Composer Peter Maxwell Davies dies aged 81 | Music | The Guardian Composer Peter Maxwell Davies dies aged 81 The former master of the Queen’s music had been suffering from leukaemia for several years Monday 14 March 2016 09.19 EDT First published on Monday 14 March 2016 09.19 EDT Close This article is 11 months old Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has died, aged 81. The Salford-born composer, universally known as Max, had been suffering from leukaemia for several years and died at his home in Orkney on 14 March. A guide to Peter Maxwell Davies's music Read more One of the foremost musicians of our time, Maxwell Davies was a fearless figurehead for the postwar avant garde. He made it his mission to connect with as many different audiences and performers as possible, writing music for children, for his Orkney community, as well as grand symphonies – 10 of them, concertos, string quartets, and music theatre works.

He was also an experienced conductor, holding the position of associate conductor/composer at both the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras for 10 years, and guest conducting orchestras that included the San Francisco Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus and Philharmonia. He enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as composer laureate. From 2004 to 2014 he was master of the Queen’s music, and was knighted in 1987. Last month he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s gold medal – the highest accolade the society can bestow. Pinterest Peter Maxwell Davies (left) conducts Welsh soprano Mary Thomas in a rehearsal for Revelation and Fall, February 1968. Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images Maxwell Davies started composing as a teenager, and studied at the Royal Northern College of Music, where his fellow students included Harrison Birtwistle , John Ogdon and Alexander Goehr. He came to international prominence in the 1960s, most particularly with pieces such as Eight Songs for a Mad King and Revelation and Fall in which he created a new, shocking and exhilarating vision of music theatre.

In 1971 he moved to Orkney, the landscape and culture of which had a deep impact on his music; in 1977 he founded the annual St Magnus festival , which he continued to be involved with until the end of his life. “From the earliest days organising things from a phone box on Hoy to his more recent role as the festival’s honorary president, Max has won the hearts of the Orkney community and been a significant part of many generations of musicians from the islands,” said Alasdair Nicolson, the festival’s artistic director . Pinterest An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise Maxwell Davies was passionately committed to the social responsibility of the composer and the concept of music as a social force. His third string quartet, written in 2003, was a defiant personal statement against the Iraq war; his 2010 opera, Kommilitonen! was a dramatisation of student protest movements in the 20th century and a call to arms for today’s young people. The composer’s 1980 chamber opera The Lighthouse was performed at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury theatre in October 2015, with Maxwell Davies in attendance. “The dazzling score ...

held our attention. Luminous and salty, it conveys the desolate, sea-battered mood, the cries of seabirds, the waves’ roar, equally as tellingly as Britten in Peter Grimes, but in an entirely different musical voice. Maxwell Davies was there to take a bow and hug his performers. His smiles were reward enough for all,” wrote Fiona Maddocks in the Observer. Peter Maxwell Davies at 80: ‘The music knows things that I don’t’ Read more The previous year the ROH’s Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra had given the world premiere of Maxwell Davies’s 10th symphony. “A wonderful opportunity presented itself to me when I was asked to conduct [it], a piece that was as much bound up with Italy as Max’s native land. [He was] a dear and generous man with whom it was a joy to collaborate and an example of perseverance in the world of music and the arts,” said Pappano. Reviewing, the Guardian’s Andrew Clements admired the work’s vivid and vivacious writing. “It’s one of the most movingly personal of Davies’s recent scores, and a major new symphony,” he said.

Peter Maxwell Davies: strikingly original music composed at white heat Read more Alan Davey , controller of Radio 3, said: “We have lost a musical giant, a major composer with a strong and unique voice through all parts of his extraordinary career, from his early avant garde musical theatre works to his symphonies and his work for children and young people. It is a sad loss to the world of music and we will remember him through his recordings and the glorious spirit that shines through his music.” Maxwell Davies’s works have featured in over 50 proms over five decades, of which nine were world premieres. “The link with the Proms was not just through his strikingly individual music, but also a shared vision of bringing classical music to wider audiences,” said David Pickard, Director, BBC Proms. British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies dies aged 81 - BBC News BBC News British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies dies aged 81 14 March 2016 Image copyright Rex Features Image caption Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was one of the UK's foremost composers Celebrated British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, a former Master of the Queen's Music, has died at the age of 81.

He was known for his modern and avant-garde works, but his most famous piece was a simple, haunting lament for solo piano - Farewell To Stromness . "He was, right to the end, a pioneer," Stephen Lumsden, Managing Director of music agency Intermusica, said. The Salford-born musician, who had leukaemia, died at home in Orkney. Media captionWill Gompertz looks back at the life of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies Famous for pushing boundaries, Sir Peter's earlier works have been described as unplayable, generating controversy amongst audiences and critics alike. He often referenced plainchant and medieval music, which he incorporated into challenging, serial compositions. In 1969, people shouted "rubbish" at the premiere of his opera Eight Songs for a Mad King; while the inaugural performance of Worldes Blis caused a mass walk-out at the BBC Proms. "Most of those who stayed booed," Sir Peter later observed. "[It] was very upsetting." But over his career, he made it his mission to connect with as many audiences as possible, writing pieces for children, ballet, theatre and string quartet.

