Horizon Fields

Michael Norris frequently takes his inspiration from art. Head of Composition at Te Kōkī NZ School of Music and Editor of Wai-te-ata Music Press – just two of his positions – he has won a number of awards and fellowships including the Mozart Fellowship, the Douglas Lilburn prize, and two SOUNZ Contemporary Awards most recently in 2018 for an ensemble piece incorporating throatsinger and live electronics – he is acclaimed worldwide for his programming work, which has been used by Aphex Twin and Brian Eno. Closer to home, he is also co-founder and director of the contemporary music ensemble Stroma; this is his second commission from NZTrio since his trio inspired by digital art, Dirty Pixels of 2003.

Michael writes: Horizon Fields takes its themes from the large-scale art installation Horizon Field Hamburg by Antony Gormley. Comprising an enormous steel platform suspended 7m above the ground of the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, its mirror-like black epoxy surface created striking refections of both the hall’s architecture and the city beyond. For visitors who walked across it, this provided the illusion of teetering on the surface of a deep, dark (perhaps frozen?) lake. Furthermore, any sudden or coordinated movements from the participants would also initiate a gentle rocking motion in the entire structure.

Gormley’s themes of floating planes suspended in architectural space, mirror-form reflections and gentle oscillations have been freely interpreted to form the core sonic ideas and musical behaviours of this piano trio. The piano is the initiator of movement in the structure, sending out small ‘ripples’ of colour that the strings sustain, echo, vibrate and pulse. A static C-sharp returns throughout the work as a pedal—a flat plane or ‘artificial horizon’, if you will—around which the techniques of echo, refection/inversion, interference and repetition form an ever-intensifying musical expressivity.

Horizon Fields was commissioned by NZTrio and is dedicated to them.

dirty pixels

Michael writes: “dirty pixels was written in response to two stimuli: an exhibition of the same name curated by Stella Brennan in the Adam Art Gallery featuring New Zealand artwork of a certain rough-hewn, gritty nature; and hearing the work Jagden und Formen by German composer Wolfgang Rihm, an unremittingly wild and preposterous discourse of extremes.

These two stimuli caused something of an aesthetic dilemma: leaving behind my rather French fondness for euphonious washes of sound, I became interested in the characteristics of roughness and raggedness, and in how a ‘pure’ conceptual scheme, such as the quite systematic construction I had formulated just prior to starting this piece, became ‘dirtied’ by intuition, by the exigencies of the material and by the reality of having it performed.”

Commissioned by NZTrio, with funding from Creative New Zealand.