Although he's better known for his work as a composer, Warren Burt has been involved in language based arts since the early 1970s. One of his teachers was Kenneth Gaburo, whose "compositional linguistics" investigated connections between language and music, and since he wrote "Nighthawk" in 1973 (performance poem influenced by William Burroughs, and dedicated to his friend Kathy Acker) he has been making pieces in which language is cut-up, stretched, twisted, and pulled, in which meaning may take a powder, but might also come back in unexpected ways. In addition to his own language work, Burt has also collaborated with a number of Australian and overseas poets including a more than 25 year long collaboration with Chris Mann, and extensive collaborations also with Amanda Stewart, berni janssen, Elizabeth Block (USA) and many others. He has also been active in the field of visual and performance poetry, and was an active member of the AXLE group all throughout the 1990s, and frequently performed improvisational theatre at Theatre of the Ordinary. He has also been involved with speech synthesis for many years, always being fascinated by the more low-tech end of the scale – seeing it as a tool for getting new speech-like sounds, rather than accurately reproducing speech as such. His computer voice setting of Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skene" is currently available on ubuweb for free download: http://www.ubu.com/sound/softpalate_stein.html In his applications of random processes to language, he was influenced not only by Gaburo, Burroughs and Acker, but also by a number of other composer/poets who structured language in non-traditional ways, such as Robert Ashley and Jackson MacLow. Currently, he lives and works in Wollongong, and is an ARC Research Fellow in the Sonic Arts Research Network at the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong.
Events
Warren Burt will be appearing in the following events:
Although he's better known for his work as a composer, Warren Burt has been involved in language based arts since the early 1970s. One of his teachers was Kenneth Gaburo, whose "compositional linguistics" investigated connections between language and music, and since he wrote "Nighthawk" in 1973 (performance poem influenced by William Burroughs, and dedicated to his friend Kathy Acker) he has been making pieces in which language is cut-up, stretched, twisted, and pulled, in which meaning may take a powder, but might also come back in unexpected ways. In addition to his own language work, Burt has also collaborated with a number of Australian and overseas poets including a more than 25 year long collaboration with Chris Mann, and extensive collaborations also with Amanda Stewart, berni janssen, Elizabeth Block (USA) and many others. He has also been active in the field of visual and performance poetry, and was an active member of the AXLE group all throughout the 1990s, and frequently performed improvisational theatre at Theatre of the Ordinary. He has also been involved with speech synthesis for many years, always being fascinated by the more low-tech end of the scale – seeing it as a tool for getting new speech-like sounds, rather than accurately reproducing speech as such. His computer voice setting of Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skene" is currently available on ubuweb for free download: 