Samuel's profile
Samuel Burt is a composer in Baltimore, Maryland. His compositions have been performed across the U.S. As an improviser, he has performed for audiences in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and other U.S. cities and has made numerous appearances in the international High Zero Festival. As a board member of the High Zero Foundation since 2005, he has helped curate the High Zero Festival, Red Room series, and Worlds in Collusion.
Inspired by John Cage, Burt pursues experiences that are unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. He experiments with musical ideas that might fail, allowing him to discover moments of bewilderment. This process avoids familiar comforts of rhythmic, formal, and melodic repetition. Each composition becomes an exploration of a consistent set of rules that are often orthogonal to the Western tradition of music making, on occasion using structural elements from non-European countries without simply borrowing their sound languages. His music is a synthesis of ideas put forth by the avant-garde composers of the last century. In order to give the listener and memorable and worthwhile encounter, he invites the listener in without making the whole experience easy. Recent work includes a duo album with Maria Shesiuk called Lightning Golem, featured in Veritas, a performance by Gridlock dance. His instrumental performance focuses on clarinets, synthesizers, and the daxophone, an instrument he builds and sells. His current electronic music projects focus on performer-interactivity, stochastics, and sound design. While his pandemic work has mostly focused on solo projects, Samuel Burt directed two outdoor performances of his group composition Wyman Park Dell in 2020. He won a Maryland State Arts Council grant for music in 2018. He debuted new works at Artscape's Worlds in Collusion 2018 including a piece for daxophones and percussion as well as performing a new work for bass clarinet and marimba. Previous awards include the Prix d'Éte, third prize (2005), an honorable mention in the Macht competition, the Otto Ortman Prize (2004), and a Peabody Career Development Grant (2005). Burt received his M.M. degrees in composition and computer music from Peabody and his B.Mus from UGA. He studied composition with Lewis Nielson, Leonard Ball, Christopher Theofanidis, and Geoffrey Wright. He teaches music at Towson and Johns Hopkins Universities.
Inspired by John Cage, Burt pursues experiences that are unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. He experiments with musical ideas that might fail, allowing him to discover moments of bewilderment. This process avoids familiar comforts of rhythmic, formal, and melodic repetition. Each composition becomes an exploration of a consistent set of rules that are often orthogonal to the Western tradition of music making, on occasion using structural elements from non-European countries without simply borrowing their sound languages. His music is a synthesis of ideas put forth by the avant-garde composers of the last century. In order to give the listener and memorable and worthwhile encounter, he invites the listener in without making the whole experience easy. Recent work includes a duo album with Maria Shesiuk called Lightning Golem, featured in Veritas, a performance by Gridlock dance. His instrumental performance focuses on clarinets, synthesizers, and the daxophone, an instrument he builds and sells. His current electronic music projects focus on performer-interactivity, stochastics, and sound design. While his pandemic work has mostly focused on solo projects, Samuel Burt directed two outdoor performances of his group composition Wyman Park Dell in 2020. He won a Maryland State Arts Council grant for music in 2018. He debuted new works at Artscape's Worlds in Collusion 2018 including a piece for daxophones and percussion as well as performing a new work for bass clarinet and marimba. Previous awards include the Prix d'Éte, third prize (2005), an honorable mention in the Macht competition, the Otto Ortman Prize (2004), and a Peabody Career Development Grant (2005). Burt received his M.M. degrees in composition and computer music from Peabody and his B.Mus from UGA. He studied composition with Lewis Nielson, Leonard Ball, Christopher Theofanidis, and Geoffrey Wright. He teaches music at Towson and Johns Hopkins Universities.
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