“Play” for orchestra (German premiere)

Program notes

About the Work

Play is the piece that put Andrew Norman on the international map. Written in 2013 while he was composer in residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, it was premiered by BMOP under Gil Rose in Boston’s Jordan Hall that May, and Norman revised it in 2016 for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was nominated for a 2016 Grammy, won the 2017 Grawemeyer Award, and one critic called it the best orchestral work the twenty-first century had produced so far. Tonight’s performance is its German premiere, a major moment for Berlin audiences.

The work’s title is deliberately double-edged. Play refers, on one level, to the playfulness of music itself: the joy of musicians making sound together. But Norman also points to a darker side of the word, to “manipulation, control, deceit, and the many forms of master-to-puppet dynamics”, and he maps ideas from video games onto the orchestra. The three movements are called “levels”, and the next one can only be reached once the previous one has been completed.

Norman builds this idea directly into the score in a startling way. The percussion section is given control over the rest of the orchestra. A hit on the triangle alternately starts and stops the music; a strike on the temple block transfers a gesture from one player to another; other percussion sounds turn players on and off, make them louder or softer, faster or slower, or send the music backwards to rewind and try again. The result is music that constantly seems to glitch, loop and fragment, and then suddenly snaps back into long lyrical phrases of disarming beauty.

Listen across the three levels for the question of who is in charge. At times dozens of independent musical ideas seem to fly in all directions at once before the percussionists rein them in; elsewhere the players are left with little or no conducting and must find each other on their own.

This is music about agency: who controls the action, who is controlled, and what happens when the rules of musical narrative are themselves up for grabs. As Norman puts it, much of the piece “deals with who is playing whom”.