NYT: Peter Maxwell Davies, Contrarian British Composer, Dies at 81

[Frank Forman]

Peter Maxwell Davies, Contrarian British Composer, Dies at 81
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/arts/music/peter-maxwell-davies-contrarian-british-composer-dies-at-81.html

By MARGALIT FOX

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the prolific English composer long known
as an anti-establishment anti-monarchist avant-gardist enfant
terrible--but whose work was so renowned that he was named Queen
Elizabeth II's official music master anyway--died on Monday at his
home in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. He was 81.

His death, from leukemia, was announced on his website, maxopus.com.

Knighted by the queen in 1987, Mr. Davies (pronounced Davis) was
also a respected conductor. He served as an associate conductor of
Britain's Royal Philharmonic and BBC Philharmonic Orchestras, and
made guest appearances with ensembles including the Cleveland
Orchestra, the Boston Symphony and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

He was associated in particular with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra,
of which he was a composer laureate.

Mr. Davies served as Master of the Queen's Revels (a ceremonial
post, dating to the 16th century, that is analogous to the poet
laureate) from 2004 to 2014. In that capacity, he composed works for
royal occasions including Christmas festivities and the birthdays of
the queen and Prince Charles.

His appointment had set tongues wagging and eyebrows soaring across
Britain, for Mr. Davies was, by proud circumstance and ardent
choice, about as far outside the august imperial mainstream as one
could be: working-class, openly gay, far left of center politically
and adamantly isolationist personally.

Since the early 1970s, he had made his home in the windswept
Orkneys, living for much of that time in relative inaccessibility,
without electricity or running water.

Musically, Mr. Davies could be inaccessible as well, writing scores
that were technically and aurally demanding. Concertgoers over the
years sometimes booed his new works, and occasionally walked out.

His work, often dissonant, made abundant use of the musical interval
known as the diminished fifth, or tritone. A painfully unstable
two-note chord, known historically as "the devil's interval," the
tritone begs for acoustic resolution but does not always find it, a
state of affairs that taxes the nerves.

But his music could also incline toward lyricism, and it eventually
came to be so highly regarded that Mr. Davies was celebrated as one
of the most eminent postwar composers in the world.

Generically, Mr. Davies cast a vast net, writing symphonies, chamber
pieces, works for solo instruments and--the output for which he
was perhaps best known--a bevy of music-theater compositions:
operas, ballets, staged songs, works for children and film scores,
including two, "The Devils" (1971) and "The Boy Friend" (1971), for
the director Ken Russell.

Stylistically, he was Janus-headed, looking simultaneously forward
to the music of the postserial period and backward to Medieval and
Renaissance church music. An impassioned ecumenicist, he could
companionably marry Renaissance liturgical music to a foxtrot, as he
did on at least one occasion, in "Missa Super l'Homme Armé," an
opera of 1968.

Mr. Davies's best-known works include "Eight Songs for a Mad King"
(1969), a staged cycle for male singer and instrumental ensemble.

Its libretto, by Randolph Stow, is based partly on rantings
attributed to King George III. It includes lines like "Dear land of
sheep and cabbages. Dear land./Dear elms, oaks, beeches, strangling
ivy,/green snakes of ivy, pythons," as well as squeaks, squeals and
grunts.

In one performance of the work, at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1970,
Mr. Davies's protagonist (played by the composer Julius Eastman) was
directed to grab a violin from one of the musicians, tear its
strings off and smash it to bits. In another, an inflammatory 1987
staging by David Freeman in London, the hero performed while sitting
naked on a toilet and smearing what appeared to be excrement about
the stage.

Reviewing the Carnegie Recital Hall performance in The New York
Times, Harold C. Schonberg wrote, "A composer who is going to set
this kind of material cannot do it in an orthodox manner." He added
approvingly: "'Eight Songs for a Mad King' is a theater piece that
has direct communication, and it hits the listener like a collective
shriek from Bedlam."

Mr. Davies's most frequently performed vocal work was almost
certainly "The Lighthouse" (1979), a haunting chamber opera rooted
in the true story of three Scottish lighthousekeepers who
mysteriously vanished in 1900. He was also known for "Taverner"
(1972), a two-act opera based on the life of the 16th-century
English composer John Taverner, whose music Mr. Davies esteemed.

His instrumental compositions include string quartets; 10
symphonies, the last completed in 2013, when Mr. Davies was already
ill with leukemia; the Strathclyde Concertos, a cycle of 10
concertos for various solo instruments--the violin concerto was
recorded by Isaac Stern--and works for solo piano.

