Split for two pianos and orchestra
Andrew Norman was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on October 31, 1979, and lives in Los Angeles. Split for two pianos and orchestra has a long history, about which more below. A version of the piece for solo piano with orchestra was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for pianist Jeffrey Kahane, who gave the premiere with that orchestra and conductor James Gaffigan on December 10, 2015. Commissioned to write a two-piano concerto for Lucas and Arthur Jussen by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Norman created a new version of Split primarily in 2025. World premiere performances of the two-piano version: April 16-18, 2026, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Susanna Mälkki conducting, Lucas and Arthur Jussen, soloists.
The score of Split calls for two solo pianos with an orchestra of piccolo, 2 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 tenor and one bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: I. 4 opera gongs, bell tree, triangle, hi-hat, suspended cymbal, small tam-tam, flower pot, guiro, slapstick, 4 temple blocks, kick drum; II. vibraphone (with two bows), small splash cymbal, suspended cymbal, medium tam-tam, brake drum, washboard, 4 woodblocks, 4 wood planks (low to high), 2 bongos, medium tam-tam; III. bell tree, 4 tin cans, coil spring, hi-hat, suspended cymbal, large tam-tam, sand blocks, ratchet, flower pot, slapstick, 4 wood planks (low to high), log drum, kick drum), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Andrew Norman was born in the Midwest but grew up in California’s Central Valley. After attending the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, he moved to the East Coast, where he attended Yale University and lived for several years in Brooklyn, New York. He became familiar with Boston while serving as composer in residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) for three years, 2011-2013. Although these are the first BSO performances of his music, some of his pieces have been performed at Tanglewood by Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center for the TMC’s Festival of Contemporary Music, beginning with his string octet Gran Turismo in 2006, chosen by Stefan Asbury. The composer Charles Wuorinen programmed his Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow Float Flop Chop Pop Splatter Splash in 2011, and Thomas Adès his Light Screens in 2018 and Frank’s House, a reference to the architect Frank Gehry, in 2021.
It was his culminating composition for BMOP, the 45-minute, three-movement orchestra work Play, that earned Norman the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Recorded by BMOP in 2013, Play was also nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Composition. Still his most ambitious project to date, Play represents several aspects of Andrew Norman’s compositional approach. He’s often a kind of maximalist, fascinated by ideas and what can be done with them when combined, repeated, slightly altered, and iterated. Ideas that might be readily identifiable and familiar, like a fragment of a major scale or a figure that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Tchaikovsky concerto, might give way after a moment or two to a dense, noise-like passage or a burst of percussion.
Probably the deepest impact on his work is the nature of contemporary life in the U.S. Play, both composed more than a decade ago, and the original Split already confront the availability of—or rather, the difficulty in avoiding—virtually infinite streams of media stimulation. Architecture has been a strong influence in much of Norman’s work; along with Frank’s House, an homage to Gehry, among his specifically architecture-inspired works are Farnsworth, after a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe dwelling; The Companion Guide to Rome, a musical response to several notable Roman churches; and The Garden of Follies. Norman also cites narrative gambits in film and television, in which time is scrambled and reassembled, as providing models for some of his structural choices.
Norman has certainly evolved and grown as a composer over two decades, some of his recent works exhibiting great and deliberate patience with musical ideas, but remarks (in a note about Drip Blip…) from 2005 succinctly outline tendencies that have remained consistent:
Brevity of expression is a feature in much of my music. Fragmentation is another. I often work like a cinematic editor, chopping up my musical material into little pieces and re-assembling it like a mosaic or montage. I am interested in juxtapositions, in how wildly different musical ideas contextualize each other by being shoved together in a short span of time. I am also interested in how we as listeners process and remember a discourse built from interrupted ideas and musical non sequiturs.
Norman acknowledges the potentially dark aspects of contemporary society’s fragmentation and media fixations, but at the same time the buoyant energy of his music conveys his joy and satisfaction in the process of creation. One need only listen to his pieces with such titles as Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow Float Flop Chop Pop Splatter Splash, Gran Turismo (alluding to a video game by the same name), and Play to recognize that joy. Also clear in Norman’s music is his attention to performers and to the capabilities of instruments. He studied both piano and viola and has often had recourse to demonstrating novel string sounds and techniques for performers.
Norman studied at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where he later joined the faculty, and Yale University. He also taught at the Juilliard School. In addition to the Grawemeyer Award, he was a recipient of both the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, leading to residencies at the American Academies in those cities. His Italian sojourn resulted in his exquisite string trio The Companion Guide to Rome, which was premiered by the Scharoun Ensemble, made up of members of the Berlin Philharmonic, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He was also named Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2017.
