World Premiere of Matthew Burtner’s “Glisten of Places”

For the 2014 ZeroSpace concert I gave the world premiere of a new work by Matthew Burtner entitled, Glisten of Places. ZeroSpace is a conference on distance and interaction held at the University of Virginia and includes a research forum and concert.

I commissioned Burtner with an Artist Research & Development Grant I was awarded from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Glisten of Places is written for percussion and geotagged soundscapes. These soundscapes feature recordings that are rarely heard or never-heard places including the inside of a fire ant hill and gas bubbles escaping from a molten asphalt lake. Burtner used the GPS locations of these field recordings and translated the lat/long into rhythms that I perform on my percussion setup. Additionally, the wind gong is a representation of the Northern/Southern hemispheres and the position of my mallet on the instrument corresponds to the soundscape’s location on Earth. Check out the photos below, including a shot of the Rotunda on UVA’s campus, designed by Thomas Jefferson.