In conversation with Paul Murray: adaptation, technique and musical ambition

When Paul Murray sat down at the public piano in London Liverpool Street Station for Channel 4’s The Piano, viewers saw a performance lasting only a few minutes. Behind it lay a much longer story: learning the piano relatively late, formal musical study, neurological illness and surgery, the reconstruction of a performing technique around one hand, and a professional life that has increasingly combined performance with teaching and music education.

Murray, Founder and Director of The Glasgow School of Music, appeared in Series 4 of The Piano, in an episode featuring pianists from Scotland. Although filming had originally been planned for Glasgow Central, the performers were eventually brought to Liverpool Street, where Claudia Winkleman was joined by Mika and guest mentor Jamie Cullum.

For Murray, the choice of repertoire was significant. He played Scriabin’s Nocturne in D-flat major, written for the left hand alone: music that creates the impression of several independent voices, textures and layers despite being performed with a single hand.

It is repertoire with which he has developed a particularly close relationship, but he is wary of allowing the physical circumstances of the performance to eclipse the music itself.

‘I did not want the performance to be about demonstrating what one hand can do as a novelty,’ he says. ‘The musical challenge is the same as it always is: line, balance, colour, timing and communication. The adaptation changes the technique, but it should not reduce the musical ambition.’

That distinction is important. Left-hand repertoire is sometimes encountered primarily through the story of why it was written or why a particular pianist performs it. For Murray, the more interesting challenge lies in what the music demands once those circumstances have been acknowledged.

Creating the impression of several simultaneous musical lines with one hand requires careful control of fingering, voicing, movement and pedalling. Melody has to emerge from surrounding textures; registers need to be connected; and the physical choreography of a passage can be very different from the assumptions built into conventional two-handed technique.

For Murray, those questions became personal after neurosurgery affected the use of his right hand.

He had begun learning the piano at around 15 before going on to study music at the University of Aberdeen. After surgery, the conventional technique he had developed was no longer available to him in the same way. Continuing to play therefore meant doing something more fundamental than simply finding alternative fingerings: he had to reconsider how piano technique worked.

It was not the first time that part of his story had reached a television audience. More than a decade before The Piano, Murray appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Chopin Saved My Life, which explored his relationship with Chopin’s First Ballade during a period in which illness and surgery were changing his musical life.

What followed was a long process of reconstruction. Murray began exploring the substantial repertoire written specifically for the left hand, while developing the technical means to make it work for him.

The experience also changed the questions he asked about playing.

‘Rebuilding my own playing forced me to look very closely at why a movement works, why a phrase sounds balanced and what a pianist actually needs to hear before the hands can produce it,’ he says. ‘That kind of close observation has stayed with me as a teacher.’

From adaptation to education

Murray is careful not to suggest that his own physical circumstances provide a direct model for other musicians. Most students will never need to reconstruct a technique as radically as he did. But the process left him with a broader conviction: that effective teaching cannot assume everybody reaches the same musical destination by exactly the same route.

Adaptation, in that sense, is not a specialist intervention. It is part of ordinary teaching.

A beginner struggling to coordinate a passage, an adult returning to music after many years, a child who has not understood an explanation that worked perfectly well for somebody else, or an advanced player trying to overcome an entrenched technical problem may all require a teacher to reconsider the route being taken.

The underlying question, Murray suggests, is similar: what is preventing musical progress, and what needs to change?

That can mean looking beyond the visible symptom. A technical problem may begin with listening rather than movement. Difficulty with rhythm might not be solved by simply repeating the passage. A student who appears unable to execute an instruction may actually need the musical idea explained or experienced in a different way.

It is an approach that informs Murray’s work at The Glasgow School of Music, but he sees the principle as much broader than any particular institution or teaching method.

The danger comes when the method itself becomes the objective: when completing a sequence of exercises, books, grades or technical stages starts to matter more than understanding what an individual musician needs in order to progress.

That does not mean abandoning structure or rigour. Murray’s own experience points in almost the opposite direction. Adapting a technique successfully requires detailed analysis, persistence and high expectations. The route may change precisely because the musical objective has not.

His observation that adaptation should not reduce the musical ambition therefore applies as readily to education as it does to his performance of Scriabin.

A public moment and a private process

The Piano places musicians in a deliberately public setting. Performances emerge amid the ordinary movement of a railway station, where music briefly interrupts a space designed for people passing through rather than sitting down to listen.

For Murray, there was something appropriate about performing the Scriabin in that environment. The circumstances surrounding his own playing have never been entirely separable from the music, yet the aim remains to communicate the work rather than simply its backstory.

During the programme, Jamie Cullum responded to the detail and delicacy of Murray’s playing and spoke about wanting to hear the repertoire on a concert grand, where its voicing and tonal possibilities could be explored further.

For Murray, however, the television appearance represents a moment within a much longer process.

That distinction also connects performance with teaching. Preparing a piece for public performance involves listening, analysis, problem-solving, independence, concentration and the ability to respond when something is not working. Those same habits are developed less visibly in lessons, practice rooms and classrooms over months and years.

‘Television captures a moment,’ Murray says. ‘A school deals with what happens over months and years. What interests me is how you help someone build a musical life that can keep developing, not only how you help them play one piece well.’

That idea has become increasingly important as his own work has moved beyond performance into education and school leadership.

The question is not simply how to produce a particular result, whether a successful examination, a polished performance or the mastery of a new technical skill. It is how musicians develop enough understanding to make decisions for themselves.

For teachers, that means finding a balance between direction and independence. Students need knowledge, technique and structure, but they also need to develop the ability to listen critically, diagnose problems and evaluate possible solutions.

Murray’s own musical trajectory offers an unusually stark example of why those skills matter. When the original route was no longer available, progress depended on understanding the musical objective well enough to find another one.

The circumstances were exceptional; the educational principle is not.

Serious musical learning inevitably involves moments when a plan stops working. A physical movement proves ineffective. An explanation does not connect. A student’s priorities change. Progress stalls. At each point, the ability to adapt without lowering expectations becomes part of musicianship itself.

Murray’s appearance on The Piano brought that idea into unusually public view. A work written for one hand, performed in the middle of a railway station for a national television audience, represented a musical journey that had required technique to be dismantled and rebuilt.

But its significance lies less in the fact that the adaptation happened than in what followed from it: a determination to keep the musical objective intact, and a growing interest in how teachers can help other musicians find another way forward when the obvious route does not work.

Paul Murray is Founder and Director of The Glasgow School of Music, a MUSIC:ED partner.