Peter Maxwell Davies

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Cover of Peter Maxwell Davies' own recording of his Fifth Symphony.
Cover of Peter Maxwell Davies' own recording of his Fifth Symphony.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE (b. 8 September 1934), is an English composer and conductor. His surname is "Davies", and "Maxwell" is his middle name. To his friends, Davies is known as "Max".

Contents

[edit] Biography

Davies was born in Salford, Lancashire. He took piano lessons and composed from an early age. After education at Leigh Grammar School, he studied at the University of Manchester and at the Royal Manchester College of Music (amalgamated into the Royal Northern College of Music in 1973), where his fellow students included Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Together they formed New Music Manchester, a group committed to contemporary music. After graduating in 1956, he briefly studied with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome before working as Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School from 1959 to 1962.

After a further period of study on a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt and Earl Kim, Davies moved to Australia, where he was Composer in Residence at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide from 1965-66.

He then returned to the United Kingdom, and moved to the Orkney Islands, initially to Hoy in 1971 and later to Sanday where he lives with his partner Colin Parkinson. Orkney (particularly its capital, Kirkwall) hosts the St Magnus Festival, an arts festival founded by Davies in 1977. He frequently uses it to premiere new works (often played by the local school orchestra).

Davies was Artistic Director of the Dartington Summer School from 1979 to 1984 and has held a number of posts. From 1992 to 2002 he was associate conductor/composer with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and he has conducted a number of other prominent orchestras, including the Philharmonia, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

He has been awarded a number of honorary doctorates at various institutions. He has been President of Making Music (The National Federation of Music Societies) since 1989. Davies was made a CBE in 1981 and knighted in 1987. He was appointed Master of the Queen's Music for a ten-year period from March 2004. Oxford University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Music degree in July 2005. On 25th November 2006 Sir Peter was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University at a service in Canterbury Cathedral. He is also a professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.

Davies is openly gay and has a keen interest in environmentalism. In 2007, there was a controversy around his planned Civil Partnership when he was told that the ceremony could not take place on Sanday. [1] He later abandoned his plans. [2]

[edit] Davies's music

Davies is a prolific composer who has written music in a variety of styles and idioms over his career, often combining disparate styles in one piece.

Early works include the Trumpet Sonata (1955), written while he was at college, and his first orchestral work, Prolation (1958), written while under the tutelage of Petrassi. Early works often use serial techniques (for example Sinfonia for chamber orchestra, 1962), sometimes combined with Mediaeval and Renaissance compositional methods. Fragments of plainsong are often used as basic source material to be adapted and developed in various ways.

Pieces from the late 1960s take up these techniques and tend towards expressionism and a violent character - these include Revelation and Fall (based on a poem by Georg Trakl), the music theatre pieces Eight Songs for a Mad King and Vesalii Icones, and the opera Taverner. Taverner again shows an interest in Renaissance music, taking as its subject the composer John Taverner, and consisting of parts resembling Renaissance forms. The orchestral piece St Thomas Wake (1969) also shows this interest, and is a particularly obvious example of Davies's polystylism, combining, as it does, a suite of foxtrots (played by a twenties-style dance band), a pavan by John Bull and Davies's "own" music (the work is described by Davies as a "Foxtrot for orchestra on a pavan by John Bull"). Many works from this period were performed by the Pierrot Players which Davies founded with Harrison Birtwistle in 1967 (they were reformed as The Fires of London in 1970, disbanded in 1987).

Davies is known for his use of magic squares as a source of musical materials and as a structural determinant. In his work Ave Maris Stella (1975) he used a 9x9 square numerologically associated with the moon, reduced modulo 9 to produce a Latin square, to permute the notes of a plainsong melody with the same name as the piece and to govern the durations of the notes.

Worldes Blis (1969) indicated a move towards a more integrated and somewhat more restrained style, anticipating the calm which Davies would soon find at his new home in Orkney. Some have drawn a comparison between this later style and the music of Jean Sibelius.

Since his move to Orkney, Davies has often drawn on Orcadian or more generally Scottish themes in his music, and has sometimes set the words of Orcadian writer George MacKay Brown. He has written a number of other operas, The Martyrdom of St Magnus (1976), The Lighthouse (1980, his most popular opera), Resurrection (1987), and The Doctor of Myddfai (1996). Davies also became interested in classical forms, completing his first symphony in 1976. He has written eight numbered symphonies since - a symphonic cycle of the Symphonies No.1 - No.7 (-2000), a Symphony No.8 titled the 'Antarctic' (2000), a Sinfonia Concertante (1982), as well as the series of ten Strathclyde Concertos for various instruments (pieces born out of his association with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, 1987-1996). In 2002, he began work on a series of string quartets for the Maggini String Quartet to record on the Naxos record label (the so-called Naxos Quartets). His most recent one is No.9 (2006).

Davies has also written a number of lighter orchestral works such as Mavis in Las Vegas and An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (which features the bagpipes), as well as a number of theatre pieces for children and a good deal of music with educational purposes. Additionally he wrote the scores for Ken Russell's films The Devils and The Boy Friend.

Maxwell Davies's short piano piece Farewell to Stromness entered the Classic FM Hall of Fame in 2003, his first ever entry.

He also wrote several children's operas including A Selkie Tale, The Great Bank Robbery and The Spider's Revenge.

[edit] Career highlights

  • 1953-8 - studied in Manchester and Rome.
  • 1967 - together with Harrison Birtwistle, founded the contemporary music touring ensemble the Pierrot Players (later renamed The Fires of London).
  • 1971 - moved to Hoy in the Orkney Islands.
  • 1987-96 - wrote the ten Strathclyde Concertos for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
  • 2002 - embarked on a cycle of ten string quartets, commissioned by Naxos.
  • 2004 - appointed Master of the Queen’s Music.

[edit] Selected compositions

  • Eight Songs For A Mad King (1968; for singer/narrator/actor and chamber ensemble)
  • Ave Maris Stella (1975; chamber ensemble)
  • Symphony No. 1 (1976-77; orchestra)
  • The Lighthouse (1979; chamber opera)
  • Cinderella (1980; children’s opera)
  • Image, Reflection, Shadow (1982; ensemble)
  • Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1985; dedicated to Isaac Stern who gave the first performance on June 21, 1986 at the St. Magnus Festival in the Orkney Islands)
  • Caroline Mathilde (1991; ballet)
  • A Spell for Green Corn: The MacDonald Dances (1993; violin, orchestra)
  • Job (1997; singers, orchestra)

[edit] Selected recordings

[edit] Notable students

[edit] External links

Preceded by
Malcolm Williamson		 Master of the Queen's Music
2004–2014		 Succeeded by
Current Incumbent
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