With only two performers and three minutes to tell its story, Dime Novel manages to takes the listener on a long journey. The work features mathematically precise but organic sounding transitions from one musical location to another plus harmonic and melodic elements that are at times indistinguishable. Rhythmically alive and witty, Dime Novel is quite accessible.

Parametric Transmutations is a monument to Burt's dedication to detail. Carefully crafted from each individual note, harmony, and rhythm to the large morphing shape. The recording was pieced together by the composer from a recording session led by Erin Freeman (http://www.erinrfreeman.com/) leading the Peabody Symphony Orchestra and a group of eight brave chamber performers. If you like what you hear, your orchestra could give the premier of this intelligently sensuous work.

This massive work asks the saxophonist to commit to playing on his back and blowing water into his mouthpiece. It was the marriage of Burt's exposure to Baltimore's experimental performers and to his own intense commitment to large forms and timbral exploration. This is perhaps the first classical work to employ the bubbling sounds of forcing fluid through a single reed instrument.

This piece, written for his wife, is part of a larger series of short new works for saxophone focusing on controlled registral placement of pitches and the large leaps required to perform such music. Incandescent Silhouette in particular deals with quiet echoes displaced an octave from their more energetically melodic originating phrases.

Cog provides the fragmented shards of a repeating melody without ever providing the melody. Each of the three performers express their own skipping window into the underlying melodic frame.

DECLENSION is the earliest piece listed here, but it represents many of Burt's strengths as a composer: a long transition form that slowly loses tension, the harmonic-melodic interactions of fixed register pitches, the relaxed floating feeling of pulseless rhythm, the lyrical phrasing in a decidedly modern context, and the specificity of tone color. The string quartet to which this piece belongs represented Burt's graduation from college and arrival into the phase in which a composer can begin to present his boldest ideas.

Unwound features the decelerating form as several other pieces during this time period. The parts to this piece are asynchronous, specifying that each performer is to loop their short musical segment many times, starting with a fast speed and slowing with each successive repetition. Their are of course some prescribed disruptions along the way that give the performers some freedom to develop the preexisting material or stray into new territory.