Media captionIn 2014, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies spoke to Will Gompertz about his 10th symphony Known to most as Max, he composed some 300 works, including 10 symphonies, 10 so-called Strathclyde Concertos and the operas Taverner and The Lighthouse. He moved to the Orkney Islands in the early 70s, leading to a calmer style of music, which often incorporated Scottish motifs. In 1987 he was knighted, and in 2004 he became Master of the Queen's Music - a post considered to be the musical equivalent of the poet laureate. The holder is expected to write music to commemorate important royal events, and the appointment of a self-confessed republican raised many eyebrows. But Sir Peter told The Daily Telegraph in 2010 that he had become a monarchist after meeting and working with the Queen. "I have come to realise that there is a lot to be said for the monarchy," he said . ""It is a better system than having a president and frankly I have been disappointed so much with our dishonest politicians.

"They are not telling the truth, any of them." Image copyright PA Image caption "I have grown to be a huge admirer of The Queen," said Sir Peter in 2010 In the 2014 New Year Honours List he was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for "services to music". Last month, he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal, considered to be the highest accolade the society can bestow. 'Fierce fighter for music' As a conductor, Davies held positions at the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras and appeared with many major orchestras in Europe and North America. He was also a proud advocate of classical music and music education. "The roots of a thriving classical music scene need three nutrients," he said in the 2005 Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture. "The first is music education, and the second, resources... The third nutrient is new music. Classical music cannot become a museum culture." "Max was a truly unique musician," said Sally Groves, a close friend and former creative director of music publisher Schott Music.

She added that he was "a remarkable composer who created music theatre works of searing power, great symphonies, intense chamber music, works of truly universal popularity" and "a fierce fighter for music in the community and in education, and on environmental issues". Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The composer often turned his sights on organised religion, particularly in his early works Sir Peter was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia in 2013, but continued to work through successive rounds of chemotherapy. His tenth symphony, premiered in 2014, his 80th birthday year, was seen as a reply to the illness. "It felt as if Maxwell Davies was simultaneously bowing his head to mortality, and shaking his fist at it," said Ivan Hewett , reviewing the work for The Telegraph. But this stage, the former "enfant terrible" had been embraced by the establishment - but he retained his edge, drawing inspiration from the MPs' expenses scandal, and railing against the "artistic terrorists" who let their mobiles ring during concerts. The composer's most recent work was an opera for children called The Hogboon, which will be premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra on 26 June.

"His vision for music education and the wealth of wonderful pieces he has left for young people is unparalleled in recent times," said the LSO's managing director, Kathryn McDowell. "He will be sorely missed." BBC Radio 3 will pay tribute to Sir Peter on today's edition of In Tune at 16:30 GMT. Peter Maxwell Davies, British composer and ‘Master of the Queen’s Music,’ dies at 81 - The Washington Post Peter Maxwell Davies, British composer and ‘Master of the Queen’s Music,’ dies at 81 The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! British composer Peter Maxwell Davies in 1993. (Wolfgang Kluge/EPA) By Jill Lawless By Jill Lawless March 14, 2016 Peter Maxwell Davies, an experimental, socially radical composer who had served as Queen Elizabeth II’s official master of music, died March 14 at his home in Scotland’s Orkney islands. He was 81.

His management company, Intermusica, said the cause was leukemia. As one of Britain’s best-known modern composers, Mr. Davies created about 300 works, including 10 symphonies, the operas “Taverner” and “The Lighthouse,” and the music-theater piece “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” about the queen’s troubled ancestor, George III. A strong environmentalist, Mr. Davies drew inspiration from the wind-swept Orkneys, where he lived for four decades and where he founded the St. Magnus International Festival, an annual arts event at which many of his works were given their premieres. Recent works included “Kommilitonen!” — an opera about student activism around the world — and a children’s opera, “The Hogboon,” which will have its world premiere in June under Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Davies also conducted for orchestras, including the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic. With his anti-establishment views and avant-garde musical leanings, Mr. Davies was a surprise choice in 2004 as Master of the Queen’s Music.

The honorary position, founded in 1626, is traditionally conferred on a musician of distinction by the monarch. The position has no fixed duties, although the master may compose pieces for royal or state occasions. Mr. Davies held the post for a decade and told the Daily Telegraph in 2010 that the role had made him moderate his anti-monarchist views. “I have come to realize that there is a lot to be said for the monarchy,” he said. “It represents continuity, tradition and stability.” Peter Maxwell Davies was born Sept. 8, 1934, in Salford, England. He reportedly resolved to be a composer when he was 4, after hearing a Gilbert and Sullivan production. He was educated at what was then called the Royal Manchester College of Music and held a number of teaching positions throughout his life. In 2005, Mr. Davies received a police warning after officers found the body of a swan — a protected species — at his home. Davies said the bird had died after flying into a power line and he had used it for food. When police officers arrived, he offered them swan terrine. “I think they were rather horrified,” he told the BBC.

But, he said, “I was brought up in the war, and you don’t waste food.” He had no immediate survivors. — Associated Press Profile: Peter Maxwell Davies | Music | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close The Master of the Queen's Music is cooking pasta with squid ink in the kitchen of his croft on Sanday, at the outer fringes of the Orkney Islands. He is taking a rare weekend off from composition to entertain. There is wild boar with melon and a perfectly judged Australian Shiraz. He discovered Italian cooking in his 20s and has never looked back. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies - friends have called him Max since he was five - lives with his partner, builder Colin Parkinson, and a dog called Judy Kettletoft, which they rescued from a life of tethered abuse. There are also three semi-wild cats that squat on their dry-stone walls - Davies has always loved cats and stands in the afternoon sun nursing one. Otter tracks are visible on the croft's 30 acres; seals bask on the shore across the bay.

