Sir Peter Maxwell Davies CH CBE was born on September 8, 1934, and passed away on March 14, 2016. He was an English composer and conductor who became Master of the Queen's Music in 2004.

During his time as a student at the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music, Davies worked with other students to create a group called New Music Manchester. This group focused on contemporary music and included fellow students Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth, and John Ogdon. Davies wrote eight stage works, including Eight Songs for a Mad King, which surprised audiences when it was first performed in 1969. He also composed ten symphonies between 1973 and 2013, including Kommilitonen!, which premiered in 2011.

As a conductor, Davies led the Dartington International Summer School from 1979 to 1984. He also worked as an associate conductor and composer with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1992 to 2002 and held a similar position with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra during the same time period.

Early life and education

Davies was born on Holly Street, Langworthy, Salford, Lancashire. He lived on Trafford Road before moving to Wyville Drive in Swinton. He was the son of Thomas Davies, who made tools for seeing, and his wife Hilda, who painted as a hobby. At age four, after watching a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers, he told his parents he wanted to become a composer.

He began taking piano lessons and writing music at a young age. At 14, he sent a piece called Blue Ice to a radio show called Children's Hour in Manchester. A BBC producer named Trevor Hill shared it with a singer named Violet Carson, who said, "He's either very talented or very strange." A conductor named Charles Groves agreed and said, "I would like to work with him." Davies became famous with the help of Hill, who made him the show's music writer and connected him with professional musicians in the UK and Germany.

After attending Leigh Boys Grammar School, Davies studied at the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music (which later became the Royal Northern College of Music in 1973). One of his teachers was Hedwig Stein. His classmates included Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth, and John Ogdon. Together, they formed a group called New Music Manchester, which focused on modern music. After graduating in 1956, he studied in Italy for a year with Goffredo Petrassi, thanks to a government scholarship.

In 1959, Davies became the Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School. He left in 1962 after receiving a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University, with help from Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten. There, he studied with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and Earl Kim. Later, he moved to Australia, where he worked as a Composer in Residence at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide, from 1965 to 1966.

Career

Davies was known as a controversial figure in the 1960s, whose music often surprised audiences and critics. One of his dramatic and unusual works was Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), in which he used "musical parody" by taking a well-known piece of music—Handel’s Messiah—and changed it to explore the mental health struggles of King George III.

In 1966, Davies returned to the United Kingdom and moved to the Orkney Islands. He first lived on Hoy in 1971 and later moved to Sanday. Orkney, especially its capital, Kirkwall, hosts the St Magnus Festival, an arts festival started by Davies in 1977. He often used the festival to present new musical works, many performed by the local school orchestra.

Davies was the artistic director of the Dartington International Summer School from 1979 to 1984. From 1992 to 2002, he worked as an associate conductor and composer with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a role he also held with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. He conducted other major orchestras, including the Philharmonia, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. In 2000, Davies was Artist in Residence at the Barossa Music Festival, where he performed some of his music theater works and worked with students from the Barossa Spring Academy. He was also Composer Laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, for whom he wrote a series of ten Strathclyde Concertos.

Davies was one of the first classical composers to create a music download website, MaxOpus, in 1996.

He received several honorary doctorates, including an Honorary Doctor of Music from Oxford University in July 2005. He served as 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 in March 2004, but his appointment lasted only ten years, unlike the usual lifetime tenure. He was made a Freeman of the City of Salford in August 2004. On 25 November 2006, he was named an Honorary Fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University during a ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral. He was a visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music and became an Honorary Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge, in 2009. Davies also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2002.

Personal life

Davies was called "Max" by friends and coworkers, after his middle name "Maxwell." He was openly gay throughout his adult life.

Although he sometimes used sacred texts in his work, Davies did not believe in any religion.

In 2005, police searched Davies's home on Sanday and took parts of a whooper swan (a protected bird under the Wildlife and Countryside Act) that he had planned to eat. Davies said he found the swan already electrocuted near power lines.

In 2007, a problem happened when Davies and his partner of five years, builder Colin Parkinson, tried to have a civil partnership ceremony at the Sanday Light Railway. They were told the ceremony could not take place there. The couple later gave up their plans but stayed together until they separated in 2012.

That same year, the website MaxOpus, which was run by Davies, became temporarily unavailable after one of its directors, Michael Arnold, was arrested in June 2007 for fraud related to missing money from Davies's business accounts. In October 2008, Arnold and his wife, Judith (Davies's former agent), were charged with stealing nearly £450,000. In November 2009, Arnold was sentenced to 18 months in jail for false accounting. Charges of theft against the couple were dropped because the prosecution had no evidence. MaxOpus was relaunched earlier in 2009.

In 2014, Davies was given the title of Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) for "services to music." He died from leukemia on 14 March 2016, at the age of 81, at his home in Orkney.

Political views

Davies supported gay rights throughout his life and served as a vice-president of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.

He was deeply interested in protecting the environment. He created The Yellow Cake Revue, a series of cabaret-style performances that he shared with actress Eleanor Bron. These performances protested plans to mine uranium ore in Orkney. A famous piece from this collection, the instrumental Farewell to Stromness, includes a slow, walking bass line. This music represents the residents of Stromness, the second-largest town in Orkney, being forced to leave their homes due to uranium contamination. The Yellow Cake Revue was first performed in June 1980 at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, with Bron singing and Davies playing the piano. If the uranium mine had been approved, Stromness would have been two miles (three kilometers) from the mine’s center and most at risk from pollution.

