Sonnenstaub (2024) for string quartet
Violin I - Umid Mustafazade
Violin II - Fatima Nasirli
Viola - Humay Hajizada
Cello - Arol Rzayev
Recording, mastering - Said Gani
16.07.2024

Sonnenstaub (2024) for string quartet

Dmitry Burtsev (b. 1992) is a composer, sound artist, and improviser.
His artistic research unfolds between two complementary poles. The first is personal, exploring memory and forgetting, subjective topographies of place, and the oscillation between speech and silence. The second pole is collective, focused on culture and language, critically rethinking traditions and their clichés. At the intersection of these areas, Burtsev develops a distinctive approach to music. Composing becomes both a form of self-expression and an encounter with the material as the "other."

Dmitry’s music consistently highlights the social aspect of sound. For him, composition is not only the creation of autonomous works, but also a question: How can sound express the pressing issues of society? This approach has resulted in projects in the fields of chamber music, sound art, performative works, and theatre.

Dmitry graduated from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory in 2017, where he studied composition under Vladimir Tarnopolsky. Since then, he has worked as an assistant to composer Sergej Newski, gaining valuable professional experience. At the same time, he was active as an accordionist in Moscow’s free improvisation scene, performing at experimental festivals such as RichterFest and Noise and Fury.

The environments in which Burtsev lived have played a central role in his music. For over a decade, he resided on the grounds of a former forestry estate outside Moscow, moving between the urban soundscape and the forest. This duality sharpened his reflection on how environments shape perception, leading to several works with field recordings. Among them are the performative composition “Symphony for Urbanites” (Moscow Urban Forum, 2019) and the performance “Personal Experience” (Sidur Museum, 2019). In the latter, Burtsev improvised with his own archival recordings in a Max/MSP patch.

From 2018, he collaborated with politically engaged theatre, composing for works addressing collective trauma, such as “Schitalka” (on the Georgian-Abkhaz War of 1991, longlisted for the Golden Mask Award) and “Govorit Moskva” (on Stalinist terror, premiered in 2022).

Following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Burtsev emigrated to Azerbaijan, where he became active in the Baku Contemporary Music Society and engaged with local traditions. In 2024, he began the master’s program at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf under José María Sánchez-Verdú.

His music has been performed by ensembles such as Studio for New Music, MCME, and Kymatic, and by soloists including Sergey Tchirkov, Natalia Pshenichnikova, Pavlos Antoniadis, and Leonard Dering. It has been featured at festivals such as Another Space, Territory, Moscow Forum, ISCM PAN Music Festival in Seoul, ReMusik, Baku Contemporary Music Days, and Voices Berlin. He has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Open Space Laboratory (2017, Grand Prix), Russian Music 2.0 (2020, laureate), and the DAAD Scholarship (2025).