Prayerbook
Piano Concerto in C
Die! Sober Flirter
The Postman
The Jolly Roger
The Body in the Ballroom
Think only this
Tomorrow nor Yesterday

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 Some Roger McGough settings led that poet to provide unpublished poems for musical setting.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 was 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, The Jolly Roger, 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. A recording is planned with the Waynflete Singers.

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.

Norris is at present working on a third radio-opera, The Body in the Ballroom.