Notes from the piano stool
David Owen Norris
Strolling down a narrow country lane, I noticed where a prudent householder had fixed a convex mirror on a tree in the hedge opposite his drive, I suppose so that he could reverse his car out into the road with confidence. In the middle of the mirror was taped a notice: ‘Will the owner of this mirror kindly contact the owner of this tree.’ It gave a phone number.
I hope the neighbourly difference will be settled amicably. Musicians are all too attuned to this sort of thing. In Paris, my piano teacher Yvonne Lefébure would suddenly rush to her studio wall in the middle of my lesson, and bang on it with her shoe, screaming at the complaining neighbour. I’ve had some very disturbing neighbours myself, though in all fairness, I’ve probably been one too.
But the mirror and its accompanying notice took me beyond this slight shudder of Schadenfreude. For a start, it reminded me of JS Bach’s Jesu, joy of man’s desiring and Sleepers Wake (and Peter Cornelius’s Three kings from Persian lands afar, for that matter), where the melody turns out to be fixed to the tree of the chorale tune. And then I loved the reversal of expectation – the fact that the tree had an opinion, as it were.
The manipulation of expectation is an important part of performing technique. One of my masterclass mantras is ‘Surprise or Satisfy’, and both depend on setting up an Expectation. The composer Charles Avison had something to say about that in his An Essay on Musical Expression of 1752: it is safer to aim at pleasing than surprising, especially in the musical art. He uses ‘please’ rather than ‘satisfy’, but the idea is similar. I’m sorry he aimed at safety – that may be why so few people have heard of him. He seems to have worried about the critics a good deal: elsewhere he warns against arousing disgust, or weariness of attention.
Avison crops up whenever I’m invited to explain How to Perform. Generally I give a talk I’ve built up over the years, called ‘Through the Looking-glass’ because the point of music, like all the arts, is to hold up a mirror to our souls. The magical thing is that a mirror automatically reverses expectations.
I’ll chew over some of these ideas during my Reeth Lecture in
June. No, that’s not a misprint, but a rather cunning idea dreamt up by Malcolm Creese, the director of the Swaledale Festival up in the Yorkshire Dales. Reeth, you see, is a little Swaledale town about eleven miles west of Richmond. And it hosts Malcolm’s Reeth Lectures. Clever, eh?
David Owen Norris is a pianist, composer and Radio 3 presenter
I’ve had some very disturbing neighbours, though in all fairness, I’ve probably been one too