Andrew Norman Wins $100K Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition

Andrew Norman’s Play has received the 2017 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. The $100K international prize is granted for a work premiered during the five-year period prior to the award deadline (i.e. Jan.1, 2011 – Dec. 31, 2015). Previous recipients include Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti, Joan Tower, John Corigliano, Toru Takemitsu, John Adams, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Kaija Saariaho.

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NewMusicBox Staff

Play, a 47-minute orchestral work by American composer Andrew Norman, is the winner of the 2017 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. The $100,000 prize, which is open to living composers based anywhere in the world, awards outstanding achievement in a large musical genre–choral, orchestral, chamber, electronic, song-cycle, dance, opera, musical theater, extended solo work, and more–and is granted for a work premiered during the five-year period prior to the award deadline (i.e. the time period Jan.1, 2011 – Dec. 31, 2015 for the 2017 award). Previous recipients include Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti, Joan Tower, John Corigliano, Toru Takemitsu, John Adams, Pierre Boulez, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Kaija Saariaho.

Andrew Norman’s Play explores the relationship of choice and chance, free will and control. The three-movement work investigates the ways musicians in an orchestra can play with, against, or apart from one another; and maps concepts from the world of video gaming onto traditional symphonic structures to tell a fractured narrative of power, manipulation, deceit and, ultimately, cooperation. “Play combines brilliant orchestration, which is at once wildly inventive and idiomatic, with a terrific and convincing musical shape based on a relatively small amount of musical source material,” said Award Director Marc Satterwhite. “It ranges effortlessly from brash to intimate and holds the listener’s interest for all of its 47 minutes—no small feat in these days of shortened attention spans.”

Play was commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with funding from Music Alive, a national residency program of the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project performed the piece’s premiere in 2013, and released a recording on its own label. Since then, the piece has garnered considerable attention and critical acclaim. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and critic and musicologist William Robin said it “might be the best orchestral work that the twenty-first century has seen thus far.”

Norman, a Los Angeles-based composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal music, draws on an eclectic mix of instrumental sounds, notational practices, and non-linear narrative structures in his work. His symphonic music has been performed by leading ensembles worldwide, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, and the Orchestre National de France. Norman has won both the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2012 for his string trio The Companion Guide to Rome. He recently was named Musical America’s 2017 Composer of the Year. Norman’s music is published exclusively worldwide by Schott Music.

In December 2013, Alexandra Gardner spoke with Andrew Norman for NewMusicBox.

All 2017 Grawemeyer Award winners will be announced this week, pending formal approval by the university’s board of trustees. The University of Louisville presents the prizes annually for outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology, and education, and gives a religion prize jointly with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The 2017 winners will present free lectures about their award-winning ideas when they visit Louisville in April to accept their prizes.

(–from the press release)