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UK Premiere of Andrew Norman's Unstuck by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, led by Sakari Oramo

Jan. 25, 2024

Andrew Norman's Unstuck was the program opener for the BBC Symphony Orchestra's performance on January 20 at the Barbican in London. Unstuck emerged from the composer's intense experience with writer's block several years ago. He noted:

"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, then 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."


Andrew Norman and Julia Adolphe discuss Anxiety & Creative Process on the LooseLeaf NoteBook podcast

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

Andrew Norman
Unstuck (2008)
for orchestra
3(pic).2.ca.3(bcl, Ebcl).3-4.3.3.1-timp.3perc(tom-t, s.d, cym, crot, b.d, tempbl, bng, ratchet)-pno-str
10'

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