A week with David Owen Norris

David Owen Norris, Professor of Music and Head of Keyboard and Percussion Studies,  gives us a round up of a week’s wide-ranging activities…

Some interesting coaching this week – the Banks String Quartet at the Royal College of Music in Frank Bridge’s 1907 student piece, the quartet in B flat, for the Bridge Study Day, where my fellow contributors included Fabian Huss, Lewis Foreman, Anthony Payne and Stephen Banfield. Then, radically different, our own two-piano-and-percussion ensemble, working towards its Friday concert in Turner Sims, performing works by student composers Harry Matthews and Christian Drew, with all the wonderful sound-world of bowed vibraphones, plucked pianos, sampled birdsong and the madly humming E-Bow. And tonight, with Peter Savidge, I shall rehearse folksong settings by Butterworth, Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, Cecil Sharp and Britten for Radio 3’s In Tune next Friday – a special folk edition from Cecil Sharp House.