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Andrew Norman Across America

Feb. 01, 2012

Andrew Norman Across America

Andrew Norman’s music is featured in the heartland and on both coasts this month with performances by the Cincinnati and Modesto Symphonies, and the Ensemble ACJW at Carnegie Hall in New York. 

Histories, a new work composed jointly by Andrew Norman, Christopher Cerrone, Robert Honstein and Jacob Cooper, debuts at Skidmore College on February 10 with a follow up at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall on February 14. Norman, Cerrone, Honstein and Cooper are all members of the Brooklyn-based composers collective Sleeping Giant. Their collaborative piece is an homage to Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat and uses the same instrumentation. Each composer contributed a movement to the new piece that is a reflection of their unique and very personal history with the iconic Stravinsky work.

Part way across the country on February 14, Robert Treviño leads the Cincinnati Symphony in the first of two educational concerts of Norman’s Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow Float Flop Chop Pop Shatter Splash. Scored for large orchestra, the five-minute work was commissioned and premiered in 2005 by the Minnesota Orchestra. While writing the work, the composer collaborated with students who first connected specific sounds in the piece to the words. Norman compares writing it to kitchen prep:

As I say to the kids who listen to this piece during school visits, the process of writing it was a bit like making a tossed salad. I chopped up sounds from the orchestra — one sound for each of the thirteen verbs in the title — and then I tossed them all together and called it a piece.

The Cincinnati Symphony repeats the concert on February 29.

On February 17 and 18 the Modesto Symphony, located in the composer's home town, presents a musical homecoming with its first performances of the composer’s Gran Turismo, conducted by David Lockington. Written for eight violins, the work was premiered in 2005 by Robert Lipsett and the USC Contemporary Music Ensemble. Driven by perpetual motion and peppered with sly humor, Gran Turismo was the result of an unexpected convergence.  Norman explains:

Rewind my life a bit, and you might find a particular week in 2003 when I was researching the art of Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla for a term paper, watching my roommates play a video game called “Grand Turismo” and thinking about the legacy of Baroque string virtuosity…It didn’t take long before I felt the resonances between these different activities.”

Details on the Cincinnati Symphony concert can be found here.

For more information on the Modesto Symphony’s performances, go to www.modestosymphony.org.

Learn more about Andrew Norman at www.andrewnormanmusic.com or  www.schott-music.com.

Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow Float Flop Chop Pop Shatter Splash (2005)
for orchestra
3.2.3.2-4.3.3.1-timp.3perc-pno-str
5’

Gran Turismo (2004)
for eight violins
8'

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