Composer takes a job
NewsHot on the heels of his touring success with Kirill Petrenko and the touring Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the US composer Andrew Norman has been named associate professor of composition at USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles.
He starts in the next academic year.
Norman already works across the road as director of the LA Phil Composer Fellowship Program for high school composers.
Interesting, I believe he was on the faculty at Juilliard. I wonder why he left? USC is a wonderful school and all, but does it really offer a composer more than Juilliard would?
Maybe USC offers tenure, a salaried position, and benefits. I don’t actually know. Just guessing.
The teaching of art is killing it. There’s nothing except a prison—no , I take that back, you’re probably better off in a prison. You got tenure and you don’t have to deal with compositional mediocrities.
By the way, talking about composers and mediocrities, I feel like a man closed in a room with no air circulating when I listen to some of what passes for performances of “early” music, especially those with scores. Having expertise on the Machaut manuscrpts, I heard a “performance” of the Machaut mass on You Tube. God awful. Where they got this score I can’t imagine, with some of the isorhythmic movements—I could only stand the Kyrie but I assume they did the same sort of thing to the Sanctus and Agnus—turned into a parody of editing music accompanied by a performance by unnamed perps. I did an edition of the whole thing that was one of those priceless things we did at Westminster Choir College before it was vandalized in favor of sports. It is to this day the best performance of that piece ever done in modern times. The Kylie of my edition is printed in the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF CHORAL MUSIC and is the first edition to get some of the rhythmic subtleties right.