Kirk Noreen, an American composer, was born in Seattle in 1970.  He studied with Alan Stout, C. P. First, and Jay Alan Yim at Northwestern University in Chicago.  He founded the Ensemble Sospeso in 1995 with colleague Joshua Cody in Seattle; in 1999 Sospeso moved operations to New York.  

Although he has not worked in the electronic medium, Mr Noreen gives a priority to material of sound and texture well before the question of individual style that preoccupy many composers.   His music is highly rhythmic, often characterized by superimposed ostinati, and it displays a great sensitivity to the weight of musical material as a determining factor in form.  Drama is built up through accumulation, rather than through contrast.  

Mr Noreen's setting of American experimental poet Jackson Mac Low, Ziani (1999), shows some influence of Helmut Lachenmann  in its expansion of instrumental vocabulary.  But direct compositional influences on his work are often difficult to ascertain.  Visual arts are an important inspiration for Mr Noreen.  The multi-movement chamber ensemble work Oh Shining—Homage to Cy Twombly (1998) is 'painterly,' but not in the superficial imitation of expressionist gesture as one might expect.  It is rather the composer's approach to the materiality of musical texture that is very much analogous to a painter's handling of his or her material.  A deliberate and almost massive homogeneity within each movement, coupled with an absence of traditional unifying gestures from one movement to another, further suggest a painter's triptych.