"Max has always been looking to build a fiefdom, a kingdom," says Paul Driver, friend, passionate advocate of his music and Sunday Times critic, "and he has found it." Davies has lived in the Orkneys since 1974, first on top of a cliff on the forbidding island of Hoy, but since 1999 on the flatter Sanday - a concession to the fact that he will be 70 in September. Apart from a slight stiffness on his left side, the legacy of a slipped disc, he would pass for 50. Davies is an intellectual, complete, self-conscious, uncompromising in his rejection of pop and pap. There are two books in the loo: a collected Chaucer and the Oxford History of English Literature (second edition). The shelves in his living room are challenging, varied: Dante's Divine Comedy (a lifelong love), Goethe's Theory of Colours, Edwin Muir's Selected Poems, Birds and Mammals of Orkney, The Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, A Gaelic Grammar. He is an obsessive reader - in German, French and Italian, as well as English.

In deference to his partner, he now owns a television, but it is not visible. When he was living on Hoy, he explained to an interviewer why he had abandoned TV: "I experimented with it for a year but found it intrusive, especially the BBC news presentation. 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. And the news itself was geared towards entertainment, the superficial acted-out interrogations of people in the news." The combination of mischievousness and seriousness is characteristic: he finds the world ridiculous and maddening by turns. Stephen Arnold, professor of music at Kingston university and a long-time friend, calls Davies's living conditions "monkish". "He likes a very particular atmosphere - dark, medieval," says Arnold. Davies dresses fastidiously and exudes calm. With his penetrating blue eyes, you feel he has worked you out completely. "With Max, one always seems to end up talking fluffy nonsense," says Driver.

Davies is a bundle of paradoxes: the 60s rebel who has become Master of the Queen's Music; the Grand Old Man with the devilish twinkle in his eye; the self-confident composer who craves attention; the 60s expressionist who wrote a Sibelian symphonic cycle in the 70s and 80s, a romantic violin concerto for Isaac Stern, and has now embarked on a sequence of 10 Haydnesque string quartets for Naxos; the private man who has lived the most public of lives - running his own ensemble for 20 years, acting as conductor-composer with three orchestras, setting up the St Magnus Festival in the Orkneys, fighting for classical music, taking on successive governments over support for the arts and now over Iraq. "Max comes from a very unlikely background," says Harrison Birtwistle, who met him at Manchester University when they were studying there in the mid-1950s.

"If you'd known his parents and said what sort of son do you think these people have, it would not be Max." Composer and teacher Alexander Goehr, another of that remarkable Manchester group which also included pianist John Ogdon and trumpeter-turned-conductor Elgar Howarth, says Davies disliked the dull, keep-the-aspidistra-flying world of his childhood. Davies was born in Salford in 1934 and moved to Swinton, half a notch up the class ladder, four years later. He was an only child, very close to his mother who, when she was 80, said it had been "thrilling" to live with her son. He was exceptionally bright, highly individualistic, detached from his factory-worker father and permanently at war with authority figures at school. Was Davies's violent mid-80s opera Resurrection - with its brutalised dummy assaulted by mediocrity, conformity and commercial crassness - an autobiographical cri de coeur? "There is a lot of anger in that piece," he admits. "It shows what happens when individuals are not allowed to develop.

It is also a political statement." But Davies says his childhood "wasn't all that bleak", and when his father died on Christmas Eve in 1984 he grieved bitterly. "His father didn't really understand what Max was doing, but he went along with it," says Eric Guest, a friend since childhood. "Middle-class parents would have pushed him, but he had to push himself. That steel came from his working-class upbringing. His mother was gifted. She had a delightful sense of humour." Davies's real battles were at school. "Moorside Council School and Leigh Grammar were awful," he says. "The headmaster at Leigh Grammar was not interested in allowing me to do music. I did it, didn't tell him and got a scholarship [to Manchester]." Davies, who had been playing the piano from the age of five, taught himself A-level music and stunned the examiners by demonstrating that he had memorised not only Beethoven's violin concerto but all the symphonies too. He had his first composition broadcast on the BBC's Children's Hour when he was 12. At Manchester, Howarth immediately recognised Davies as exceptional. "He was incredibly intense.

He used to wear a green, embossed scarf all the time. He lived in it. He had a shock of black hair and mad eyes, eyes like a cat, and his mannerisms were very quick and mercurial. He had plenty to say and was pretty outrageous. He was hooked on Ulysses, which was thought to be terribly daring, and would quote rather outrageous bits from it. He loved all that kind of thing." "There was an inexplicable note to his personality," says Goehr. "He could be abrasive and opinionated. He spoke an accentless English, which was unusual in Manchester. Harry Birtwistle is clearly a Lancashire person but Max seemed to come from nowhere. There was an air of mystery about him. Perhaps he had other lives we didn't know about. He thought popular music was downmarket and the work of the devil, but it was said he went to parties at which he played such music on the piano. Did he like to sup with the devil?" Davies and Birtwistle also gave piano and clarinet recitals at working men's clubs and mechanics' institutes and, according to the pianist, were well received.

