2013
Program Notes, Book 1 A7
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow
Float Flop Chop Pop Shatter Splash
(2005)
Andrew Norman (born in 1979)
Drip ... is scored for three flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, two
bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion, piano and strings. The performance time is
five minutes. This is the first performance of Drip ... by the Grant
Park Orchestra.
In announcing Andrew Norman as one of the four emerging composers receiving
commissions through “Project 440,” a musical celebration of its fortieth anniversary
season, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra described him as “a lifelong enthusiast for
all things architectural who writes music that is often inspired by forms and ideas he
encounters in the visual world. His music draws on an eclectic mix of sounds and usually
features some combination of bright colors, propulsive energy, a healthy dose of lyricism,
and the fragmentation of musical ideas into little pieces.”
Norman was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1979 and raised in central California.
He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California Thornton
School of Music, where he studied composition with Donald Crockett and Stephen Hartke
andpianowith Stewart Gordon, and anArtist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, where
he was a student of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis. Norman’s orchestral
and chamber works have been commissioned and premiered by theMinnesota Orchestra,
Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Aspen Music Festival; he is currently
serving a three-year residency with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Norman’s rapidly
accumulating distinctions include fellowships from the American Academies in both Rome
and Berlin, Nissim Prize and five Morton Gould Young Composer Awards from American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Charles Ives Scholarship from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, and a BMI Student Composer Award. His string trio The
Companion Guide to Rome was named a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Drip was commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra in 2005 for their Young People’s
Concerts. Norman writes, “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.”
Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219,
“
Turkish” (1775)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Mozart’s A major Violin Concerto is scored for two oboes, two
horns and strings. The performance time is 31 minutes. The
Grant Park Orchestra first performed this work on July 25, 1956,
with Izler Solomon conducting; Eudice Shapiro was the soloist.
Mozart’s five authentic Violin Concertos were all products of
a single year — 1775. At nineteen he was already a veteran of five years experience
as concertmaster of the archiepiscopal court in Salzburg, for which his duties included
not only playing, but also composing, acting as co-conductor with the keyboard player
(
modern orchestral conducting was not to originate for at least two more decades), and
soloing in concertos. It was for this last function that Mozart wrote these concertos. He
