memory.
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CD
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POGUS 21028
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"Harmonic Colour Fields is a set of five computer pieces which explore static microtonal harmonic fields. This means that once a piece begins, harmonically, it's going to stay pretty much the same for it's entire duration. The pieces are descended from the 1970s 'drone' pieces of such composers as La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Hal Budd, and myself, but they make greater use of slow harmonic progressions to make more varied musical surfaces. I wanted to make pieces where the quality of the harmony was the primary focus, and so used very simple rhythms, plain electronic timbres, and a minimum of melodic structuring. In fact, in these pieces, any sense of melody is simply the result of how the harmonic material is articulated. That is, change in harmony, and not construction of melody was my aim in making these pieces. The title refers to the 'colour field' minimalist painters of the 60s and 70s. I thought of these pieces as analogous to those paintings, in that the explore the varieties and shades of one particular harmonic musical colour."
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