What Davies could not do in mid-50s Manchester was come out as gay - homosexual behaviour was a criminal offence. He had known he was gay from his early teens and had learned to cope with keeping it secret. "Obviously at school - less so at university - one did feel very out on a limb. But I was bright enough to be able to read things like André Gide in French even at 15 and soon after that I found my way around Jean Genet, which made me laugh a lot. Keeping it secret became second nature. I knew that if I mentioned it in the wrong circles I could go to prison." Davies learned French at school, German during an extended stay in Hamburg before university, Italian while studying composition in Rome in the late 50s. Germany and Italy were antidotes to repressive, narrow-minded England, and to the limitations of English music. At Manchester he had had a stormy relationship with the professor of composition, Humphrey Procter-Gregg, an ardent supporter of the sort of English pastoralism typified by Delius. Davies, in thrall to Mahler and Schoenberg, disliked Procter-Gregg even more than he disliked Delius.

"Procter-Gregg hated anything by Stravinsky or Bartok," he recalls, "and referred to Beethoven as that dreadful German bow-wow. I went there to do composition, but he disliked me so much and he disliked the music I wrote so much and I disliked him so much that more or less by mutual agreement I was thrown off the composition course. I studied the piano and did a thesis on Indian music for my degree instead." With his continental grounding, Davies has always disdained English amateurism. But he proved equally resistant to the avant-garde orthodoxies of the 50s and 60s. "At Darmstadt [the German home of serialism] I disgraced myself on one or two occasions by getting the giggles in concerts." Instead, he sought a personal musical language, an accommodation between tradition and modernity, authority and inspiration, and he found it by building on the bedrock of medieval plainsong. After Manchester came Rome, studying with the composer Goffredo Petrassi, of whom Davies still speaks with reverence, and then a spell as a music teacher at Cirencester Grammar School.

"It was only a small country school but it got to the point where a third of the kids were taking part in the big shows," recalls Arnold, who was 13 when he first met Davies. "The big thing was doing Monteverdi's Vespers , which in the early 1960s was an extraordinary achievement." Arnold says Davies treated the children as if they were seasoned pros. "He could be a bully; he used to just steamroller things through. He would put his watch on the piano when he was conducting and when he got really angry he would slam the piano. I don't know how many watches he got through." While he was there Davies wrote a large-scale Christmas piece called O Magnum Mysterium (1960) for the choir and orchestra, the first of his many works for schools and amateur forces. Davies was as unconventional a teacher as he had been a student. "He didn't really believe in people studying music formally," says Arnold. "Some did and he helped them out with their O and A levels, but he thought composing music and making music was the heart of it. I wrote a piece for violin and harpsichord which was put on at the Bath Festival.

Max played the harpsichord and Yehudi Menuhin played the violin. You take it for granted when you are 16!" In 1962, with the help of Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten, Davies secured a Harkness scholarship to Princeton. "The entire faculty immediately treated him as an equal, not as a postgraduate student at all," says Stephen Pruslin, a fellow student who became a friend and collaborator. "He was a very private person. He even had the telephone engineers take away his telephone. Someone asked him why and he said he thought it might go off." When Davies returned from Princeton in 1964, the music publishers Boosey & Hawkes gave him a £100-a-year retainer.

"From that moment on," jokes Davies, "I never did another day's work." His apprenticeship complete, a stream of incendiary works cascaded out over the next five years - Revelation and Fall, the Second Fantasia on John Taverner's In Nomine, Eight Songs for a Mad King, Vesalii Icones and, in 1969, Worldes Blis, which caused a sensation at its Proms premiere when a large part of the audience walked out. "I remember going out later that evening with my then manager," says Davies, "and having quite a lot to drink and thinking, 'You'll just have to get used to this. This is what being a composer is like. Stravinsky put up with it, they've all put up with it, so you've got to put up with it too'." He refused to be cowed. "It sounds terribly arrogant but the piece felt as if it made a statement. When there was a second performance, it was said that I had made revisions, and some of the critics said it was much better in this version, but nothing had changed!" Pruslin says that in the late 60s Davies "raised stylistic disruption to an artistic principle".

Influenced by early music and seeking, in Pruslin's words, to emulate its "purity and consistency" in the 50s and early 60s, after Revelation and Fall in 1966 he sought to subvert it, taking plainsong and distorting and parodying it. In Missa super L'Homme Armé (1968), what begins as a mass ends in a foxtrot - a demonic transposition that attracted the interest of film director Ken Russell, for whom in 1971 Davies wrote film scores for The Devils and The Boy Friend. It was a wild time for Davies socially as well as musically -"I was burning the candle at three ends at least," he says. In 1967, he had started an ensemble called the Pierrot Players (later renamed the Fires of London) with Birtwistle, but the two quickly fell out. "Max wrote these rather hysterical theatre pieces and I was placed in a false position of competition," he says. "I didn't want to write that sort of thing. It's not what I thought the whole thing was about.

