Musicatlas
Music
His ‘Sonatina’ for flute & piano is his best-known work - it’s an arrangement of a piano piece written as an exercise on a Juilliard School composition course. His flute concerto, written later, was never published and he seems to have given up composing, so the sonatina is just about his only work still in the repertoire nowadays.
Life
Burton was a pianist who had ambitions as a composer, and took the first steps by enrolling on a composition course at the Juilliard School in New York. The flute sonatina (which was a re-arranged version of a piano piece) later won the Composition Contest of the New York Flute CLub in 1948. Burton gave the first performance with the flautist Samuel Baron, and as the contest’s first prize was an offer of publication by Schirmer, the work survived in the repertory. Burton later took a job with Schirmer and se ems not have have composed very much more. He retired to Florida and died in 1979.