Andrew Norman has composed on commission for such ensembles as the Minnesota Orchestra, Grand Rapids Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic (Spiral), and Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. Norman wrote his percussion concerto Switch for the Utah Symphony, where he held the title composer in association, 2018-2020. He has written several pieces on commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, including Try, Sustain, and Suspend, the latter a piece for piano and orchestra requested by pianist Emanuel Ax. The LA Philharmonic co-commissioned and gave the U.S. premiere of his opera for young people, A Trip to the Moon, which was commissioned by Simon Rattle for the Berlin Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras. He is currently working on a violin concerto for Leila Josefowicz, a trombone concerto, and a “long list of orchestral things.”
For those of us who have encountered many artistic origin stories, the history of Andrew Norman’s Split for two pianos and orchestra instantly recalls that of Johannes Brahms’s D minor Piano Concerto. That comparison is usefully borne out by Norman’s own comments on his piece. The practice, or habit, of returning to and rewriting a piece is hardly uncommon, sometimes — as in Norman’s case — amounting to an aesthetic stance. Split may be his most extreme case.
After developing the musical ideas for Split in versions for solo piano and piano duo, Norman wrote the first publicly performed version of Split, which he called a fantasia for piano and orchestra, on commission from the New York Philharmonic for the conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane, with whom the composer had worked on a project for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. As he was embarking on the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra commission for a new piece for two pianos and orchestra, he realized he couldn’t escape the abandoned two-piano version of Split from more than a decade earlier and felt compelled to bring it to fruition.
Norman met with the Jussen brothers at the beginning of the process of writing the piece, more to get to know their personalities than to discuss technique or mechanics. They gave him as much expressive freedom as he could wish for. Particularly tailored to the Jussens’ performance style are passages that exploit their preternatural ability to blend in perfect synchrony. In the piece, the composer also poses the rhetorical question of whether the two parts are to be considered one consciousness or two, a single entity that has somehow split, or even two opposed forces.
These ideas relate to the social media and technological metaphors that underlie Norman’s concept for Split. While he was careful to create musical ideas that are clear in themselves—akin, say, to a single reel on Instagram or a brief snippet of video on YouTube—he combines and reorders them to suggest the destabilizing “rabbit hole” effect of chasing the next tweet or random/targeted link. Individual moments may be enlightening or witty, he says, but “there’s a price to pay” for each coil of the spiral. Even so, as a composer, Norman is ultimately interested in creating a cohesive musical experience, aiming for the same qualities of expectation, fulfillment, and surprise that make for a satisfying listening experience. A piece that’s maximally energetic for its entire span exhausts the hearer; in Split, dense, aggressive activity is offset by passages of transparency, clarity, and calm.
Given the trajectory of the media world in the past ten years since he composed the first version of Split, it’s no wonder the composer sees the new version as considerably darker than the original. At the same time, though, he sees it as a tragicomedy in which its elements are presented for the “thinking, feeling listener,” and the artistically present performers, to inform the experience with their own individual, fundamentally human sensibilities.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
Andrew Norman on his Split for two pianos and orchestra
Split is the culmination of an iterative process that has occupied me for more than a decade. It began as a solo piano piece, was briefly a duo for two pianos, then a piano concerto, and now, finally, a concerto for two pianos and orchestra (in this shape-shifting journey the piece shares some similarities with Brahms’ first piano concerto, which began its life as a sonata for two pianos, was briefly a symphony, and then finally settled into the concerto medium).
At its heart, Split is the story of two protagonists trying to find their way out of a labyrinth of constant distraction. It is their quest to express a complete thought together — to find a place of peace and focus and wholeness away from the fractured tumult that surrounds them. The piece is structured as a series of disparate, parallel musical worlds that are toggled between by interruptive hits from the percussion section. You could think of it like a horizonless stream of orchestral channel-surfing or social media doomscrolling; the music occupies a tonal space where exuberance, wit, and playfulness can easily cross over into anxiety or ennui, where the endorphin-popping sugar-rush of short-form media yields to feelings of entrapment, despair, and perhaps even violence.
It was clear to me, a decade ago when I started working with this material, that this music was about my — and our — relationship to the online world, about how technology has changed our brains, our attention spans, the ways we process information and the ways we relate to each other. But over that same span of time my feelings about technology and what it has done to us have clarified, evolved, and darkened significantly. Our attention is a precious resource that is mined and monetized, commodified and exploited. To be distracted is to be divided; to be divided is to be controlled. For me, now, the simple act of attentive presence in the real world — to a piece of music, a work of art, a human being across the table — carries a kind of counter-cultural weight; it is an act of resistance. And it is the search for that space of mindful, resistive presence which animates the musical journey of Split.