Norris’s international career as a pianist, intensified since 1991 when he became the first Gilmore Artist, has made it difficult for him to pursue Composition, which was always his main interest.

He studied Composition at the RAM with Eric Thiman and John Gardner, and at Oxford with Robert Sherlaw Johnson. His BA degree (he took a First) included a large portfolio of compositions, on the strength of which he was awarded a Composition Scholarship for postgraduate work. His iconoclastic view of the Second Viennese School (which he admired but regretted) led to friction with the Examiners, especially his Required Dodecaphonic Piece, which was so blatantly in E minor that he helpfully attached a serial analysis. Norris’s views are now widely held by much younger composers, of course, and one of the guiltier pleasures of his long career in music has been observing the vanishing reputations of his Examiners on that occasion. At the time, the fall-out led him to neglect Composition in favour of performing opportunities at the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The first pieces that attracted attention were Folksong settings. Their broadcast on Radio 3 (twice repeated within a year by popular demand) led to requests from American Public Radio. Original compositions included a commission from the Scottish Arts Council for soprano, clarinet and piano (A Small Dragon – frequently revived) to words by Brian Patten, who praised the cycle. Some Roger McGough settings led that poet to provide unpublished poems for musical setting.

As Director of the Petworth Festival, Norris produced a community cantata Interruption at the Opera House (again to words by Patten) and a notable Benedicite for children which was broadcast in 1990 on Radio 4’s Morning Service, leading to innumerable requests for the music, which, alas, has still not been written down. (It will be performed by 500 children in Winchester Cathedral in 2009, however.)

In 1991 the BBC commissioned a work for Mozart-Year. The result was a radio-opera (a very definite new genre drawing on Norris’s experience of speech broadcasting, which had filled most of his time for the preceding four years) entitled Die! Sober Flirter. This has had an extraordinary success wherever it has been performed, from America to Norway. Three different productions of it have been broadcast. Its success on tour in 2006 (see Reviews) encouraged Norris to write a second radio-opera, Pugwash walks the plank, which received its premiere in November 2008.

On reaching his fiftieth year Norris felt he had achieved most of what he wanted in the fields of performance, recording, teaching and broadcasting. And so he turned more of his attention to Composition, producing a number of piano pieces including a set of variations “…play on;…” , a song-cycle for tenor, cello and piano, Think only this (premiered and recorded by Philip Langridge, performed in the Brussels Festival by Ian Partridge) and a song-cycle for tenor and piano to poems by John Donne, Tomorrow nor Yesterday (premiered in 2006 by Mark Wilde).

Prayerbook, a 70-minute oratorio about Tradition and Change, was premiered by the Oxford Bach Choir under Nicholas Cleobury as part of the first English Music Festival in October 2006. Performers and audience alike were delighted to find accessible music with serious import. The piece has just received its second performance.

Most of the Piano Concerto in C was sketched on a tour of Ireland in 2007, though parts of the slow movement date back to 1994. It has three movements and lasts about half an hour. It was premiered in May 2008 in the English Music Festival, and repeated in Southampton in September. The programme note follows:

Piano Concerto in C

David Owen Norris (born Long Buckby, Northamptonshire in 1953)

Allegro
Andante serioso
Allegro molto

For wind quintet, three trombones, timpani/whip/triangle/tambourine/bass drum (one player) and strings.

Norris writes:
When I communicate with words I try to use familiar language to say new, interesting things. When I communicate with music, I hold to the same ideals. These ideals are not new to music, of course: Vaughan Williams made much the same point eighty years ago. But it still needs to be made today. Musical obscurantism lives on. The analogy with language is telling. James Joyce and Tristan Tzara – and we should include the delightful early Edith Sitwell – have not had many imitators. The artistic establishment enjoyed them, and then respectfully moved on. When it came to radical innovation in musical language, however, that establishment was quickly won over, and new musical languages dominated the officially-supported music of much of the twentieth century. This difference of reaction raises the question of whether the establishment actually understood music as well as it understood words. If you’re not sure what’s being subverted, you’re more likely to accept the subversion.

One man’s Radical Innovation, of course, is another man’s Obvious Development. Over the years I have enjoyed playing quite a bit of radical music (and I must admit it’s more enjoyable to play than to listen to). But I never thought that it was the only sort of new music that should be approved of. Now the artistic establishment is changing its attitudes, but once again it’s single-mindedly chasing after the one hare, this time Multi-Cultural Cross-Over (doesn’t that sound old-fashioned already?). The Arts Council’s mail-shots are an interesting study.

So, the most immediately obvious feature of my music is Tune, which is analogous to Story (just as Melody might be analogous to Plot.) Melody leads on to Counterpoint, ranging from strict canon in inversion and mirrored trebles and basses, to freer echoes and imitations, and fugue. I use these devices for the reasons they have always been used: to create unity in diversity, to allow the looking-glass of contrapuntal imitation to change the colour of the harmony, and (little commented upon) to allow individual players to take an explicit part in the constructive process. [I recently performed my new translation of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, so I am of course aware that radical music also used these devices. One of the differences is that in my Piano Concerto you will be able to hear them.]

Because my music is tonal, it can be heard to modulate. The keys’ relationships to each other are important, but so are their relationships to me. I view C major, for instance, as a straightforward, open key, and it’s perhaps significant that so few bars of my Concerto are in the tonic. The first piano cadenza turns out to be in D, a key I find I use for personal reflection. Even the main theme aspires continually to E flat, and nearly gets away with it at the end. The very ending finds that the reconciliation between the narratives of each movement makes it impossible to end in the major or the minor. Similarly, it’s an unlooked-for combination of themes that makes it possible for the slow movement to reach its home key at last.

‘Concerto’ implies a discussion, even an argument, between soloist and orchestra. The piano tries to persuade the orchestra to share its material, and vice versa, with varying success. The piano often pulls rank, and interrupts the orchestra’s bourgeois aspiration to symmetry. The top notes of the piano’s opening chords, at the same pitch but in a different key, form the second theme of the first movement. This theme (in E flat) supplants the main theme at what would otherwise be the recapitulation, leaving the piano’s conversion to the main theme (in C) to be an event towards the end of the movement. The piano abandons the theme for its own material again, however: synthesis must wait till the end of the piece.

In the Finale, the 3-beat bars of the Country Dance are exactly the same length as the 4-beat bars of the Jig, so that although the music appears to slow down, in its deep structure it’s going on at the same pace. The vulgar ‘brass-band’ tune, which I found impossible to exclude, bothered me so much that I felt I must have the piano confront it. When I re-worked the material for piano solo, I found that it was an inversion of the middle section of the tune it was to lead up to. I take a certain comfort from such post hoc discoveries.

The slow movement theme and the tonally fluid theme of the Finale date back to the summer of 1994, which, like all the summers of the 90s, I spent at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago. The opening sprang into my mind during a tour of Ireland in the summer of 2007, and most of the rest of the material was conceived during the same trip, though the tune of the Finale was worked out while waiting for the dedicatee, Em Marshall, to collect me from Birmingham New Street Station. The Concerto’s duration is about half an hour.

Andover, April 2008