Canary Burton

Burton's works have been performed internationally. Her music, with information about her work, is archived in the Wellfleet Public Library in Massachusetts and in Italy in the library of the Fondazione Adkins Chiti: Donne in Musica Archived June 26, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. She is the recipient of an ASCAP Plus Award, which supports ASCAP members whose works have a unique prestige value for which adequate compensation would not otherwise be received. Some of her music from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, may be heard online and the sheet music downloaded.

Selected pieces of her work were included in the published collection Music of Living Composers, compiled by the Campbell University piano professor and composer Betty Wishart in 1997. In 2013, Southern River was among the winners of the annual Search for New Music competition of the International Alliance for Women in Music.

She relocated to Washington D.C., where she worked at WPFW Pacifica radio for three years. She then moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she established her own contemporary music radio show, The Latest Score, on WOMR in Provincetown. While founding and playing in various rock and jazz ensembles, Burton continued her studies—with Kevin Toney in jazz in 1980, with David Sussman in 1988, with John Zielinski in composition from 1990 to 1992, and briefly with Rodney Lister at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1995. She worked as a music teacher from 1996 to 2000.

Burton was born on September 16, 1942, in Richmond, California. In 1972 she moved to Moscow, Idaho, to attend the University of Idaho where she was one of the first women to be accepted into the music composition program. After passing her third-year piano exam, she left to form her own rock ’n roll band and play in various rock and jazz ensembles. She attracted followers through her gigs, but she came to find performance unfulfilling and turned to composition.