Richard Burdick is a prolific composer of chamber and orchestral music. He has a large volume of works for chamber music settings and concert halls, many of which feature prominent French horn parts.

His works vary from quite tonal to improvisational and avant garde. They also range from minimal to quite random. He has written minimal styles both in the highly sustained and highly repetitive types.

For over 20 years, composer Richard Burdick has been using I Ching inspired scales as a foundation for his compositions. The I Ching is sort of a fortune telling system of the ancient Chinese. Being a binary system, it suggests scale intervals of either half steps or whole steps. It is ideal for scales structures.

Like the scales of Northern India, the scales are divided into two tetra chord like sets of three intervals. Mr. Burdick mostly uses the perfect fifth to separate the two sets of three intervals. He also has a complete system of fixed tones for each scale that are an attempt to organize the whole system of 64 scales.

Richard has worked professionally as a transcriber and/or arranger for the Sacramento Symphony, Concord Pavilion Pops Orchestra and others. He has been a recipient of Meet The Composer funding, Concert sponsorship funding from the city of Davis, California, and was the winner of the 1983 Kensington Symphony Composition Contest with his "Six Medieval Fragments for Orchestra, opus 14."

Mr. Burdick began composing in 1975 and has had premieres of most of his compositions.

The most recent performances have been at the Conservatory of Music in Regina, Saskatchewan Canada and at the "Emergence", Regina Symphony Orchestra's new music festival, March 27th 2004

Please visit his list of compositions by clicking on "Compositions of Richard Burdick listed in OPUS order" or "Compositions listed by INSTRUMENT group" on the menu on the left.

Thanks for your interest.