Samuel Burt has been driving the experimental music scene in Baltimore through the High Zero Foundation, producing the High Zero Festival, the Red Room series, and the Volunteers' Collective Workshop. He has been an active composer of chamber music for classically trained musicians. Occasionally, these activities overlap, and sometimes they lack the sense of newness you get when you first discover that you can listen intently to two people scraping pieces of metal together. Which is why he has taken up instrument construction. The daxophone, pictured, has unlimited potential for making new (grunting, hooting, singing) noises simply by cutting a new tongue out of a piece of thin wood and clamping it down.

The daxophone is a friction idiophone, meaning you bow it to make the entire wooden body vibrate. The sound comes from carefully chosen and shaped pieces of wood called tongues. Tongue making is both a sonic and visual art. Each is unique in wood grain, shape, and sound.

Burt has played daxophone regularly with avant-free music band Coy Fish led by Sarah Hughes. Amongst the many performances of 2018, Coy Fish opened for the Library of Congress's "Summer Movies on the Lawn" screening of the Wizard of Oz taking audiences somewhere over else over the rainbow.

Burt composed music for two daxophonists and percussion, performing it with Eric Franklin and Shelly Purdy at Artscape 2018. The work, entitled Renku No. 1, is built around a form of Japanese poetry where individuals add stanzas to a poem.

Samuel Burt and Maria Shesiuk are nearing completion of an album of daxophone and synthesizer music. They've been recording and editing monthly through 2018.

He's built 20 daxophones. Considering a daxophone for yourself? http://samuelburt.com/daxophones/

Samuel Burt learned much from his many pianist friends. Over the past two decades, he's written a significant amount of music for piano, most recently Mixed Signals and Node Ode.

Lisa Weiss and Burt have begun a project to introduce new works for piano and live electronics. Weiss performed Mixed Signals at Goucher College in 2017. Mixed Signals is a work for computer or cell phone that listens to the notes the pianist plays and generates an echoing harmonic cloud, reordering the notes and stretching them out. This work will also be used to christen the new piano at the Immaculate Heart of Mary in March.

The aim of this project is to allow the performer to plug a cell phone into an audio cable and set the phone on the piano and begin performing these new works with minimal effort. Electronic music is often inaccessible to performers with limited computer music background, often requiring that someone else's presence to work through the technology. With modern developments and if programed with great consideration, the composers can reduce the technical requirements.

How are these compositions different from other modern classical music? Burt lives in many musical worlds. He grew up on the traditions of classical music and jazz and became involved in experimental improvised music as a teenager. He blends together the rigor and ornate craftsmanship of classical music with the rhythmically-free, spontaneous, and untuned harmonies of improvised music. His work as an educator affords him opportunities to oversee student works that range through all different styles of contemporary popular music. These influences manifest obliquely in his music, through manipulation of dynamic energy levels and unusual applications of repetition.

While his style is most often centered around densely packed parametric sets of newly invented procedures, the effect of his music ranges from beautiful and flowing to suspenseful. It always engages the mind and guides the listener through the unexplored frontiers of music, both emotionally and intellectually.

Burt's next project could be a commission from you, even for orchestra! Please, contact him if you like what you hear.