Max - A Musical Portrait Of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

This piece, Farewell To Stromness

has since it was written been consistently in the classical charts.

It was written by arguably our greatest living composer

and master of the Queen's music,

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

My name is Paul Joyce.

I'm a director and artist, and my experience as a young film-maker

was fundamentally changed when I saw Ken Russell's film The Devils.

Ken's images combined with Max's abrasive, yet eloquent music made these sequences a quite

unforgettable experience, showing me a few filmic language, literally changing my life as a director.

And then I wanted to hear everything that Max had written.

This now extends to ten operas, eight symphonies, literally hundreds of works in all.

He is, without doubt, one of our greatest and most prolific, classical composers.

As master of the Queen's music, one of the highest honours British composer can receive,

Max follows in a tradition which included William Boyce,

Edward Elgar, Arnold Bax and Arthur Bliss.

But the title carries no obligation.

Max writes what he wants when he wants to.

For this, I believe, he received the traditional yearly payment

of a sack but of sherry from the Royal household.

So I have come to this remote Scottish island on a personal pilgrimage

to meet a childhood hero who is now both an inspiration and a friend.

He is personally one of the kindest men I have ever met, but as a composer, he takes no captives.

His music can be as direct and raw as the world he has been observing

for over seven decades, and thank goodness he shows no signs of letting up now.

Do you adopt an absolute routine?

Are you here at nine or...

I'm here as soon as I can be in the morning, but of course, I spend time

in the kitchen preparing the day's food, and as soon as I can...

9.30 or so... I am also sitting here.

I also take the dog for her walk every day no matter what the weather at about seven.

-Yesterday we were talking about your beginnings and your childhood, which was I think Salford, wasn't it?

-Yes.

It was from I suppose a working-class background, and I loved and hated

the place, but I particularly enjoyed Trafford Road, my grandfather's shop.

I didn't know at the time, but it was a venue for prostitutes, and there were brothels along there because

the docks were next door, and I used to evidently say to my grandparents

that I liked those beautiful ladies, and I remember particularly...

It must have been '38 or '39...

I was taken there to see The Gondoliers, a local

amateur production, and I thought this reality was rather better than the one that was everyday.

There was an orchestra there too, and I'd never heard a live orchestra before,

and that was the first big musical experience of my life, and it was...

I do remember I wanted to be involved with something like that.

I was sent to a lady called Ms Sally Jones for piano lessons when I was eight.

I took to this, just loved it, and I started to write music.

I didn't know you could buy music paper which had the five lines written out for you.

I drew them myself. Do you remember the first piano piece that you did?

I remember it started like this...

That's how it started.

I was eight years old, and I have never forgotten it.

So we're entering basically the war about that time, aren't we?

How did that affect you there?

I think the war affected everybody in Salford and Manchester very strongly.

When the bombing really got started and all of those nights just sat in the pantry

under the stairs with a little portable wind-up gramophone playing

my parent's collection of foxtrot records, which I really liked...

you heard the explosions and the bombs going off,

and one night, of course, the...

two houses next door were blown up.

A long time after the war, I wrote this piece,

St Thomas Wake based on a pavane of that name by John Bull,

the 17th century English composer, and in my mind,

I kept hearing this foxtrot band at the side of the orchestra, and I realised

the whole memory was coming back of playing foxtrots as the bombs fell.

UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS

Music it's totally silly music, but it was part of childhood.

I couldn't do music for the exams. There was no teaching,

and the headmaster when I asked could I please do music for my

school certificate or O-level, he said, "This is not a girl's school".

When it came to school leaving age, I didn't tell him, and I just sent off to County Hall in Preston, got

the syllabus and entered for the exam myself,

and on the back of that I got a Lancashire County music scholarship,

and I went to Manchester University Music Department, and the first time I really met people

who were interested in music was when I went to the college in Manchester.

And that was a revelation. There were people who were really, really passionate

about the whole thing.

But, again, there was

no encouragement at the university itself to be interested in music.

This was, I found...

even then I found this quite astonishing.

At the time that you're beginning to compose and had that

excitement of a creative life, you must have been developing sexually as well, and at what point

did you become aware that you were different in that respect too?

I think I became aware of that when I was about 14.

