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Andrew Norman
Frank's House
for two pianists and two percussionists
(2015)| Duration | 10' |
|---|---|
| Commission | Commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for their Westside Connections Series |
| Premiere | February 5, 2015; Moss Theater, Santa Monica, CA; Members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra – Jeffrey Kahane, piano • Joanne Pearce Martin, piano • Wade Culbreath, percussion • Ted Atkatz, percussion |
| Instrumentation | See preview page for full percussion instrumentation. |
| Publisher | PSNY |
Media
Program Note
"The windows… I wanted to make them look like
they were crawling out of this thing. At night,
because this glass is tipped it mirrors the light in…
So when you’re sitting at this table you see all
these cars going by, you see the moon in the
wrong place… the moon is over there but it
reflects here… and you think it’s up there and you
don’t know where the hell you are…”
– Frank Gehry
This piece is built out of a system of cues and responses. Instruments trigger other instruments on and off, like windows opening and closing. The instrument doing the triggering often has rhythms notated in 4/4 at quarter = 120, but those rhythms need not be felt or known by the rest of the ensemble, who each play in their own time and wait to be turned on and off by aural cues. Put another way, what happens inside each "window" is totally uncoordinated (and often quite crazy), but the length of the window is precisely determined by the cueing instrument in the moment of performance (the 4/4 rhythms can be viewed as a kind of suggestion, a guide to keep things moving along, but in truth these windows could be quite variable in their lengths). The piece ends with a long, minimalist unfolding (rehearsal Z to JJ) in which the pianists and percussionists play independently. The players should pass through the climax in the general vicinity of one another (there's a lot of room for variance here), but apart from that no other coordination is needed. Do not attempt to recreate the vertical alignment of the score on these pages, as harmonies, lines, and events should intersect in a different way at every performance.
- Andrew Norman
