Appearing in:
New Works NEw Voices
Marcus Norris
composer
Marcus Norris’ first foray into making music came in the form of producing rap beats on pirated software, installed on a Windows 98 computer that he Macgyvered together from spare parts while laying on the floor of his childhood bedroom. Though he came to composing concert music later, he transferred that same imagination and ingenuity to writing music of all kinds. Marcus has been called a “New Musical Talent in our Midst” by Chicago’s N’digo Magazine, and has made a number of achievements, including being selected as an inaugural Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Philharmonic from 2021-24, being awarded the prestigious Cota-Robles fellowship for pursuing his PhD at UCLA, being chosen in 2020 for the LA Philharmonic’s National Composers Intensive, and in 2017 winning 1st prize in the Southeastern Composers League Competition. His violin concerto “GLORY” opened to three sold-out performances when premiered by the Jackson Symphony Orchestra in 2019, and then was subsequently performed in Guangzhou, China later that year. His Dance Suite “I Tried So Hard for You” premiered in Havana in 2018, closely following the Russian String Orchestra premiere of “My Idols Are Dead” in Moscow. In 2020 he founded South Side Symphony – the only orchestra that would perform “Back That Thang Up” on the same concert as Beethoven.