The Companion Guide to Rome

The Companion Guide to Rome is a composition for string trio by the American composer Andrew Norman.

The movements thus commemorate nine of Norman's favorite Roman churches mentioned in the text.

Norman wrote in the score program note:Like many of the buildings in Rome, this piece is the product of a long gestation marked by numerous renovations, accretions, and ground-up reconstructions.

The music is, at different times and in different ways, informed by the proportions of the churches, the qualities of their surfaces, the patterns in their floors, the artwork on their walls, and the lives and legends of the saints whose names they bear.

The more I worked on these miniatures, the less they had to do with actual buildings and the more they became character studies of imaginary people, my companions for a year of living in the Eternal City.