I think I was very much helped to come to terms with this by being able to read.

I did find...

all in French, of course, the books of Andre Gide which deal with the subject

of being gay in a very, very positive way, and so I think they saved my sanity

when I was about 14, 15, and incidentally gave me a good knowledge of French too because they...

Oh, and what was extraordinary was that I borrowed these things from the Manchester Central Library,

and they didn't question my taking these French books out, but I asked,

"Could I borrow Ulysses by James Joyce?"

And they said, "No, no. Certainly not.

"That's not for children."

I think I was looked after by friends, particularly Alexander Goehr

was a real threat because he knew

more about music than they did at that Manchester University Music Department, somebody

who was completely conversant, completely at ease with that whole musical world, and they knew it.

He was wicked, and he told me this story that they went into this

lecture, which was a lecture on music history, and nobody turned up to give it,

so Sandy Goehr stood up and gave them a lecture on music history,

and everybody thought he was the teacher.

He said to his publisher in London, you know, "You should be publishing Max's music"

as well as mine. I thought that was marvellous of him, very generous, and indeed.

They did take me on, and I think in 1956 or so they actually did produce

my very early five piano pieces, and there they are. It's still in print.

They did start to do some of my very early pieces around.

I wrote a piece for a summer school, which I was invited to by William Glock, who ran it.

I went to the summer school in Germany

I made my connections with Italy and eventually went on

to study with in Rome, and it slowly started to happen then.

But looking back, I thought at the time, well, this must be what happens to every composer.

Of course, it isn't.

'I had to earn money when I came back from studying with Petrassi in Italy,'

and I decided, well, I'll give school teaching

a go, so I got a job at Cirencester Grammar School, and I taught music.

And I realised that music teaching is very often concerned with the safety

of the people who are teaching it.

They don't want their ideas to be disturbed, their pre-set ideas,

and so music teaching is about singing and playing music

which already exists.

Music teaching should be about creating music, and young people are perfectly capable of doing that.

I just expected it, and they did it.

If you expect something, they do it, and it was the lack of inhibition which I found so refreshing, and I

think without those children writing together what they called operas, which are little music theatre works

for performance in class, and they rehearsed them and performed them for their colleagues in class,

I wouldn't have had the lack of inhibition necessary to write things like Miss Donnithorne's Maggot,

Eight Songs For A Mad King and so on.

I can directly lay down the responsibility for those pieces with my watching

how young people collectively in a small group

and individually wrote and improvised their music at Cirencester.

'George III in his madness with...

I originally had the instrumentalists in cages to be the birds that he was

trying to teach to sing.

I have the little automatic organ. You turn a handle,

and this lovely little organ, late 18th century thing,

it plays eight tunes, and these are the Eight Songs For A Mad King,

although I didn't use them literally.

I used something based on the tunes which this thing plays you,

and there we are with the birds in the cages,

who are the instrumentalists, and he has a dialogue with these various instrumentalists.

'I wrote the Eight Songs For A Mad King very, very quickly.'

It was just two or three weeks, and I'd never done anything like it

'but I just wanted to explore that madness, if you like,

'and it was not, as some of the critics at the time accused me of,'

making fun of a mad person in the figure of George.

It was perhaps more a question

'of trying to make us aware of our own madnesses

'by sympathising with his.'

'When I first heard it in the early 80s,'

and I was invited to perform it in Wales,

and I first heard it on a recording,

and my immediate reaction was, "There's no way I can ever sing this piece.

"It's so dark." It was seen to be reaching parts of me or the singer

that I wasn't sure I wanted to go to.

I found that the way for me is to come from a dramatic impetus,

'and so the sounds come from that drama.'

Initially, I had to find a way of singing it...

how to do it, but then I had to find ways of, why am I doing it?

I quote Handel. I quote ridiculous foxtrot music, which, of course,

George III would not have had access to

but he does contribute to the crazy happenings going on in his head of which he's trying to make sense.

I sang it in Australia, and Max was there, and after I performed it,

two doctors came up to me independently,

and they said, "What we've seen on stage is exactly how a

"person in that state of mind is."

The ending where his doctor comes on stage,

and he's a percussion player, and beats him offstage

with a cat o' nine tails on large bass drum,

and he's reduced to really animal noises...