Before the Iraq War in 2003, Davies marched in protest. He also criticized the Labour governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Davies’s appointment as Master of the Queen’s Music caused controversy because he had previously supported republicanism. However, in 2010, he told The Daily Telegraph that his conversations with the Queen changed his views. He said, “I have come to realize that there is a lot to be said for the monarchy. It represents continuity, tradition, and stability.”

Davies was a member of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) and the Incorporated Society of Musicians.

Music

Davies was a very productive composer who wrote music in many different styles throughout his career. He often combined different styles in one piece. His early works include the Trumpet Sonata (1955), written while he was in college, and his first orchestral work, Prolation (1958), written while he studied under Petrassi. His early works often used serial techniques, such as in Sinfonia for chamber orchestra (1962), sometimes mixed with methods from the Mediaeval and Renaissance periods. He often used parts of plainsong music as a starting point for his compositions. His piece "O Magnum Mysterium" (1960) appears on several YouTube videos and was once his most famous work.

Works from the late 1960s used these techniques and often had experimental and intense qualities. 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 focuses on Renaissance music and features parts that resemble Renaissance forms. The orchestral piece St Thomas Wake (1969) clearly shows Davies's use of many different styles. It combines a set of foxtrots (played by a dance band from the 1920s), a pavane by John Bull, and Davies's own music (he described the piece as a "Foxtrot for orchestra on a pavan by John Bull"). Many works from this time were performed by the Pierrot Players, which Davies started with Harrison Birtwistle in 1967. The group later became the Fires of London in 1970 and was disbanded in 1987.

After moving to Orkney, Davies often included themes from Orcadian or Scottish culture in his music. He sometimes set the words of Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown to music. He wrote several operas, including The Martyrdom of St Magnus (1976), The Lighthouse (1980, his most popular opera), and The Doctor of Myddfai (1996). The ambitious, nihilistic parable Resurrection (1987), which includes parts for a rock band, took nearly twenty years to complete.

Davies was interested in classical forms and completed his first symphony in 1976. He wrote ten numbered symphonies: a set of Symphonies Nos. 1–7 (1976–2000), Symphony No. 8 titled the Antarctic (2000), Symphony No. 9 (premiered on 9 June 2012 by the Royal Liverpool Symphony Orchestra), Symphony No. 10 (see below), a Sinfonia Concertante (1982), and ten Strathclyde Concertos for various instruments (created during his work with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, 1987–1996). In 2002, he began writing a series of string quartets for the Maggini String Quartet to record on Naxos Records (the Naxos Quartets). The series was completed in 2007 and was described by the composer as a "novel in ten chapters."

Davies's lighter orchestral works include Mavis in Las Vegas (a title inspired by a Las Vegas hotelier's mistake in spelling his name) and An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (which includes bagpipes). He also wrote theatre pieces for children and music with educational purposes. He composed the scores for Ken Russell's films The Devils and The Boy Friend. His Violin Concerto No. 2 premiered in the UK on 8 September 2009 (his 75th birthday) at the Royal Albert Hall, London, as part of The Proms season.

On 13 October 2009, his string sextet The Last Island was first performed by the Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall during a 75th birthday concert. His Symphony No. 10 had its world premiere at the Barbican Hall, London, on 2 February 2014.

Throstle's Nest Junction, opus 181 (1996), and A Spell for Green Corn – The MacDonald Dances both premiered in London at the BBC's Maida Vale studios on 19 June 2014, broadcast live on Radio 3 with the composer's participation. The music was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and presented by Petroc Trelawny.

• In his final months, as he faced a terminal illness, Davies continued to create music. He completed The Hogboon (op. 335, a children's opera), the epiphany carol A Torrent of Gold, and the short choral work The Golden Solstice. He was working on a String Quartet (op. 338) at the time of his death; only the first movement was completed.

• 1953–58 – studied in Manchester and Rome.
• 1967 – founded the contemporary music ensemble the Pierrot Players (later renamed The Fires of London) with Harrison Birtwistle.
• 1971 – moved to Hoy in the Orkney Islands.
• 1977 – founded the St Magnus Festival.
• 1987 – knighted.
• 1987–96 – wrote the ten Strathclyde Concertos for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
• 2001–07 – wrote a cycle of ten string quartets commissioned by Naxos.
• 2004 – appointed Master of the Queen's Music.
• 2005 – received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from the University of Oxford.
• 2008 – became Patron of the Manchester University Music Society (MUMS).
• 2009 – became an Honorary Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge.
• 2014 – appointed to the Order of Companions of Honour.
• 2015 – awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

Recordings

• Naxos Quartets – Maggini Quartet – Naxos 5-CD set 8.505225
• Mass; Missa parvula; two organ pieces; two motets – Hyperion CDA67454
• Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis and O Sacrum Convivium – Delphian DCD34037
• Symphonies 1–6 – BBC Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic / composer – Collins Classics
• Ave Maris Stella; Image, Reflection, Shadow; Runes from a Holy Island – Fires of London / composer – Unicorn-Kanchana