Rerenga (November 13)

Michael Norris

RELEASE DATE: November 13

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 throughout the title track, Rerenga. Taonga pūoro, 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.

THE COMPOSITIONS

RERENGA (for taonga puoro, orchestra, and live electronics, 2019)
Alistair Fraser (taonga pūoro)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, cond. Hamish McKeich
Winner of the 2020 SOUNZ Contemporary Award

HORISON FIELDS (for piano trio, 2022)
NZTrio: Amalia Hall (violin), Ashley Brown (cello), Somi Kim (piano)
Winner of the 2022 Philip Neill Memorial Prize

CLARO (for orchestra, 2015)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, cond. Hamish McKeich

SYGYT (for throat singer, ensemble, and live electronics, 2017 rev. 2022)
Jonny Marks (throat singer)
Stroma: Hamish McKeich (conductor), Bridget Douglas (flute/bass flute), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Sam Jacobs (horn), Shannon Pittaway (bass trombone), Anna van der Zee, Alan Molina (violins), Andrew Thompson (viola), Ian Greenberg (cello), Matthew Cave (double bass)
Winner of the 2018 SOUNZ Contemporary Award

VIOLIN CONCERTO ‘SAMA’ (for violin and orchestra, 2018, rev. 2022)
i. Arḍ
ii. Faḍa’
iii. Semazen
Amalia Hall (violin)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, cond. Hamish McKeich
Winner of the 2019 SOUNZ Contemporary Award