I think I wrote pieces which were not honest because of that." The breach has never been healed. "His friendship is something I've really missed because we had a lot in common," says Birtwistle. "Food, humour, a sense of irony, a sense of the ridiculous." In the mid-60s Davies also became estranged from Goehr. "He wrote me a letter saying that I had betrayed all the ideas of modern music," says Goehr, "and that as my best friend he said he had to tell me that everything I was doing was worthless. I wrote back, 'who needs best friends like that?'" Their relationship is a complex one: two often acerbic intellectuals, intensely engaged. Goehr has a waspish line in anecdotes, including one about Davies once telling John Ogdon not to take taxis after concerts because he was too fat. Last year there was a rapprochement. "I heard from Max's manager [Judy Arnold] how much he thought he owed to me," says Goehr. "I said I owed a lot to him, too, and that it would be sad if the next time we saw each other was at one or the other's funeral.

He sent me a postcard, we arranged to meet and after a few minutes I felt as if there had never been a break. I wondered why there had ever been one. When we finally go the grave, we will go as friends." Davies took a holiday in the Orkneys in 1970 and, by chance, met the writer George Mackay Brown, whose book, An Orkney Tapestry, had captivated him. "I was entranced by the book," says Davies, "this whole feeling of the place being part of a legend - something that is alive in people's minds, is part of a great continuum and ritualises the everyday life of the islands. George loved it all so much and his descriptions of place are so alive." In his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, Mackay Brown recorded his first impressions of Davies: "The young dark composer - Beethoven in his 20s might have looked like him - told us he was looking for a house to compose in, as far away as possible from London... Did he guess at the loveliness under the wrappings of rain and fog?

The boom and hush and echo of the sea were everywhere." On Hoy, Davies found the home he was lacking (his Dorset cottage had burned down in 1969). He also found a surrogate family in Mackay Brown's great friends, Archie and Elizabeth Bevan, who lived in Stromness and later helped Davies overcome local opposition to an incomer founding a festival. They became Davies's local support system, just as Judy Arnold and her husband Michael, who managed his financial affairs, looked after the rest of his life. That just left a need for transport - Davies doesn't drive. In Rackwick, the island's loneliest spot, Davies found the silence he had been seeking. Mackay Brown became a close friend, and the boom of the sea started to mould Davies's music, especially the symphonies. Mackay Brown was a Catholic convert and Davies, simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by religion, found the way he connected religious ritual with the rhythms of Orcadian life attractive. "He makes this lovely parallel between the church year, with all its ritual, and the agricultural and fishing year," explains Davies. "Every little act becomes sacrosanct...

I've felt something of the kind without being able to articulate it in words. I suppose my own attitude to religion, thanks to George, clarified a great deal in that I realised that it was the beauty of the ritual and the whole experience that appealed to him and that the dogma and the horrible history were very much secondary." "Max recognises that there is a profound spiritual core in music making," says the Scottish Catholic composer James MacMillan, who attended Davies's composer classes on Hoy in the 1980s. "It doesn't matter that he is not a conventional believer. His preoccupation with betrayal suggests deep personal instincts at work. He believes that society has betrayed what he regards as essential." MacMillan says Davies feels "a horror at many aspects of modern life" - from the trivial, the prevalence of muzak say, to political philistinism and the deceit that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq. Davies confronts barmen in pubs that play piped music, just as he lined up at the front of last year's anti-war march. Davies's opera Taverner (1970) deals with a 16th-century composer who betrays his art to save his skin.

It is his ultimate nightmare - the artist, who should be in touch with some greater reality and seeking to save and salve the world, abandoning it instead. He is fascinated, too, by the dilemma of Shostakovich and Prokofiev in the Soviet Union, walking the deadliest of tightropes. "There is always a temptation to betray yourself," he says. "I was determined not to do it." In The Martyrdom of St Magnus, with which he launched the annual St Magnus Festival in 1977, he finds heroism in Magnus's unwillingness to betray his ideals, in his cleansing act of redemption through submission to death. Magnus is a Christ figure, murdered by an impure world: spiritual victory over earthly temptation. "He believes that music is one of the essentials of our life," says MacMillan, "that it has a spiritual and social force. He sees it as a great healing thing, but also as a way that the human spirit can plumb the depths and look into the abyss." The composer Simon Holt, who had a two-year relationship with Davies in the late-70s, says he is terrified and fascinated by the idea of evil.

"Art feeds off whatever it needs and sometimes it needs things which are objectionable and tasteless," he says. Davies has an overwhelming need to compose. He starts at nine, after he has taken the dog for a walk, breaks for lunch, then works until eight in the evening. "Music has always been an obsession," he says matter-of-factly. "That's what counts. It is a marvellous feeling to go into my studio [newly built by Parkinson] and sit at my desk with the pages all around. I find sheer joy in the craft, like working in wood or stone." He has never had creative block. "I can't imagine it," he says. "Max is very self-protective," says Holt. "He has incredible drive. Ultimately nothing matters beyond the piece he's writing, and why should it? He's had some very strong relationships, but the music is absolutely central." Guest traces Davies' productivity to a fear of drying up - and to the depression he says his school friend suffered before life on Hoy anchored him. "He was never manic, but would get these terrible, black depressions," says Guest. "He only broke free from them in his 40s.

I remember once when we were 16, he said that if he ended up like Sibelius, unable to write music, he would kill himself." Davies has written in every genre - orchestral, chamber, opera, music theatre, oratorio, ballet - and in many styles. How can the composer of Worldes Blis also have written the kitschy Mavis in Las Vegas (1997)? Farewell to Stromness (1980), a piano interlude in a revue written to oppose planned uranium mining in the Orkneys, was the fastest-rising piece in Classic FM's Hall of Fame this year - an odd fate for the 60s enfant terrible. There has been a critical cooling over the past 20 years (Davies says he doesn't read the critics - but he says it testily). Some balk at his lighter pieces. "These days you're supposed to be one thing or t'other," he says. "I've even been called a prostitute and accused of playing to the gallery.

