On Normalisation – What if the normal not a given, but a choice?
I often catch myself questioning what we consider “normal” in music.
Not because I want to provoke — but because something in me resists the ease with which we accept what is given. A concert begins with applause, ends with silence. The conductor walks in, the orchestra tunes, the music starts. We say this is natural. But what if it isn’t?
What if a rehearsal is more real than a performance?
What if a wrong note is not a mistake, but a question?
What if we no longer know how to listen because we already know how to hear?
So much of what surrounds music is ritual. The score is treated as fixed. The concert format is taken for granted. The biographical frame — “He was born in this year, wrote that symphony in that one” — is repeated until it becomes a truth. Even time itself, in the way we experience form, is absorbed without question. But all of this is, at its root, agreed upon. Negotiated. Normalised.
At times, I feel the need to pause and look again — at habits, gestures, assumptions that have become almost invisible through repetition.
Not with criticism, but with curiosity.
What do we no longer notice because it feels familiar?
And what might music reveal if we approach it not as a fixed tradition, but as something quietly waiting to be heard anew?
In that space, something real begins. Not the illusion of truth, but the tremor that precedes understanding.
I don’t believe in “newness for the sake of newness.” But I believe that art must constantly resist sedimentation. I believe the performer is not a vessel for norms, but a threshold between what is heard and what might be heard differently.
And so I ask again:
What part of what I’m doing is truly mine?
And what part is simply a repetition of the expected?
Maybe the deepest act of musicianship today is not expression, but de-normalisation.
Not to disturb for effect — but to invite reality back into the frame.