Paul Norman

United Kingdom °1987
research interests: Music, performance, composition
affiliation: Birmingham City University (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire)
en

Paul Norman is a composer who places emphasis on ideas and concepts and whose performances include visual and performative elements. Norman sees composition as an approach to art making grounded in musical experience that carries a specific relationship to temporality and structure. For him composing becomes a way of trying to understand little bits of the world and a way to point at the situations he finds intriguing. In doing this he encourages the audience to share this process, to ask questions and to make decisions that resonate within the given compositional frame of the performance. 

 

Norman has shown both solo projects and interdisciplinary collaborations together with dance, visual art and theatre, across Europe. This has included the exploration of audience comfort through the use of compositional strategies that produce relaxing music when a space in too quiet in the interdisciplinary collaboration with choreographer Sebastian Mathias and Nino Baumgartner maneuvers/groove space. With the work Pointing at Things: It started when you read this, produced in the context of the Frankfurt LAB residency programme, Norman used text scores to activate the audience’s decision making, asking them to consider choices about their actions as compositional. 

 

Norman was awarded a PhD from Birmingham City University (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) in 2018. His full-time study was supported with a stipend from the Midlands3Cities DTP.  Norman is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Birmingham City University and lectures in Composition and Experimental Performance at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. 

 

www.paulnormanmusic.com 

 

research

research expositions

  • ***CLICK FOR MORE INFORMATION*** reading as performance / reading as composition (2020) author(s): Paul Norman published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    At the end of ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1969), Sol LeWitt states: “these sentences comment on art but are not art.” In the same work he also remarks, “If words are used and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics,” thus creating a paradigm. Is writing or talking about artistic ideas art or not? … Let’s say for now that it could be. John Cage famously defined music as the “organisation of sound” perhaps though, reflecting on the origin of the word composition as coming from the Latin componere meaning to “put together”, the ‘organisation of things’, may be a more suitable definition. Not only sound, but all elements of a performance could or perhaps should be organised, put together or composed. Consider the situation where your (yes, you the readers) organisational decisions matter. Maybe it’s as simple as ‘do I read the text or look at the given example first?’ These decisions matter, they effect what is communicated and when, what knowledge or assumptions are carried and for how long. These decisions are thus meaningful and potentially compositional in nature, establishing a new question. Is all reading compositional?… …Let’s say for now that it could be.
     open exposition comments (0)
  • She plays angel music (where people might die) (2020) author(s): Michael Wolters, Paul Norman published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
    She plays angel music (where people might die) Post-Internet Music as a comment on the absorption of knowledge This exposition articulates the research within the artistic work She Plays Angel Music (where people might die), a 60-minute concert-installation for 5-25 female harpists. The research was triggered by highly questionable and incomplete information on the history of harp composition found on Wikipedia. While it is generally accepted that Wikipedia is not a reliable source in academia, it still a powerful source of knowledge amongst the general public. Thus, the incomplete display on the site promotes a) the historic and continuing discrimination of women from music composition in the classical music world and b) the continuing rejection of contemporary music in favour of music by dead composers in the classical music world. This exposition takes the reader through the compositional steps that were performed in order to create a post-internet work that attempts to highlight political situations by gathering publicly available information into a controversial context.
     open exposition comments (0)
  • Catalogue d'Emojis (2020) author(s): Paul Norman, Michael Wolters published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
    Catalogue d'Emojis is a Live Performance and CD release of a new work for two performers and two pianists by Dr Paul Norman and Dr Michael Wolters (who together work under the name 'Difficult Listening').
     open exposition comments (0)
  • Trennungssongs of Togetherness (last edited: 2020) author(s): Paul Norman This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    **WIP** How do you make a piece about Europe without talking about Europe? Separation: the action or state of moving or being moved apart. Song: a set of words set to music or meant to be sung Togetherness: the state of being close to another person or other people. Paul Norman and Leander Ripchinsky, choose not to take separation, song or togetherness at face value, but through the act of game-playing gently coax something resembling meaning from its hiding place. As an audience we are asked to park our expectations, taking the chance to busy ourselves with rules and words and sounds and all kinds of decision-making. How do you make a piece about Brexit without talking about Brexit?
     open exposition comments (0)
  • Documenting Non-Sonic Music (2023) author(s): Paul Norman, Andy Ingamells, Michael Wolters published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
    How to document music with non-sonic elements? Or: How to document all the performative qualities of a piece of music that can’t be heard? Beginning with this question our group of researchers, filmmakers and dramaturgs from Birmingham (UK), Frankfurt (Germany) and Fredrikstad (Norway) met between 2019 and 2021 to develop initial ideas and questions, then test them.
     open exposition comments (0)

research expositions (collaborated)