Apart, Together by Andrew Norman, a Project 440 commission

more at www.orpheusproject440.org

Composer Insight:
There is always risk in live music. We listen to our favorite pieces live not just because we want to hear the tunes we love again, but because those tunes we love come out different every time, and in that silent moment before the music begins we really have no idea what is going to happen. This is, for me, a big part of what makes live performance so powerful. And it was also my first thought in the long process of writing a piece for Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

The piece I ended up writing for Orpheus will never sound the same way twice; I ask the players to make decisions on stage that change the shape and pacing and texture of the experience. At times they deliberately break apart from each other, playing in their own sense of time. At times they layer up in chance textures like the splatters on a Jackson Pollack canvas, and at a few key moments they come together and play with the unanimity of purpose and expression we associate with the best communal music making.

The members of Orpheus have spent the last 40 years interacting in the most vital and intimate ways musicians can. Without a conductor to dictate an artistic vision, they decide on one democratically. They are remarkably sensitive to each other—both in rehearsal and on stage. To honor that legacy, I wanted to explore—and to push the boundaries of—how classical musicians communicate and make music together.

I also wanted to honor Orpheus' spirit of sonic adventure, so I wrote a piece that uses some of the strange, noise-based sounds that acoustic instruments can make. As a violist myself, I love these scratchy, quasi-electronic sounds; not only are they fun to play, but they also provide a context in which the more familiar, more traditionally "beautiful" sounds of the orchestra can sound fresh and expressively significant once again.

Finding new and personal ways to get an orchestra to speak is largely what my work is about. And speaking, if only for a few minutes, with you through the musicians of Orpheus in this storied concert hall is a privilege that makes months of solitary work worthwhile. I hope that my piece speaks honestly, and that it provides an experience—emotional, transient, and a little risky—that we an all share together.

This piece is dedicated to my parents, Jeff and Kathie Norman, who, like Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, are celebrating 40 years of togetherness.

--Andrew Norman

Category:

Music

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• Andrew Norman
• Project 440
• Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
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• contemporary music
• orchestra
• chamber music
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• classical
• violin
• oboe
• Carnegie Hall
• world premiere
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