Matthew Burtner: Glacier Music
Ravello Records

No one would appear to be better qualified than Matthew Burtner to create an electroacoustic album using the Alaskan natural landscape and its glaciers as the central sound sources. As a Professor of Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia and as someone who's created material for the Obama State Department and NASA, he possesses solid electroacoustic credentials; as importantly, the Alaska-born Burtner grew up amidst glaciers and so has long familiarity with the sounds they generate. Not surprisingly, the cracks, creaks, and pops produced by glaciers as they break apart and collapse are woven into the album material, as are sounds of burbling water and trickling streams. One imagines Glacier Music would be like catnip to the prototypical Gruenrekorder listener.

Five works are presented, with two twenty-plus-minute pieces bookending three shorter ones. While all are thematically linked and sonically unified, differences between them enhance the recording considerably. The opening setting threads playing by a string quartet and small ensemble into its design, for example, whereas a percussionist adds to Burtner's soundworlds in two others. Said differences do much to make the release as engaging as it is.

Dribbling water appears as an undercurrent throughout Sound Cast of Matanuska Glacier, a study in sonic physiography that Burtner composed for President Obama's 2015 GLACIER Conference in Alaska. The work's plaintive, requiem-like tone is established by the minimal yet nonetheless stately material affixed to that foundation by the Rivanna Quartet (violinists Daniel Sender and David Sariti, violist Ayn Balija, cellist Adam Carter) and Albemarle Ensemble (flutist Kelly Sulick, clarinetist Shawn Earle, hornist Katy Ambrose, and chapman stick player Greg Howard chapman stick), the message one of warning in emphasizing the effects of global warming on phenomena sensitive to its impact. One guesses that the rumblings and clattering that dominate halfway through aren't present for purely sonic reasons but to suggest the slow breaking apart of glacier forms and relatedly how rapidly the globe is heating up. Without being heavy-handed, Burtner communicates his message eloquently and unforgettably. Recorded on Alaska's Ailik Glacier (part of the 23,000-year-old Harding Ice Field), Threnody (Sikuigvik) captures the sounds of air being released from pockets within the glacier as pieces break away, melt, and drift out to sea. Though only five minutes in length, the piece nevertheless manages to perpetuate the ponderous mood of the opener, the listener again cued to ponder the dramatic effects of climate change.

With percussionist Brandon Bell aboard, Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier startles the ear with loud ringing at the outset, the burbling of Alaska's Root Glacier audible alongside it. Climate change is here evoked using a different strategy than in the opener, with interactive software enabling the percussionist to determine the rate of time-stretching in a field recording of glacial melt. Cymbals, gongs, shakers, and tinklings punctuate the material as it slows during its eleven-minute run until near-stasis is achieved, the meditative result offering Bell a prime opportunity to ornament its glassy surfaces with vibraphone. In the album's fourth setting, Trevor Saint opens Syntax of Snow as brightly with loud bell tones in a drifting work one might describe as a duet for amplified snow and glockenspiel. In a fascinating move, the piece matches notes played on the glockenspiel using one hand with performative gestures applied by the other to microphones-amplified snow, the outcome accentuating the deep tie between a landscape and its people.

Commissioned by Alaska's Anchorage Museum to accompany Thomas Hill's Muir Glacier, 1889 painting, Muir Glacier, 1889-2009, arguably the album's most poignant work, presents the composer's attempt to render into sonographic form the 130-year retreat of the glacier. In the time since Hill created his image, the glacier shrank until it vanished entirely in 2009. To generate a time-collapsed approximation of the event, Burtner recorded sounds from various Alaskan glaciers in states of retreat, resulting in a twenty-six-minute meditation accented by dribbling water, rumblings, and ghostly string-like effects that reinforce the work's ambient-drone character. Apparently Burtner's piece has been presented with the Hill painting, which one presumes would have made the experience of both viewing the image and hearing the sound work all the more enriching.

Enriching, in fact, is a word that could be applied to the album as a whole. What makes Glacier Music an especially compelling release beyond its obvious musical quality is its associated thematic dimension, whose timeliness makes the project seem all the more substantial and relevant.

January 2019