I still think it's a very touching moment.

They could not save him.

His mouth was never still.

Sometimes he howled like a dog.

And he veiled the mirrors not to see himself pass by,

for his eyes had turned to black currant jelly.

Poor fellow. I weep for him.

He will die.

Howl...

Howling...howling...

..howling...

I came to Orkney first in 1970 just as a tourist.

I wanted to see the cathedral.

I knew there that they were singing in thirds

in the 12th century as opposed to everywhere else that was singing

in fourths and fifths, and I wanted to see where this had started and also to see the stone-age monuments.

The next day I had planned to go to Hoy, and lo and behold,

there was a fellow on the boat who said, "I think I know you.

"You are the composer," this, that and the other.

He was a dealer in manuscripts.

And he said, "I'm going out to Hoy because one of my authors is on Hoy having a holiday."

That's George MacKay Brown.

"We're all going to have lunch together. Why don't you come along?"

And so I went along for lunch and met George, and we had a lot of whiskey, beer and wine.

It was all wonderful, and George says,

"Well, there's that house up the hill there which has been empty since 1918.

"What a marvellous site." And I thought, yes, it's a wonderful site for writing music.

It had the best view out of the nonexistent windows

and looking out through the nonexistent roof,

but that became a house where I lived for 28 years, in Rackwick,

and where I wrote all my music in those years, without exception, I think.

When I first came, I think the most important thing was silence.

It was a revelation that you could clear your ears, and it was the

first time in my life I'd experienced that kind of quietness.

Such a beautiful place, and to be alone in it

just with your thoughts, with the music in your head

and with that landscape - I loved it.

I think those ritual places,

these stone circles in Orkney...

Even where you see places where people lived,

like Maeshowe with the stone furniture from the stone age,

I find that very moving, and particularly a temple,

which, obviously, the circles were,

they're a very, very special, ritual holy place

and I feel there's a magic there.

I wouldn't speculate about what the rituals were,

but with something like the Stones Of Brodgar where the stones are slightly hollow

and they act as sound reflectors, you can have a good idea.

I'm sure music has a part in ritual through history and pre-history.

Cries, bangings on drums, summons to attention, shouts, chanting.

That must have happened.

I've a theory people communicated by singing first before speech.

So my association here was a very strong response

to that landscape and the seascape.

I think the sea has played an enormous part in my work.

The sound of it, then the history of it,

which George Mackay Brown, his work is full of that relationship of the local people and the sea.

It gets through, you don't have to think about it, it just gets into the music.

In the late 60s, a group called the Pierrot players

was to perform works by Harry Birtwistle and me.

And Harry said, the performances we're getting of our works

by these conductors, and there weren't many of them,

are so awful we couldn't do worse than conduct ourselves.

So we actually conducted,

although we had no experience as conductors whatever.

And with that group I found myself,

when it was called the Fires Of London, going all over the world,

'and Ken Russell must have heard the group or have liked a piece of mine

'and he wanted me to write music for his film, The Devils.

'Particularly with the last part of that film where Grandier is burnt alive at the stake,'

I think the musicians themselves

were much more affected by the music

'and its relation to the images on screen.

'When we saw it in black and white, not in colour

'with just the music,

'and these rather grainy images,'

it was much more affecting

than when words were added in rather polite English accents.

Because one had this extraordinary almost dumb show where language,

the spoken word didn't appear at all.

And I learnt a lot from that, about opera.

I find this landscape of course totally different and the reason

I left Hoy was, I thought you getting old now and there I had to walk about

a mile uphill to the house from the nearest point you could get a car.

Here you can get a car right to the house. What a luxury!

You can go to a shop here quite easily,

it's about a six or seven minute drive away.

On Hoy, that wasn't possible.

Anyway you've been here for 28 years, how about a change?

And I decided this was a totally magic place which I still believe it is.

It has a very special atmosphere here.

And I fell in love with the place and here I am,

and I've been writing music here now it must be nearly ten years.

I think music does unlock something which no other art-form does.

It makes time recognisable.

And I think a time that exists inside a work of music

is a much more real time because it has whole depths.

It has perspectives, vanishing points like architectural perspective.

