Studying the piano on video

Our head of keyboard studies, Professor David Owen Norris, has been working with the university’s educational film unit to put together a video on what it’s like to study the piano at Southampton.  We were trying to convey something of how university music study differs from what pianists might have experienced before – whether they have completed A-level music study alongside one-on-one performance tuition, or whether they come from countries where piano tuition or music study in schools is organised in a completely different way.  We also wanted to give a flavour of how university music study might be different from the training you would receive in a different kind of higher education setting.  And finally we wanted to give an idea of what makes Southampton distinctive – from the wide range of instruments we have (we believe that pianists should try lots of different historical and modern instruments; we’ll never be a single-maker institution) to the way piano study fits into our culture of world-leading research.  And all this in five minutes or less!  Check out the video to see if we succeeded: