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Canadian Premiere of Andrew Norman's Sustain

Dec. 01, 2019

Canadian Premiere of Andrew Norman's <em>Sustain</em>

The Esprit Orchestra, under the direction of Alex Pauk, performed the Canadian premiere of Andrew Norman's Sustain on December 1 at Koerner Hall at the TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning in Toronto. Originally composed in 2018 for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Sustain was premiered by that orchestra under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel in October, 2018. Andrew Norman shared insights that drove the composition:

"My first thought in writing Sustain was to imagine the audience that will sit in Walt Disney Concert Hall one hundred years from now, during the 200th season of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. What will it mean to gather as a community and listen to an orchestra in 2118? How will the ears and minds of those people be different from ours? How will they be the same? How will their notions of time and space and sound and history be shaped by the world around them, and what will that world outside the Hall look like? What place will the art of live symphonic performance have in such a society? These are broad and bottomless questions which led me in many directions, but gradually they coalesced around a pair of subjects. The first is time. Perhaps, one hundred years from now, the act of sitting quietly and listening to a symphonic argument unfold over 45 minutes will mean even more than it does today. Perhaps, in a time when humans will be bombarded with increasingly atomized bits of information, when overstimulation, fragmentation, and isolation will be the given norms of experience and discourse, perhaps then communal listening to a single, long unbroken musical thought will carry a kind of significance, sacrifice, and otherness we can’t yet really imagine."



(Sustain/Andrew Norman/Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel, conductor)

To learn more about Andrew Norman, visit schott-music.com. 

Andrew Norman
Sustain (2018)
for orchestra
3(3.pic).3.3.3-4.4.2.btbn.1-4perc.hp.2pno-str(16.14.12.10.8)
40'

 

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