Along with Hans Abrahamsen, the Mizzou New Music Initiative is pleased to welcome Andrew Norman as one of our two distinguished guest composers for the 2015 Mizzou International Composers Festival.

Currently an assistant professor of composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, Norman (pictured) is a graduate of Yale and the University of Southern California. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the 2006 Rome Prize and the 2009 Berlin Prize, and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his string trio “The Companion Guide to Rome.”

Norman has served as composer-in-residence for Young Concert Artists in New York and for the Heidelberg Philharmonic, and currently is composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Composer Fellowship Program.

Along with music, Norman has a notable interest in architecture – he even considered pursuing it as a career – and that interest is reflected in his use of visual patterns and textures as inspirations for his compositions, as well as in an enthusiasm for musical notation, both historic and experimental. It came out even more explicitly in his recent work “Frank’s House,” which was inspired directly by the Santa Monica residence of famed architect Frank Gehry and was premiered earlier this year by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Norman’s music has been recognized by the New York Times for its “daring juxtapositions and dazzling colors,” the Boston Globe for its “staggering imagination,” and the Los Angeles Times for its “Chaplinesque” wit. His symphonic works have been performed by ensembles around the world, including the Los Angeles, New York, and Royal Liverpool Philharmonics, the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, the BBC, Saint Louis, and Melbourne Symphonies, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, the Orchestre National de France, and many others.

For more about Andrew Norman, you can read his 2014 interview with New Music Box, and listen to him on a 2014 episode of WQXR’s “Meet the Composer.”

(You can hear some samples of Andrew Norman’s music in the YouTube players embedded below.)

The Companion Guide to Rome

Excerpt from “Frank’s House”

“Play: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3” & “Try”