Mr. Davies considered composing to be a moral act, and many of his
compositions had overtly political wellsprings. Among them were his
String Quartet No. 3, composed in opposition to the Iraq war, and
"Kommilitonen!" a 2011 opera in praise of student protesters,
including James Meredith, the black man who fought to enter the
University of Mississippi, and the anti-Nazi agitator Sophie Scholl.

Though many of Mr. Davies's compositions sprang from political ire,
others were born, evocatively, of the sea-loud islands where he
lived most often alone.

Peter Maxwell Davies, familiarly known as Max, was born on Sept. 8,
1934, in Salford, near Manchester. His father was a factory manager,
and for young Max, the prospect of a career in the factory or the
mines seemed virtually certain.

At 4, Max was taken to a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's
operetta "The Gondoliers." He came home able to sing the entire
score note for note and vowed then and there to be a composer.
Though it was an unheard-of ambition in his family circle, he had
his parents' support.

"I remember listening from upstairs to an argument my uncle had with
my parents," Mr. Davies told The Sunday Times of London in 2004. "He
was saying, 'Surely you aren't going to let that lad of yours do
music when I can offer him a bricklaying apprenticeship.' My parents
were saying that I had a scholarship and had to have a chance."

He went on to study at the Royal Manchester College of Music, as it
was then known, where his classmates included Harrison Birtwistle,
who also became an eminent composer. Mr. Davies later studied at
Princeton with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt.

With Mr. Birtwistle and others, Mr. Davies founded the Pierrot
Players, a music-theater ensemble, in the mid-1960s. The group
performed many of Mr. Davies's early works, including "Revelation
and Fall," a monodrama for soprano in which the singer, as the
British newspaper The Telegraph wrote in its obituary on Monday, "is
required to howl a text by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl into a
megaphone."

For many years, Mr. Davies lived on the island of Hoy in the
Orkneys, where he allowed little of the electrified world--
including television, to which he objected tonally--to impinge.

"I experimented with it for a year but found it intrusive,
especially the BBC News presentation," he told the The Guardian in
2004. "The signature tune was in E major. Such a special key,
reserved for works like Bruckner's Seventh Symphony and Beethoven's
Opus 109 Sonata."

Over time Hoy proved too accessible, and Mr. Davies later moved to
Sanday, an even remoter Orkney island, where he lived to the end of
his life.

Mr. Davies began his conducting career leading performances of his
own compositions, partly because some established conductors found
them too daunting. He was widely recorded, both as a conductor of
his own work and that of other modernists and, as a composer, by
conductors including John Williams, André Previn and Oliver Knussen.

Despite his deep desire for solitude, Mr. Davies was often the
subject of unsolicited publicity. In 2005, he made headlines after
he was apprehended with a terrine he had made from a swan, a
protected bird that is considered the property of the British Crown.

Mr. Davies, who explained that the swan had been killed when it flew
into a power line near his home, received an official caution from
the police but was not charged.

In 2012, the British press made much of Mr. Davies's acrimonious
separation from his lover, Colin Parkinson, with whom he had lived
for a decade.

An only child, Mr. Davies leaves no known immediate survivors.

Mr. Davies remained deliciously dyspeptic to the last. After ringing
cellphones proliferated among concert-hall audiences, he publicly
deemed their possessors "artistic terrorists" and declared they
should be fined. He was in the habit of walking out of shops and
restaurants whenever Muzak was played. He walked out often.

For all this, he had by the end of his life become an establishment
figure--comparatively, anyway. His career as a public luminary was
one that his family could scarcely have imagined when he began his
work.

In an interview with The Sunday Herald of Glasgow in 2005, Mr.
Davies recalled his father's words after the premiere of "Taverner"
at the Royal Opera House in 1972--an event that The Guardian,
decades later, would call "one of the landmarks in British postwar
music."

Approaching the opera house's director, George Lascelles--the
seventh Earl of Harewood and a cousin of the queen--the elder Mr.
Davies was heard to say, "Tell me this, Mr. 'Airwood, this stuff wot
our Max writes, do you think it'll go?"

[Joe Roberts]

(snips)

> At 4, Max was taken to a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's
> operetta "The Gondoliers." He came home able to sing the entire
> score note for note and vowed then and there to be a composer.

It would have been a good choice.

Joe