Burtner, Matthew

Matthew Burtner (www.matthewburtner.com) is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Music at the University of Virginia (www.virginia.edu) where he Co-Directs the Coastal Future Conservatory (http://www.coastalconservatory.org). He also Directs the environmental music non-profit organization, EcoSono (www.ecosono.org). An Alaskan-born composer, Burtner pioneered methods of musical ecoacoustics to compose sound art from environmental change during a time of dramatic global warming in the North. His climate-change music has been performed in concerts around the world and featured by NASA, PBS NewsHour, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the BBC, the U.S. State Department under President Obama, and National Geographic. He published three evening-length intermedia climate change works including the IDEA Award-winning telematic opera, Auksalaq. In 2020 he received an Emmy Award for “Composing Music with Snow and Glaciers” a feature on his Glacier Music by Alaska Public Media. In 2021 he published the album Avian Telemetry/Six Ecoacoustic Quintets (Parma Records) commissioned by the Shi Center for Sustainability and performed by the Furman Percussion Ensemble, and the immersive multimedia environment, Dwelling in the Enfolding (Anchorage Museum) with Mona Kasra, a work available through the Oculus platform.