{"id":2207,"date":"2017-07-09T20:04:28","date_gmt":"2017-07-09T20:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/?p=2207"},"modified":"2017-07-09T20:04:28","modified_gmt":"2017-07-09T20:04:28","slug":"summer-performances-off-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/2017\/07\/09\/summer-performances-off-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer performances – on and off the air"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professor David Owen Norris describes his summer projects – a special post for all the students who think the staff are on holiday when term is over \ud83d\ude42<\/em><\/p>\n

Pianos & Premieres<\/u><\/p>\n

The Geffrye Museum<\/a> has very kindly decided to give us an 1812 Strecker grand pianoforte with divided pedal. This will fit very well with our other instruments with divided pedals \u2013 a Ganer Square of 1781<\/a>, a Broadwood grand of 1828, and a Bechstein of 1902. It\u2019s a now-forgotten device which was very important in its day. Musicians who discover it, especially composers, are always fascinated by it. Much more use than the sostenuto pedal.<\/p>\n

In July I\u2019ll be taking a square piano to Chawton to give a concert in honour of Nancy Storace, Mozart\u2019s first Susanna, who died in 1817. So did Jane Austen and Mme. de Stael, and there\u2019s a great conference about them<\/a> at Chawton House Library, which will form the setting for our concert on 14 July at Chawton Church. I\u2019m working with students from Southampton and from the RNCM, and we\u2019ll be giving the British premiere of a newly discovered piece by Mozart, and the modern premiere of Thomas Billington\u2019s setting of Gray\u2019s Elegy.<\/p>\n

\"DON_chord\"<\/a>
Chord of the week for Proms Extra<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

TV & Radio<\/u><\/p>\n

I\u2019m about to record my seven Chords of the Week <\/em><\/a>\u2013 always an enjoyable part of my summer. They slot into BBC2\u2019s PromsExtra<\/em> on Saturday evenings through the Proms season. I choose a chord from the week\u2019s televised concerts, and then I put it in context, playing bits on the piano to show how it all works. Much more work than you might think \u2013 I try my scripts out on a variety of guinea-pigs, and at present I\u2019m on my sixth draft. Yesterday I videoed my rehearsals, and today I watched them through again and again as I ironed my seven shirts for location filming tomorrow (all colour-coded to each piece). Trimmed the script here and there to deal with final timing issues. Half a million people watch PromsExtra<\/em>, so it\u2019s important to get it right.<\/p>\n

A couple more television things are looming up, as soon as I\u2019ve finished Chord of the Week<\/em>. I\u2019m contributing to a film about the friendship between Holst and Vaughan Williams. I\u2019ve suggested to the conductor Barry Wordsworth that we might compare how the opening of Holst\u2019s Egdon Heath<\/em> sounds on cellos as well as on the sky-high double basses that Holst actually prescribes. It\u2019s one thing to tell people what the effect of the double-basses is, but much better television to say \u2018here\u2019s what would have been the obvious thing to do\u2019 (cellos at the same pitch), and now ‘here\u2019s the scary unheard-of thing that Holst actually wanted’.<\/p>\n

Then for the LSO\u2019s first concert with Sir Simon Rattle, I\u2019m making a short film about the Enigma Variations. All the other composers in the concert are alive, so they\u2019re making their own films. I\u2019m rather flattered to be Sir Edward\u2019s representative on earth, as it were! Luckily, I\u2019ve just done an Elgar Unwrapped<\/em> <\/a>on Enigma in the Turner Sims for Robin Browning and his Southampton orchestra, S\u00f3n,<\/a> so I\u2019m all up to speed.<\/p>\n

\"David<\/a>
David presents Elgar Unwrapped<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then I\u2019m doing five Prom intervals for radio, on birdsong, aspects of orchestration, and so on. The most elaborate will be on the Dresden Amen<\/a>, attributed to Naumann. It\u2019s surprisingly difficult to find the original, but looking for it has been instructive. Most of its uses aren\u2019t Amens at all, if we think of an Amen as a plagal cadence. Mendelssohn presents it as an imperfect cadence. Wagner has it both ways, of course. Mahler merely borrows the melodic line, but without the characteristic repeated note. The key to the Dresden Amen is the passing use of the second inversion of the dominant seventh, and as it happens, this is common in Naumann\u2019s songs. I could get very technical on this, if I\u2019m not careful. It will all culminate in a quasi-hip-hop dance track based on the Amen. Very Southampton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor David Owen Norris describes his summer projects – a special post for all the students who think the staff are on holiday when term is over \ud83d\ude42 Pianos & Premieres The Geffrye Museum has very kindly decided to give us an 1812 Strecker grand pianoforte with divided pedal. This will fit very well with our other instruments with divided …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73437,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6494,207,66718,522826],"tags":[1071690,611778,1071692,1071691,643633,1061059],"class_list":["post-2207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-performance","category-staff","category-what-i-did-over-the-summer","tag-chord-of-the-week","tag-david-owen-norris","tag-dresden-amen","tag-promsextra","tag-robin-browning","tag-son","column","threecol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3YgXZ-zB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2208,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions\/2208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}