With BYU's Group for Experimental Music
Brigham Young University’s Group for Experimental Music will be joined by British saxophone luminary John Butcher in a free concert Saturday, March 12, at 7:30 p.m. in the Madsen Recital Hall.
He will also give a BYU Barlow Lecture Friday, March 11, at 3 p.m. in E-580 Harris Fine Arts Center. Butcher is a virtuoso and pioneer of extended techniques on the saxophone and a master of collective and solo improvisation.
The concert program will consist of compositions, improvisations and comprovisations created collaboratively by the Group for Experimental Music conducted by Christian Asplund. Butcher will be performing solo and in duets with Asplund.
Butcher’s work includes improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked saxophone pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics. Originally a physicist, he left academia in 1982 and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians.
He is well known as a soloist, recently exploring unusual site-specific acoustics, and has released seven CDs of solo saxophone music. He has toured and broadcast in Europe, Japan, North America and Australia and was featured, playing solo, in the BBC-TV program “Date with an Artist.”
The Barlow Lecture Series brings composers and other musicians to BYU to discuss and present their work to the BYU community. The lectures began in 1987 and are funded by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at BYU.
The Group for Experimental Music is BYU’s student ensemble dedicated to the performance of collaboratively created and improvised music, a musical genre involves new approaches to pitch, rhythm, timbre and performance context.
For more information about this concert, contact Christian Asplund at (801) 422-3688 or christianasplund@gmail.com. To learn more about John Butcher, visit www.johnbutcher.org.uk. To learn more about the Group for Experiemental Music, visit cfacbeta.byu.edu/departments/music/composition/experimental-music.
Writer: Philip Volmar