I remember when the commission came along to write something for the Boston Pops, I thought - like I have with so many things, like being Master of the Queen's Music - 'Well I've never done anything like this before, let's have a go.' And so I wrote An Orkney Wedding [1985]. It became very popular." The orthodoxy is that his most creative period was 1965-75, when he was writing highly charged pieces for the Fires of London, evolving a symphonic language and absorbing the early influence of Orkney. "He gave the impression then of working in white heat," says composer Colin Matthews. "I was at the first performance of Eight Songs for a Mad King and it was so disturbing that I have hardly been able to listen to it since. This wasn't just a portrayal of madness but madness visible. He would say himself that he still had technical deficiencies, but when he resolved these some of that white heat was lost. There is a comparison with Schoenberg, who composed amazing things like the Five Orchestral Pieces and Erwartung , but then lost something when he codified his language." Birtwistle implies that Davies has ceased to be a modernist.

The critic Ivan Hewett says he is "much less revered among young composers than Birtwistle", while the Guardian's Andrew Clements argues that he has become much "safer" and that the Strathclyde concertos [10 concertos written for the principals of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra] were "quite dreadful". Driver, however, dismisses what he calls the standard critical line. "You can't just say that because you've got these white-heat masterpieces in the late 60s and early 70s that everything else is somehow not interesting or not valid. I even find the failures interesting." Goehr sees dangers in the sheer volume of Davies's output. "These series of Strathclyde concertos and 10 string quartets, it's too good to be true. One can't write 10 string quartets. One can, with luck, write one that is halfway reasonable."Goehr believes it is impossible for composers to be modern-day Mozarts or Haydns, because the gap between high-art music and the general public is too great. "The conditions just aren't there; it's a fantasy." Davies, crusader against mundanity, disagrees. The fight goes on. Every day.

"If people think I write too much, it's their problem, not mine," he says. "When you have a creative urge, you can't stop writing. You don't have to have a reason to write; you just fulfil your own needs. Players seem to enjoy playing the pieces, and I hope that ultimately we can bridge the division between the language and the public. I do feel, on a good day, that perhaps one can do something to heal." Peter Maxwell Davies Born: Salford, September 8 1934. Educated: Leigh Grammar; Manchester University and Royal Manchester College of Music; '62-64 Princeton. Some positions held: 1959-62 music teacher, Cirencester Grammar; '75-80 professor of composition, Royal Northern College of Music; '85 visiting professor of composition, Harvard; '85-94 associate composer/conductor, Scottish Chamber Orchestra (now composer laureate).

Some works: 1962 Fantasia on an In Nomine of John Taverner; '66 Revelation and Fall; '69 Eight Songs for a Mad King; '69 Vesalii Icones, '69 Worldes Blis; '70 Taverner; '76 The Martyrdom of St Magnus; '76-2000 Symphonies 1-7; '79 Black Pentecost; '85 An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise; '85 Violin Concerto; '86-96 Strathclyde Concertos 1-10; '97 Piano Concerto; '97 Mavis in Las Vegas; 2000 Antarctic Symphony. Honours: 1981 CBE; '87 knighted; 2004 Master of the Queen's Music. The St Magnus Festival continues until June 23. Peter Maxwell Davies conducts his Antarctic Symphony at the Proms on August 4. Three of his works will also be played at a Prom to celebrate his 70th birthday on September 8.

British Composer Peter Maxwell Davies Dies At 81 : Deceptive Cadence : NPR British Composer Peter Maxwell Davies Dies At 81 British composer Peter Maxwell Davies was Master of the Queen's Music from 2004-2014. Ross Gilmore/Redferns hide caption toggle caption Ross Gilmore/Redferns Prolific and multifaceted British composer and conductor Peter Maxwell Davies died Monday at age 81 at his home in the Orkney Islands, off the northern coast of Scotland. His death, from leukemia, was reported on the websites of both his publisher and his management company . Called the "harlequin of British music" for more than five decades in a tribute by author Paul Griffiths , Maxwell Davies leaves a trove of varied works. Within some 300 pieces, there are 10 symphonies (hailed by the Times of London as "the most important symphonic cycle since Shostakovich"), concertos, operas, song cycles, chamber music of all kinds, ballets, choral pieces and music for children. His latest work, The Hogboon, an opera for children, will debut with the London Symphony Orchestra June 26.

He'll be remembered for both his controversial, expressionistic early works and later, more lyrical pieces incorporating elements of folk music, such as An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, a 1985 tone poem that features bagpipes. YouTube One of the composer's more recent concertos inspired by seascapes near his island home of Sanday, Orkney is Fiddler on the Shore, written for violinist Daniel Hope, who premiered the piece at the 2009 BBC Proms concerts with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Article continues after sponsorship "His music had a romantic and yet robust expression, which was particularly endearing," Hope wrote in an email. "He was a great composer, a fine musician and a true gent. He also had an extremely wicked sense of humor and a way of looking at the world that was refreshingly original. He'll be greatly missed." Maxwell Davies was born Sept. 8, 1934 in Salford, just outside Manchester. Composing seemed to come naturally for him. He wrote his first pieces in 1942 while still learning to play the piano.

