Rerenga (November)

Michael Norris

Composed between 2015 and 2022, this collection of orchestral and ensemble works is unified by a concern for colour and gesture, timbre and texture. It reflects the influence of textural and spectral composition, the modernist impulse to organise and express inherited materials in new ways, and the ascendancy of electronic music. The music reaches outward, distinctively, to a global cultural context, beyond Aotearoa yet rooted here.

These aspects of Michael’s style are woven through the title track, Rerenga. Taonga puoro, orchestra and electronics become soundscapes, redolent of land surfacing in a shimmering sea under a vast sky. Sonority here becomes a musical means to grasp identity, with a violence suggestive of geophysics and a fraught bicultural history. This is music as a palimpsest, its abstraction initiating journeys of imagination, which, like this country’s future, reflect the entanglement of tangata and whenua, Māori and Pākehā.

Such mixes are hard to imagine from any other composer, in Aotearoa or elsewhere, given the creative convergences involved: broad and sensitive cultural awareness, technical and compositional mastery, boldness of imagination and deftness of taste, energised with urgent expression and grounded in community and collaboration.

Assoc. Prof. Dugal McKinnon, June 2025

Produced by David McCaw
Recorded by Graham Kennedy
Mixed and mastered by Graham Kennedy
Design by UnkleFranc
Printing by Studio Q

This music was composed, performed and produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Released: 13 November 2025
Catalogue: RAT-D160

Michael Norris is a composer, software developer and music theorist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. He was the recipient of the 2001 Mozart Fellowship, the 2003 Douglas Lilburn Prize, the 2010 Trans-Tasman Composers Award, the 2012 CANZ Trust Fund Award, and has won the SOUNZ Contemporary Award four times, in 2014, 2018, 2019 and 2020. He teaches composition and orchestration at the New Zealand School of Music.

Michael is also deeply committed to developing the musical ecosystems in New Zealand: he is co-founder and co-director of Stroma New Music Ensemble, raises money for and manages the NZSM Composer-in-Residence schemes, has served as a Trustee of the Lilburn Residence Trust, is a board member of SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, and is the Editor of Wai-te-ata Music Press.