Andrew Norman » music

A Trip to the Moon, a Melodrama for Children

admin — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 05:14:55 +0000

scored for soprano, mezzo soprano, tenor, baritone, 6 speaking roles, adult chorus, children’s chorus, orchestra (33.3331.3perc.piano.strings)

duration 50 minutes

A Trip to the Moon is an opera with many forebears. It is a melodrama, both in the specific, historically-rooted sense of the word as it was used in the 18th and 19th centuries (to denote a stage work that combines spoken recitation with musical accompaniment), and in the more general, emotionally heightened and dramatically sensationalized sense that the word has accumulated since then.

A Trip to the Moon is also a retro-futurist sci-fi adventure opera, and it was inspired by three interrelated sources of 19th century science fiction. The first is Jules Verne’s 1865 novel De la terre à la lune (fun fact: Verne spent his bohemian youth working in a Parisian theater writing light libretti for his friends while birthing literary science fiction on the side). The second—from which I borrowed a few useful plot points—is the 1875 Offenbach operetta Le voyage dans la lune, a work that took the fastidious, scientifically-grounded Verne and launched it into the realms of fantasy and grand stage spectacle, adding royal romances, magical umbrellas, dancing snow flakes, and an erupting volcano to the moon journey. The third inspiration is the seminal 1902 silent film by Georges Méliès, also called Le voyage dans la lune. Drawing on elements from the Offenbach, the Verne, and other contemporaneous depictions of moon travel, Méliès created his own unique mélange of what were by then familiar moon tropes — the arguing astronomers, the smoking forge, the bullet-shaped rocket, the tribunal of mysterious moon people, and the hurried journey home.

In addition to being a melodrama and a sci-fi adventure opera, A Trip to the Moon is, more importantly, a community opera. There are roles in this piece for world-class professional musicians, and there are roles that require no musical training whatsoever, that literally anyone can sing (or whack, or whirl). It is a piece that is inherently flexible with regard to the size and skill set of its forces (the premiere in Berlin featured 200 volunteer singers and an orchestra made up of school children alongside members of the Philharmonic), and it is a piece that was conceived as an experience as much for the wide variety of people making it as for the audience watching it. In this sense it can trace its lineage through works like Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde and Bertold Brecht’s Lehrstücke all the way back to the morality and mystery plays of late medieval Europe. Like A Trip to the Moon, these works were allegorical, archetypal, participatory, and ritualistic in nature, to be made by a community for a community.

But aside from all those historical antecedents, A Trip to the Moon is first and foremost a children’s opera, to be performed by and for children. And while I’m thrilled to get to share it with adult audiences, I feel that the piece is not truly at home until it is presented for a crowd that contains, at least in part, the young (and the young at heart).

A special thanks goes to Simon Rattle, who commissioned A Trip to the Moon as part of the community outreach initiatives of the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Symphony, to Opera Philadelphia, who gave me a deep dive into the practicalities of opera-making in the twenty-first century, and to the many gifted and generous storytellers who helped guide and shape my ideas for the work: Royce Vavrek, Mark Campbell, Ela Baumann, Yuval Sharon, Alexander Birkhold, and Brian Selznick.

Pictures, from the amazing design team at PXT Studio, can be seen here.

Spiral

admin — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 01:23:06 +0000

scored for orchestra (3333.4331.3perc.harp.piano.strings)

duration 5 minutes

Spiral was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic for one of Simon Rattle’s last concerts with that orchestra as its music director.

It features contracting cycles of material that gradually come into, and go beyond, focus.

Sustain

admin — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 01:19:44 +0000

scored for orchestra (3333.4431.3perc.timp.harp.2pianos.strings)

duration 35 minutes

Sustain was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the first concerts of their centennial season.

My first thought in writing the work was to imagine the audience that will sit in Disney Hall 100 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 Disney 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, 100 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.

I realized, as I was trying to conceptualize Sustain as a one long unbroken musical thought, that I was attempting to access and understand spans of time that were much bigger than my own, that I was trying to move from times with which I was familiar—that of a tweet, or a work day, or a year—to things I could never personally experience, like the rise and fall of species, the movement of tectonic plates, the birth and death of stars.

Strucutrally speaking, Sutain is cast in the form of a contracting spiral. It repeats the same music ten times in a row, each repetition being exponentially faster than the time before. What takes many minutes to unfold at the beginning flies by in a few seconds toward the work’s center.

All this thinking about time and proportion brought me around to what is perhaps at the heart this piece: the natural world. Midway through writing Sustain I discovered that I was really writing a piece about the earth, and my—and our—relationship to it. All the work I was doing with long spans of musical time and geologically-unfolding sonic processes was in many ways my attempt to place us, the listeners, in relation to things in nature which are unfathomably bigger and longer than we are. And if there is a sense of sadness or loss that permeates this music, it comes from the knowledge that we, at this critical moment in our history, are not doing enough to sustain the planet that sustains us, that we are not preparing our home for those who will inhabit it in the next hundred, thousand, or million years.

