
Composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum (born New York City, 1979) leads a vibrant musical life. Her film scores, appearing at Sundance, Tribeca, IDFA, Telluride, theatrically and on HBO, include Stockholm, Pennsylvania, Regarding Susan Sontag, Powerless/Katiyabaaz, Money for Nothing, Stealing Summers, On Life’s Terms, The Shattering, The Apocalypse According To Doris, Joburg, Mesmerize Me, Foreign Language, Back To The Front, and Temporary Obsession, among others. As a producer, she has worked on such titles as Kinect Disneyland Adventures, Black Nativity, The Galapagos Affair, The Naked Option, Craft in America, VITO, In Justice, American Masters, Ace Ventura Pet Detective Jr., Guardians of Middle Earth Video Game, Kung Fu Panda 2 Video Game, and The Tournament.
With a Master’s degree from The Juilliard School studying with Milton Babbitt and Samuel Adler, her concert music includes Double Adventures for orchestra commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music conducted by Marin Alsop, Quotes, commissioned for the 40th Anniversary of the London Symphony Chorus with string orchestra, pieces for the Seattle Symphony, Detroit Symphony and San Francisco Symphony, Hand Games, a dectet based on clapping games for the Pennsylvania Chamber Orchestra and Ensemble Green in Los Angeles, Ouija, a book of music for solo piano commissioned by Soojin Anjou and premiered at the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum, Germany, A Simple Oath, commissioned by Judith Clurman’s Essential Voices USA, premiered on National Public Radio, and published by G. Schirmer, Inc. Kroll-Rosenbaum won the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award for her work, Two Songs from Days of Innocence, published by Boosey & Hawkes and released by Vital Records.
Nora served as co-librettist and executive music producer for the Carnegie Hall world premiere of Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama, a multimedia collaboration between Jessye Norman, Laura Karpman and The Roots. This live interdisciplinary experience was a natural outgrowth of her work as a co-founder of VisionIntoArt, the interdisciplinary new music group that fosters “flamboyant, confounding and enticing collaborations among choreographers, visual artists, actors and composers” (NYTimes). Recently, she produced songs for clarinetist Lone Madsen and Opus X, and tenor Michael Slattery for the SongFest 2014 Celebration of LA Composers. She was a fellow at the 2014 Sundance Composers Feature Lab, 2012 Sundance Composers Documentary Lab, 2005 ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop, and the 2004 UCROSS Foundation.
Nora makes joyful noise on the beach in Los Angeles, with her spouse, composer Laura Karpman, and their rambunctious son, Benny.
Articles by Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum:
By Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum I'm at the end of pregnancy, and in addition to now owning a car seat and burp cloths, the pressing question in the minds of the two...
By Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum I'm hungry for the almost-lost ideal of audiophiles craving the best in sound. But there is real utility and community online.
By Nora Kroll-RosenbaumBetween the familiarity with the look of a sound (like how amazing a Fender Rhodes' waveform appears) to developing odd relationships with time because of digital editing, I...
By Nora Kroll-RosenbaumI am tossing coherence out the window in honor of a proper fan, so here are a few random thoughts to underscore this scorcher.
By Nora Kroll-RosenbaumMore and more I find that notation reflects the action of creating new music. Beyond the speed of the creative process, notation can successfully function in many different...
By Nora Kroll-RosenbaumThe role of great album artwork in enticing a listener into a great recording has changed.
By Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum How can we make compelling visual choices that, when faced with curating live elements, direct the attention of the listener to see, and therefore hear, more musically,...
By Nora Kroll-RosenbaumThe end of summer is always filled with aching tastes for crisp fall air and a sweet nostalgia for apricots past. People have drastically different relationships with summer...
By Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum Do the short bleeps with beautiful attacks of vintage video game soundtracks live happily as the 20th-century harpsichord?