Xerox Book (2001) by Christopher Burns
for piano and percussion

Xerox Book, for piano and percussion, is a pendant to my sextet The Location of Six Geometric Figures. In several movements of the duo, extracts from the larger work are molded and twisted through a variety of idiosyncratic transcription techniques. In other movements of Xerox Book, newly composed materials were subjected to similar processes of compression and distortion. In most of the larger movements, there were several generations of transformation before the music reached its final state — just as a sequence of photocopying will gradually distort an image into something new and unrecognizable.

The duo's title derives from Andre Barry Huebler Kosuth LeWitt Morris Weiner, a volume published by Seth Siegelaub in 1968, informally known as the Xerox Book. Each of the artists named in the title of Siegelaub's publication contributed twenty-five Xeroxed pages to the project, all addressing the idea of repetition in some way. Xerox Book is my belated contribution to the project.