Sustain was hailed as “a new American masterpiece” in the New Yorker, “sublime” by the New York Times, and “a near out-of-body acoustic experience that sounds like, and feels like, the future we want…” in the Los Angeles Times.

Sustain was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

Mine Mime Meme

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 23:50:42 +0000

Mine Mime Meme is a 9 minute work written for the chamber sextet eighth blackbird. It is part of an evening-length work by the Sleeping Giant collective called Hand/Eye. It was inspired by an interactive installation by the art and technology collective Random International.

For Ashley

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 01:53:56 +0000

For Ashley is part of a larger work, Ash, by the Sleeping Giant Collective. It is a five-minute solo cello piece that takes inspiration from the prelude to Bach’s 4th Cello Suite.

Split

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 01:49:44 +0000

scored for piano solo and orchestra (3333.4331.3perc.harp.strings)

duration 25 minutes

Split is a hyper-active fantasy for piano and orchestra. The piece was written for Jeffrey Kahane, and I took much inspiration from the wit, vitality, and expressive character of his playing. I started with the idea of casting Jeffrey as a mercurial trickster, wreaking havoc in and among the various sections of the orchestra, but as the piece progressed he became less the prankster and more the pranked, an unwitting protagonist trapped in a Rube Goldbergian labyrinth of causes and effects who tries, with ever greater desperation, to find his way out of the madness and on to some higher plane.

In one sense the piece could be read as the spirited inner dialogue of a pianist with many conflicting personalities. Each of these personalities is associated with and amplified by a different group of instruments in the orchestra.

In another sense, the piece is an epic battle between the pianist, who has many different stories to tell, and the percussionists who are constantly interrupting these stories and switching the music to different channels entirely. Each percussion instrument acts as a very specific trigger in this game of channel-changing jump-cuts: the pop of a bongo drum starts a minimalist perpetual-motion-machine, the metalic zing of a spring coil unleashes florid and effusive arpeggios, and the scrape of a washboard sends everyone down a relentless spiral of asymmetric suspensions (and the list of actions / reactions could go on and on…). This is a universe with a lot of rules, and for the most part I abide by them all.

In yet another sense, the title references my thinking about the orchestra and its dual nature as both organism and machine. Talk to any player in a symphony orchestra and they will describe their role as a cog in a well-oiled clockwork. Indeed, part of the thrill of watching an orchestra is to behold the mechanistic precision of its members. Yet on the other hand, what makes the orchestra unique and indispensable (especially in this age when almost all the sounds in the music around us are made, in one way or another, by a computer) is the unmatched and unfiltered human energy and collective human expression of its constituent musicians. Split seeks to explore this clockwork vs. organism dialectic, to celebrate the outer reaches of both precise synchronicity and complete freedom, to chart and traverse the distance between people being machines and people being people.

Split was premiered by Jeffrey Kahane, James Gaffigan, and the New York Philharmonic on December 10, 2015 at David Geffen Hall in New York City.

Split was reviewed here in the New York Times.

Switch

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 01:35:33 +0000

scored for percussion solo and orchestra (3333.4331.3perc.harp.piano.strings)

duration 29 minutes

Swtich is a game of control. Each percussion instrument (both in front of and behind the orchestra) is a switch that controls other instruments in specific ways, making them play louder or softer, higher or lower, freezing them in place and setting them in motion again. The soloist, dropped into this complex contraption of causes and effects like the unwitting protagonist of a video game, must figure out the rules of this universe on the fly, all while trying to avoid the rewind-inducing missteps that prevent their progress from one side of the stage to the other.

Instead of being broken into traditional movements, Switch exists as a system of different “channels,” each with its own unique sound world, that are flipped between by the playful (and devious) snaps of the channel-surfing slapsticks at the back of the stage.

Switch was premiered by Colin Currie, Thierry Fischer, and the Utah Symphony on November 6 and 7, 2015, at Abravanel Hall, Salt Lake City, Utah.

It can be heard on the Utah Symphony’s recording “Dawn to Dust,” along with pieces by Augusta Read Thomas and Nico Muhly.

Music in Circles

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 17:43:50 +0000

Music in Circles features some material I wrote and rewrote and rewrote many times over for different groups of instruments. I’m currently in the process of finalizing the score for the most recent version of piece (using flute, clarinet, trumpet, violin, viola, and cello), which ymusic included on their sophomore album, Balance Problems.

Don’t Even Listen

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 17:26:40 +0000

Don’t Even Listen is a short song written for Gabriel Kahane on a text by Franz Kafka.

Peculiar Strokes

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 17:22:33 +0000

scored for string quartet

duration 12 minutes

Peculiar Strokes is an open-ended collection of miniatures, each of which explores a particular, peculiar bow stroke. Movements from the set can be extracted, mixed, and matched in any order.

Here is a video of the Attacca Quartet playing some movements of the piece.