Peck, Charles2022-01-242022-01-242021-12Peck_cornellgrad_0058F_12804http://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:12804https://hdl.handle.net/1813/110832213 pagesA dive into the kinetic, polystylistic music of composer Andrew Norman reveals a distinctively 21st-century artist. His work reflects the current wealth of musical genres, the expanding access to artistic media, and the increasingly hyperactive pace of consumption that pervades the Digital Age. For Norman, these trends inspire music that eschews any singular harmonic language, favoring instead a quick alternation of many ideas—a technique the composer refers to as jump-cut. Norman often credits the narrative-scrambling forms of extramusical media as the impetus for this structural technique, regularly citing flashbacks in a novel, pauses in a videogame, and channel surfing on television. To craft this distinctive music, Norman relies on four characteristics—contrasts, rule-bound structures, fragmentation, and time manipulation. This paper examines Norman's treatment of those characteristics in two pieces in particular: Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow Float Flop Chop Pop Shatter Splash and The Companion Guide to Rome. In both cases, the music ensures clarity amidst an abundance of material by carefully constructing a recognizable personality for each idea. Orchestration, timbre, rhythm, articulation, and rule-bound pitch structures are used to achieve maximum contrast between juxtaposed materials. While the quick jump-cuts in these pieces mean ideas are frequently presented as fragments, they may also be developed or expanded as the piece unfolds, an effect which Norman uses to manipulate the listener's sense of time. The obsessive detail and rich imagination Norman pours into these characteristics make his music as rewarding to analyze as it is to hear.endissertation or thesishttps://doi.org/10.7298/wkp1-ha64