The Present Contains Nothing More Than The Past, And What Is Found In The Effect Was Already In The Cause

Saturday, October 27, 2007, 7pm
Anthony Burr

View photos of the performance

This piece grew out of my ongoing collaboration with the filmmaker Jennifer Reeves. From that work I have extended the conceit of using tuning to define and color the physical sense of the performance space, and moved the role of the instrumental part to the forefront. It is most certainly informed by my engagement with the musics of Alvin Lucier and La Monte Young, especially their ability to create work that hovers at the place where the more commonly discursive elements of music (rhythm, pitch) destabilize and blur into space and presence. The other main inspiration is John Coltrane who wound up in a similar place through his insistent explication of almost formalist material to the point where it became a sort of spiritual transcendence.

Anthony Burr has worked across a broad spectrum of the contemporary musical landscape with groups and artists including: Alvin Lucier, Jim O'Rourke, John Zorn, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Laurie Anderson and many others. Ongoing projects include a duo with Icelandic bassist/composer Skùli Sverrisson, The Clarinets (a trio with Chris Speed and Oscar Noriega), a series of recordings with cellist Charles Curtis and a series of live film/music performances with experimental filmmaker Jennifer Reeves. As a composer he has specialized in the creation of epic scale mixed media pieces, most notably Biospheria: An Environmental Opera, created with artist Steve Ausbury in response to Biosphere 2. It was performed in San Diego in 2001, and sections were mounted in archive form as part of the cinematexas festival in 2003. Another project of this ilk was The Mizler Society, a burlesque on early modern music theory, J.S Bach and the Art of Fugue, which he created with John Rodgers and was presented by the Australian Art Orchestra at the Melbourne Museum in 2002. He has produced and/or engineered eecords for La Monte Young, Charles Curtis, Skùli Sverrisson, Ted Reichman and many others. Upcoming releases include a new Anthony Burr/Skùli Sverrisson double CD with guest vocalists Yungchen Lamo and Arto Lindsay, and a recording of Morton Feldman's Clarinet and String Quartet. He was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.

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