# Grawemeyer Award for Andrew Norman



## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

The 2017 Grawemeyer Award has gone to Andrew Norman for his orchestral work _Play_.

According to award director Marc Satterwhite, " '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. 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."

Brief NPR interview with Norman here: http://www.npr.org/sections/decepti...ew-norman-wins-the-grawemeyer-award-for-music (includes YouTube link to the BMOP recording)


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## Hmmbug (Jun 16, 2014)

> If I get more commissions, great, but maybe I can use this moment to talk about things that are important to me. Like to call attention to the fact that there are problems. For instance, this award has been given to three women out of its 30-year history. And to me that's kind of an issue.
> 
> And in all honesty, I'm a white man and I get lots of commissions and there are systemic reasons for that, reasons we should all be talking about. There are so many talented composers out there. Rather than giving me another commission, why aren't we giving those people a commission?


Here's Norman on the Grawemeyer Prize (from Nereffid's link).

My impressions: I think most would agree that this was predictable - from the effusive critical praise to the Grammy nomination, we've been hearing a lot about _Play_ for the past year, and about Andrew Norman for a bit more than that. Alex Ross wrote a little blurb in which he alluded to people calling this the best orchestral work of the century. Perhaps that's too broad of a statement, but there's no doubting the impact it's already had.


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## Guest (Nov 30, 2016)

_Play_ is pretty good, but I can't help but feel that this award is in decline. I mean, when Boulez and Saariaho and Chin were winning awards, you kinda still got the impression it wasn't a popularity contest.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

nathanb said:


> _Play_ is pretty good, but I can't help but feel that this award is in decline. I mean, when Boulez and Saariaho and Chin were winning awards, you kinda still got the impression it wasn't a popularity contest.


But... what if it's _both_ a popularity contest _and_ a measure of excellence?


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## PeterFromLA (Jul 22, 2011)

I've heard snippets. They have not whetted my appetite to want to hear more. It seems like this ground has been covered by Adams' Fearful Symmetries, unless I'm missing something?

Composers yet to be honored, who would be more meritorious,: Steve Reich, Pascal Dusapin, Per Norgard, Pawel Szymanski, Valentin Silvestrov, Giya Kancheli, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Sofia Gubaidulina, Helmut Lachenmann, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Carl Vine, Georg Friedrich Haas, and many others.


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## Retrograde Inversion (Nov 27, 2016)

Its a decent piece, but some of the gestures strike me as being a little ...obvious..., especially as the piece goes on.


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