About Andrew Norman

Andrew Norman (born 1979) is a composer of chamber and orchestral music. A native Midwesterner raised in central California, Norman studied the piano and viola before attending the University of Southern California and Yale. His teachers and mentors include Martha Ashleigh, Donald Crockett, Stephen Hartke, Stewart Gordon, Aaron Kernis, Ingram Marshall, and Martin Bresnick.

A lifelong enthusiast for all things architectural, Norman writes music that is often inspired by forms and ideas he encounters in the visual world. His music draws on an eclectic mix of sounds and usually features some combination of bright colors, propulsive energy, a healthy dose of lyricism, and the fragmentation of musical ideas into little pieces.

Norman is a committed educator who enjoys helping people of all ages explore and create music. He has written several pieces to be performed by and for the young, and has held educational residencies with orchestras and festivals across the country, including recently finished two-year relationships with the schools of Colorado's Roaring Fork Valley and with Young Concert Artists in New York. Norman taught piano and composition at the Pasadena Conservatory and has given master classes at the Hoff-Barthelson Music School and the Des Moines Symphony Academy.

Norman is increasingly active as an orchestral composer. His symphonic works, often noted for their clarity and vigor, have been commissioned and premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, the Oakland East Bay Symphony, the Grand Rapids Symphony, and the New York Youth Symphony, among other ensembles.

Norman's chamber music has been featured at numerous venues in recent seasons, including theWordless Music Series at Le Poisson Rouge, the MATA Festival, the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series. This spring the Berlin Philharmonic's Scharoun Ensemble presented a concert featuring Norman's music at Radialsystem V in Berlin.

Norman enjoys the company of creators of all kinds, and has spent much time recently in residencies. He has been a fellow at the American Academies in both Rome and Berlin, and has spent peaceful and productive months at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Copland House. After several years of the itinerant life, Norman is looking forward to settling in New York City. Upcoming commissions include a theremin concerto for the Heidelberg Philharmonic, orchestral pieces for the Aspen Music Festival, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and a short work for the Calder Quartet.

Visit Andrew Norman's website.

The 4.40 Fund

The 4.40 Fund is a commissioning collective that brings people together to support the creation of new work performed by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and around the world. By contributing just $4.40, you join a community of people of all ages, interests, and incomes, united by a curiosity for new music and the artists who create it.

Project 440 is supported by a leadership gift from Thomas Bishop, with additional major support provided by the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund. Project 440 is a collaboration between Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and WQXR 105.9FM.

Project 440 World Premiere
December 3, 2011 at 7 PM
Stern Auditorium | Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall

Apart, Together by Andrew Norman is the second of four new works by emerging composers commissioned by Orpheus as part of Project 440.

Spotlight on Project 440 composer Andrew Norman

Composer Insight - by Andrew Norman
There is always risk in live music. We listen to our favorite pieces live not just because we want to hear the tunes we love again, but because those tunes we love come out different every time, and in that silent moment before the music begins we really have no idea what is going to happen. This is, for me, a big part of what makes live performance so powerful. And it was also my first thought in the long process of writing a piece for Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

The piece I ended up writing for Orpheus will never sound the same way twice; I ask the players to make decisions on stage that change the shape and pacing and texture of the experience. At times they deliberately break apart from each other, playing in their own sense of time. At times they layer up in chance textures like the splatters on a Jackson Pollack canvas, and at a few key moments they come together and play with the unanimity of purpose and expression we associate with the best communal music making.

The members of Orpheus have spent the last 40 years interacting in the most vital and intimate ways musicians can. Without a conductor to dictate an artistic vision, they decide on one democratically. They are remarkably sensitive to each other–both in rehearsal and on stage. To honor that legacy, I wanted to explore–and to push the boundaries of how classical musicians communicate and make music together.

I also wanted to honor Orpheus’ spirit of sonic adventure, so I wrote a piece that uses some of the strange, noise-based sounds that acoustic instruments can make. As a violist myself, I love these scratchy, quasi-electronic sounds; not only are they fun to play, but they also provide a context in which the more familiar, more traditionally “beautiful” sounds of the orchestra can sound fresh and expressively significant once again.

Finding new and personal ways to get an orchestra to speak is largely what my work is about. And speaking, if only for a few minutes, with you through the musicians of Orpheus in this storied concert hall is a privilege that makes months of solitary work worthwhile. I hope that my piece speaks honestly, and that it provides an experience–emotional, transient, and a little risky–that we can all share together.

This piece is dedicated to my parents, Jeff and Kathie Norman, who, like Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, are celebrating 40 years of togetherness.

Blog Update from Andrew Norman

This is a summer of travel for me, which means that my piece for Orpheus is taking shape on the road, during moments of downtime in hotel rooms and coffee shops and airplanes. Most of this work has been conceptual–thinking in the broadest terms about my piece and what I want it to accomplish–and this is the kind of work I can do anywhere. But when it comes down to actually putting notes on paper, I am very particular about my space, and it usually takes me a while to settle into an environment and feel comfortable enough to compose. And settling in, for me, invariably means making a big mess in whatever space I'm inhabiting. Perhaps I am like an animal marking its territory in the wild, strewing paper and pencils and instruments around to claim my space. I always imagine myself to be the kind of creator who thrives in a minimalist space, all glass and white clean, straight lines. But this is just not how reality works for me, as you can see below.

My studio at home as I left it in June:

My studio at the MacDowell Colony, where I worked for three weeks in July:

Two days of work and four trash bags later, here is my studio at home, reborn in early August:

And here is my workspace for four weeks in August and September, in a 15th century castle in Central Italy:

Audio sample: Unstuck
Performed by the Tonhalle Orchestra, Zurich; Conducted by Michael Sanderling

Andrew Norman on Unstuck:
I have never been more stuck than I was in the winter of 2008. My writing came to a grinding halt in January and for a long time this piece languished on my desk, a mess of musical fragments that refused to cohere. It was not until the following May, when I saw a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and remembered one of its iconic sentences, that I had a breakthrough realization. The sentence was this: "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time," and the realization was that the lack of coherence in my ideas was to be embraced and explored, not overcome.

I realized that my musical materials lent themselves to a narrative arc that, like Vonnegut's character, comes unstuck in time. Bits and pieces of the beginning, middle, and end of the music crop up in the wrong places like the flashbacks and flashforwards that define the structure and style of Slaughterhouse-Five.

I also realized that the word unstuck had resonances with the way that a few of the piece's musical ideas get caught in repetitive loops. The orchestra, perhaps in some way dramatizing my own frustration with composing, spends a considerable amount of time and energy trying to free itself from these moments of stuckness.

The Companion Guide to Rome - VI. Clemente
Performed by the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin

Andrew Norman on The Companion Guide to Rome:
Like many of the buildings in Rome, this piece is the product of a long gestation marked by numerous renovations, accretions, and ground-up reconstructions. What has emerged is a collection of portraits–nine in all–of my favorite Roman churches. The music is, at different times and in different ways, informed by the proportions of the churches, the qualities of their surfaces, the patterns in their floors, the artwork on their walls, and the lives and legends of the saints whose names they bear. The more I worked on these miniatures, the less they had to do with actual buildings and the more they became character studies of imaginary people, my companions for a year of living in the Eternal City.