Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
1934 - present
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE, is an English composer and conductor and is currently Master of the Queen's Music.
Life and Music
- Davies was born in Salford, Lancashire. He took piano lessons and composed from an early age.
- After education at Leigh Boys Grammar School, Davies 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.
- In 1962, he secured a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University, with the help of Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten, where he studied with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt and Earl Kim. He then 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Davies was known as an 'enfant terrible' of the 1960s, whose music frequently shocked audiences and critics. One of the last of his overtly theatrical and shocking pieces was Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), in which he utilised 'musical parody' by taking a canonical piece of music, Handel's Messiah, and subverting it to suit his own needs.
- Davies has a keen interest in environmentalism. He wrote The Yellowcake Revue, a collection of cabaret-style pieces that he performed with actress Eleanor Bron, in protest at plans to mine uranium ore in Orkney. It is from this suite of pieces that his famous instrumental chanson triste interlude Farewell to Stromness is taken. The slow, walking bass line that pervades the Farewell portrays the residents of the village of Stromness having to leave their homes as a result of uranium contamination.
- 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 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 experimental 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.
- 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.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Is God Save The Queen 'boring'?Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen's Music, has suggested the national anthem becomes "more stirring".