Later he studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music, Princeton University and Manchester University, where he helped form a coterie of like-minded composers interested in the latest serial techniques — including Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr — known as the New Music Manchester group. With a keen ear on the popular modernists of the times, such as Pierre Boulez, Maxwell Davies was also deeply influenced by the masters of the past, especially choral music from the English Renaissance. In 1962 he began in earnest the composing of his opera Taverner, inspired by 16th-century composer John Taverner. The music and ideas in the opera folded back on themselves and triggered a period of "parody and distortion" in his music, as Griffiths describes it. At this time Maxwell Davies was beginning to earn his first important commissions, including one for the popular Proms concert series in London. He was also finishing up his directorship of music at the Cirencester Grammar School, initiating his longstanding dedication to music education in Britain. Not everyone took the composer's music to heart, at least right away.

As reported by the BBC , people shouted "rubbish" at the 1969 premiere of his music-theater work Eight Songs for a Mad King . And earlier today in an email Griffiths recalled attending the debut of the composer's Worldes Blis: Motet for Orchestra, which inspired much of the audience to walk out in protest. The year 1971 marked a turning point in the composer's music, coinciding with his move to the austere landscapes of the Orkney Islands. Maxwell Davies began writing music in a more relaxed vein, inspired by his surroundings, in pieces such as the song cycle Stone Litany, the chamber symphony A Mirror of Whitening Light and the solo piano piece Farewell to Stromness, part of The Yellow Cake Revue, a musical protest in cabaret form against uranium mining in the Orkney Islands. Maxwell Davies was showered with honors, including knighthood in 1987. In 2004 he was appointed Master of the Queen's Music, a 10-year position, and in 2014 he was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honor.

The composer also thrived as a conductor, and held positions with the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic. He regularly led top orchestras around the world, and for 20 years directed his own chamber ensemble, Fires of London. Although he lived in a solitary place, Maxwell Davies believed composers should interact with society at large. It was a belief, Griffiths writes, that "took him from working as a school music master when he was in his mid-twenties to serving as Master of the Queen's Music through his seventies. Answering an evident need, wherever it came from, he could compose a musical play for young children or a birthday ode for the monarch with the same care and relish he brought to a string quartet or an opera." Peter Maxwell Davies, composer with royal ties, dies at 81 | Daily Mail Online Peter Maxwell Davies, composer with royal ties, dies at 81 LONDON (AP) — Peter Maxwell Davies, an experimental, socially radical composer who served as Queen Elizabeth II's official master of music, has died. He was 81. Davies' management company, Intermusica, said he died Monday of leukemia at his home in Scotland's Orkney islands.

One of Britain's best-known modern composers, Davies — Max to his friends — created around 300 works including concertos, 10 symphonies, the operas "Taverner" and "The Lighthouse," and music-theater piece "Eight Songs for a Mad King," about the current queen's troubled ancestor, George III. FILE - This is a June 19, 1996 file photo of composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies posing for a photograph in London. Maxwell Davies, who served as Queen Elizabeth II's official master of music, has died at 81. Davies' management company, Intermusica, says he died Monday March 14, 2016 of leukemia at his home in Scotland's Orkney islands. One of Britain's best-known modern composers, Davies created some 300 works including symphonies, the operas "Taverner" and "The Lighthouse," and "Eight Songs for a Mad King," about the current queen's troubled ancestor, George III. (AP Photo, File) His work could be bold and challenging or quietly lyrical.

A strong environmentalist, Davies drew inspiration from the rugged, wind-swept Orkneys, where he lived for four decades — including several years in a cottage without electricity. The composition "An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise" became one of his most popular works, and in 1977 he founded Orkney's St. Magnus Festival, an annual arts event where many of his works were given their premieres. He wove social and political themes into compositions including his 9th Symphony, which Davies said contained a military-style section reflecting his opposition to the "disastrous" invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. His 2011 opera "Kommilitonen!" was about student activism around the world. Among his final works is children's opera "The Hogboon," which is due to have its world premiere in June under Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra. Born in Manchester, northwest England, in 1934, Davies trained at Royal Manchester College of Music before further study in Italy and at Princeton University. In addition to composing he conducted, for orchestras including the BBC Philharmonic, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic.

With his anti-establishment views and avant-garde musical leanings, Davies was a surprise choice in 2004 as Master of the Queen's Music. The honorary position, founded in 1626, is traditionally conferred by the monarch on a musician of distinction. The position has no fixed duties, although the Master may compose pieces for royal or state occasions. Davies held the post for a decade, and told the Daily Telegraph in 2010 that the role had made him moderate his anti-monarchist views. "I have come to realize that there is a lot to be said for the monarchy," he said. "It represents continuity, tradition and stability." In 2005, Davies received a police warning after officers found the body of a swan — a protected species — at his home. The composer said the bird had died after flying into a power line and he had used it for food; when police officers arrived, he offered them swan terrine. "I think they were rather horrified," he told the BBC.

But, he said, "I was brought up in the war and you don't waste food." His friend Sally Groves, former creative director at Schott Music, said Davies had been "a remarkable composer who created music theatre works of searing power, great symphonies, intense chamber music; works of truly universal popularity." Funeral details were not immediately available. Share or comment on this article Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article. Bing DON'T MISS Twinning! Kim Kardashian and Kendall Jenner forgo undergarments as they don nearly matching sheer lace gowns for Ocean's Eight cameo 'She could be turning up on my doorstep with the baby': Ex On The Beach star Joshua Ritchie claims he's 'worried' Stephanie Davis' tot is his Baby joy!

