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Andrew Norman's Unstuck with the Alabama Symphony

Sep. 10, 2013

Andrew Norman's <em>Unstuck</em> with the Alabama Symphony

Kicking off its new season this month, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, under the music direction of Justin Brown, gives a performance of Andrew Norman’s brilliant orchestral showpiece Unstuck on September 12. Paired with works by Schubert and Mahler, Unstuck receives a repeat performance by the orchestra on September 14 at the Alys Stephens Center in Birmingham, Alabama. Of the work, Norman writes:

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. The following May, 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. Musical fragments become unstuck in that sections from the beginning, middle and end crop up in the wrong places like the flashbacks and flash-forwards that define the narrative structure of Vonnegut’s novel. 

Norman joins the composition faculty this year at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. USC celebrates Norman’s arrival with a performance of his Gran Turismo, for eight violins, on October 7 by the USC Thornton Edge Ensemble led by Frank Ticheli.

For more information on Andrew Norman, please visit www.schott-music.com    
Details on the Alabama Symphony performance can be found at www.alabamasymphony.org

Andrew Norman
Unstuck (2008)
for orchestra
3(pic).2.ca.3(bcl, Ebcl).3-4.3.3.1-timp.3perc-pno-str
10’

Gran Turismo (2004)
for eight violins
8’

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