October 2010:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110625163454
/http://buzzcity.ca:80/October2010.html

A new song for the old I Ching – the music of Richard Burdick

One frigid morning, a few winters ago, my neighbour, Richard Burdick, was seen to run from his home holding an archaic French horn and jam it into the depths of a big snowbank. “It’s too warm in my studio,” he explained. “And it’s gone out of tune.”

When it comes to a musical performance, be it solo or orchestral, playing in tune is fundamental. Contemporary tunings, like A440, were standardized and mathematically perfected by about 1880 to make it simpler for playing and combining various instruments. But lately, musicians who play older music, like baroque, have been rejecting modern instruments in favour of things like the natural horn because these instruments have the range and subtlety to accurately produce what the composer intended.

“There is growing interest in it,” says Richard Burdick. “These days you can’t find CD's of Bach played on modern instruments. It’s all the old instruments.”

Richard Burdick knows about pitch and scales. He leads the French Horn section of the RSO and he’s been playing with them and other orchestras in the USA for decades. But like many of the RSO’s performers, there is another side to his musical career, and with Burdick, it most definitely marches to a different beat.

His instrument of choice for musical exploration is the natural horn. This is an unstopped French Horn wherein the music is shaped by subtle movements of the right hand placed in the bell of the horn. The instrument is maddeningly difficult to master but it has a huge range and, in capable hands, offers great subtlety. Says Burdick: “My range now is A below the cello, concert pitch, to about a soprano high C. So it’s more than FOUR octaves and officially there is no limit. It’s all in technique.”

Great range and subtlety is vital when your personal ambition is to use I Ching inspired scales as a foundation for your compositions. The I Ching, sometimes referred to as the Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese fortune telling system based on eight groups of three lines and 64 groups of six lines. Since the I Ching is a binary system, it suggests scale intervals of either half steps or whole steps and is ideal for scale structures. Consequently, Burdick has developed scales divided into two tetrachord-like sets of three intervals, separated by the perfect fifth, and has developed a complete system of fixed tones for each scale that organize the whole system of 64 scales.

“I’ve assigned each hexagram one of those keys. So between C and C# there are five microtonal keys. And you can hear the difference. I’m working on a project of waves and particles – I Ching waves. The waves overlap and build. Basically, I take the scale in a pattern related to the harmonic series, and the rhythm of that tone in relation to the pulse of the vibration.”

Complex? Certainly, and definitely unfamiliar to most ears. But is it pleasing?

“No,” says Burdick. “What it sounds like is horns honking in a traffic jam. But it affects our brain in unexpected ways. Recording it, I had many memories come back to me – old memories that I hand’t recalled in 20 years. In one way, it blasts you with noise, almost traffic jam noise, but in another way it awakens your brain.

Since he has been developing music based on the I Ching, (nearly 30 years) Burdick has seen that people buy single tracks of his compositions because they relate closely to what their I Ching forecasts tell them they need. He is now going in a direction more like I Ching meditations, so that practitioners may say: ‘OK, I’m in this state, so I need to meditate.’” As an aid to that, one or another track of Burdick’s compositions will correspond to what they need.

“How,” asks Burdick, “do you find an individual’s harmonic resonance, a note that is the essence of that person? I think the trick is the base tone of their voice. Everybody has a distinctive sound, almost like a fingerprint. We tune at A440, but the human body resonates at A432. So, if you lower the pitch a third of a step from A440, the music is more pleasing.”

What Burdick claims has been confirmed in experiments. In one study, a thousand people were exposed to a piano tuned at A440 and again at A432. Almost 90 per cent of them reported that the A432 tuning was more pleasing. Because it breaks with convention and is paired with a system that has a long proven influence on the human condition, Burdick is hopeful that his work will spawn an awakening in people to the realization that this new codification of sounds can offer tangible benefits to their lives.

“People know baroque and classical forms,” says Burdick. “They may know romantic and the impressionists, like Ravel and Debussy. But there is a fusion now of various musical styles and periods of music. The new music is not going to be twelve tone, either, not something the piano can readily play. I think its time for new instruments and a neo-impressionist period.”

Richard Burdick has recorded a number of CD's of his music. Some are his own compositions, some are the work of other composers. All are available from Bach and Beyond in the Golden Mile Plaza. Or, by visiting his website at www.horn.pro

Listen to I-Ching audio samples:
I-Ching-arpeggio
Waves