MUSICIAN OF THE MONTH: NORMAN ADAMS

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What better way to kick off the new year than by getting to know an amazing local artist? Meet our January Musician of the Month, Norman Adams!

Norman Adams is Principal Cellist of Symphony Nova Scotia, and the Artistic Director of suddenlyLISTEN Music. A student of Hans Jørgen Jensen, Bernard Greenhouse, and American new music pioneer Pauline Oliveros, Norman has been a soloist with SNS and Les Jeunes Virtuoses de Montréal. He has been guest principal cellist of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and has performed chamber and improvised music throughout Canada, the US, France, and the UK. His performances have also been heard across the country on CBC Radio. As an educator, Norman has been a faculty member at Acadia University, at Scotia Festival of Music, the Acadia Summer Strings Festival and has led creative workshops at String Fest at Memorial University of Newfoundland, for the Nova Scotia Registered Music Teachers Association, and in schools around Nova Scotia. In May 2017, Norm will serve on the jury of the Shean Competition in Edmonton.

In addition to his work as a classical cellist, Norman is well known as an improviser and electronic musician, playing free and creative music across North America and Europe and at festivals from New York City to Prince George BC. Norman has collaborated with many leading artists including Joëlle Léandre, Gerry Hemingway, Eddie Prévost, Pauline Oliveros, Xavier Charles, Marilyn Crispell and Evan Parker.

Since 2000 Norman has been the Artistic Director and Producer of suddenlyLISTEN Music, an organization that presents an annual series of concerts of improvised music, featuring a broad range of local, Canadian and international artists, and produces a wide range of other performance projects. He is also dedicated to sharing music with all people, leading suddenlyLISTEN’s Improvisation Workshops for the past 11 seasons.

In 2010 Norman was awarded an Established Artist Award by the Nova Scotia Arts and Culture Partnership Council for his varied work.

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1.What is your idea of perfect happiness? Perfect happiness is good coffee, playing music with good listeners, riding bikes a little too hard, laughing with my family, discovering new places. If one day could include all those things, it would be perfect happiness!

2. Why did you choose the cello? I started violin when I was 4, with Pauline Harbourne (still teaching violin in Sackville NB at age 101!) I think she moved me to cello at age 10 out of sheer desperation! She still tells funny stories about me in lessons….I think it was switch to something a little different to keep me playing. It took a long time for me to really embrace the cello and music as a life though. It wasn’t until I was a couple of years into University that I finally realized this was my voice. I was a late bloomer, but I’ve never looked back!

3. What is something people would be surprised to know about you? I can’t imagine anything that would surprise people really, in these already surprising times… I played a concert from a moving rickshaw? I was a PEI provincial mountain bike champion? I have a cassette tape out on Endemik Records, a Montreal (mostly) hip hop label? I once played music from Fiddler on the Roof, on a roof?

4. If you weren’t a musician, what would you like to do, all things possible? I would still be an artist of some sort. I love graphic design. I love programming computers to do arty things. I love art projects in which all of the angles have been examined and considered, and everything works: conceptually, technically, visually, sonically. I think of Graeme Patterson. I’d like to be like him!

5. Where would you most like to live? I love living right here in Halifax. Its big enough for me, it’s small enough for me, it’s easy to get out of on a bicycle. In summer I love living on PEI: it’s really small, and it’s really easy to get out town of on a bicycle! (Only in summer though). I would however like a house I could get to for a few months a year, in rural France, somewhere small (again), near mountains, with a boulangerie.

6. Which composer (dead or alive) would you most like to share a meal with and why? I can’t think of a classical composer, to me they all exist as a product of their time, and I’m more interested in our present time! John Cage was a guy who was also a product of his time, who would be pretty interesting though. He had such a unique idea about what music is, and such a joyous attitude and view of the world. I think he’d be pretty inspiring. I think he’d know a good place in the Village to go….

7. Favourite childhood book? Good question. Are you My Mother? I remember very vividly… I also loved to read non-fiction: lots of world history and even the encyclopedia that sat in shelves in my boyhood room!

8. Any New Year’s resolutions? I always measure years from September to June (with a break in expectations in between) so I’m in the midst of my year already. My resolutions were, and usually are: take more time, be more efficient, exercise more, plan ahead, spend more time (some time) cooking!

 

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Keep up with Norman’s work here: www.normanadams.ca and www.suddenlylisten.com.