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Tom Hardy confirms he'd like to play James Bond... as he awkwardly dodges question about Daniel Craig's replacement 007 ambitions 'Where is Kendall's other leg?' Fans freak out after spotting missing limb in viral picture with Kylie Jenner and Hailey Baldwin Naked and proud! Orlando Bloom's friends pose with nude cutout of actor paddle-boarding at his 40th bash They can all laugh about it now 'Mum and baby are doing great!' Armie Hammer and wife Elizabeth 'overjoyed' after welcoming their second child First son together 'My mates down there': Rita Ora makes suggestive Snapchat comment as she shares racy image of herself in red lingerie...

days after NAKED bath shots Corrie's Kym Marsh and Simon Gregson are supported by real-life partners as they scatter their stillborn child's ashes in heartbreaking new scenes 'The results are heavenly': Chloe Madeley flaunts her impeccably toned abs as she shares series of progress pictures in a skimpy crop top 'It melted my foot!' Ed Sheeran was left unable to walk and needing a skin graft after treading in a boiling geyser on break from spotlight Horrific injury Roxanne Pallett slams the 'lazy' seamstress who told her she needed to lose weight to fit into a costume despite already being a size 8 Danielle Lloyd SLAMS ex Jamie O'Hara's claims he gives her £15,000-a-month... and insists he DID slap her during THAT Vegas row Ella Henderson flaunts her womanly curves in plunging ruffle bikini during sun-soaked winter holiday to St. Lucia Time for some R&R Life's a beach! Big Brother's Lisa Appleton struggles to contain her ample assets in skimpy emerald bikini as she soaks up the sun in Spain 'I hate it...

I have to kiss her!' Laura Whitmore, 31, is left red-faced as Shane Ritchie, 52, jokes about their steamy kiss in upcoming play Kim Woodburn's devastating secret resurfaces 50 years after she gave birth to a stillborn baby and buried it in a park as she struggles on TV 'I've never even been this proud of my kids!' Holly Willoughby praises her pet cats when they start performing impromptu tricks live on This Morning New mum Stephanie Davis shares second snap of her baby son as she chooses the tot's godfather... while ex Jeremy McConnell parties in Thailand Billionaire Russian oligarch spends £3.5MILLION hiring Elton John and Mariah Carey for his 19-year-old granddaughter's wedding at London hotel Bella Hadid marks VS debut by getting wings tattooed onto her ankle...

as she continues to endure heartache of ex The Weeknd hooking up Selena Gomez Make-up free Millie Mackintosh shows off her natural beauty and enviably lean legs as she dons her workout wear and winter warmers to hit the gym 'She slayed that performance': British girl, 7, stuns viewers of Filipino talent show with a SPOT ON impersonation of Taylor Swift Meet the new Earl of Snowdon and his heiress wife! How the family of a furniture maker who likes to cycle around London will step into the spotlight La dolce vita! Formula One champion Nico Rosberg snuggles up to glamorous wife Vivian as they enjoy a romantic holiday in Rome La La Land star Ryan Gosling cringes as he is forced to watch himself dancing to a 1980s dance hit as a child - but the internet is left amazed by his moves Getting pizza all over her frock, and interrupting interviews: Nicole Kidman's 'bizarre behaviour' at the Golden Globes revealed Roman holiday!

Doting mum Christina Ricci enjoys day of sightseeing in Italian capital with son Freddie, 2, and husband James Soaked in the sights Mariah Carey, 46, dazzles in statement jacket as she steps out for dinner with toyboy beau Bryan Tanaka, 33, and daughter Monroe, 5, in London . 'It looks ridiculous': Lisa Riley reveals she is surgically removing her 'horrendous' excess skin as she admits she still has insecurities after 10st slim down 'I don't care if I'm two stone lighter, I'm miserable!' Chris Evans rants about his dry January battle on Radio 2 show saying 'every day feels the same' Geordie Shore star Holly Hagan displays her ample bosom in a skimpy blue bikini as sun-soaked trip to Thailand continues Soaking up the sunshine 'I love guys!' Adam Thomas urges Emmerdale bosses to make his character gay so he can experience 'snogging' another man Keen for a new direction We're all going on a summer holiday! Sir Cliff Richard looks tanned and happy as he beams while greeting relatives in Barbados Veteran entertainer Benedict's familiar parents, a homage to the greatest ever Holmes and a VERY famous Viking...

so did YOU spot the 'Easter eggs' hidden in last night's Sherlock finale? This soap star needs a good rinse! Bikini-clad Emmerdale star Gemma Atkinson rubs mud all over her toned body as she enjoys a cooling dip in Cape Verde 'We didn't go out of our way to keep it secret': Katherine Kelly reveals she has given birth to a second child called Rose after keeping pregnancy under wraps PICTURE EXCLUSIVE Kourtney Kardashian, 37, wears a sheer bra for late-night rendezvous with former flame Justin Bieber, 22 Head Start to Home Cooked

Question: What position is currently held by Peter Maxwell Davies?
Answer: MASTER OF THE QUEEN'S MUSIC