There is an unfolding flow, of the eloquent discourse,

which could only take place in time that's entirely abstract.

You challenge people yet you hope they have a good time.

You have to challenge them, take their intellect further,

their emotional responses further, their musicality further.

And music in the last three centuries I think has reflected

many, many more aspects of life than could possibly have done

with the vocabulary which was available to composers before that.

And when you've done a big piece sometimes it's wonderful to relax

and have a good time.

I did an arrangement of Fantasia And Two Pavans by Purcell.

And I turned one of these pavans into a foxtrot.

It changes as if the speed starts to drop so you have to rush

to the gramophone and wind it up again in the middle.

And it finishes with the percussionist imitating

exactly that scraping sound on a side drum with wire brushes.

It reminds me of Mavis.

Yes.

And there's a little story attached to that, isn't there?

Yes, that was at this piece I wrote for the BBC Phil,

a little present after we'd done a tour of the United States.

And we played in Las Vegas.

And we stayed in this pink Flamingo Hilton I think it was called.

And I had this arrangement that a phone call was coming through

from the Independent in London.

The journalist had telephoned the hotel and asked for me

and the receptionist said,

"No, there's nobody of that name staying here, you must have it wrong."

So the fellow said "He's a very important conductor

"and composer and I've got him down as staying at that hotel."

The receptionist said, "If he's that important, he wouldn't be staying at this hotel, would he?"

And it turned out they got me down because the computer couldn't

cope with my long name, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

It had got me down as Mavis.

All these pieces from Farewell To Stromness right through

to the symphonies and quartets are part of the same imagination.

I can hear all of the connections

'and I have no trouble going from one to the other.

'Farewell To Stromness, which a lot of people play these days,

'that was written as part of a part of a political protest,

'against a proposed mining of uranium in Orkney.'

They were going to sink the core of the mine just two miles outside Stromness.

That would have been the end of this beautiful little town.

It would have been the end of agriculture and fishing,

who wants to eat anything which comes from somewhere which is radioactive in that sense

with the yellow cake being blown all over in the gales,

which of course happens here, you have huge gales.

So, it was a big protest,

it would have been the end of the islands as we know them.

And that was just a little piano interlude, Farewell To Stromness.

It would have been farewell and I wrote it off the top of my head.

After all, I wrote Eight Songs For A Mad King, didn't I?

And I'm not known to be particularly a supporter of royalty.

I do remember very well the first time I met her,

upon being appointed Master of the Queen's Music.

I went into Buckingham Palace

and a door opened and she welcomed me and, at that moment, I gather, I was Master of the Queen's Music.

That was the official point. And we sat down and discussed the possibilities.

And she asked me what I wanted to make of it.

And I asked her what she would like of it.

She said, well, Prince Philip and she would like to be guided on this

and they were very willing to listen.

And I thought that was very good.

The thing that impressed me most was I had taken in,

and I hadn't forewarned anybody about this,

a recording for Westminster Cathedral, the Catholic cathedral.

I handed this over and said, "I hope you might have time to listen to a track."

She said, "Oh, Westminster Cathedral, could you tell me

"why they sound so different than the other choirs at St Paul's and Westminster Abbey?"

So I told her about the continental way of voice production

and using the whole body

and it gives, in the boys, this totally different, what we call the continental sound.

And she said, "Thank you for telling me that, I had no idea."

And she had noticed that entirely herself

and I thought, "I am dealing with a very serious person here and you had better watch it,

"because she is not a lady who is going to miss a trick."

I don't know whether art is useful or not,

but I do know that it's necessary, that without it, we are not civilised.

Perhaps, often, with it, we remain relatively uncivilised.

But, it does open up possibilities of civilising the human mind.

'I have often said that writing a string quartet is like dancing naked in public.

'You can't have any flaws at all. It's totally exposed.

'Your thought has to be absolutely clear and pristine.'

And that is why I wanted the challenge of writing quartets.

And then, at last, came the opportunity to write not one quartet but ten, for Naxos Records.

The weight of each one was very important,

for instance, the Third Quartet,

where I absolutely exploded with rage.

It shattered any preconceived images musically I had for that piece

because of the invasion of Iraq,

which I just saw as a betrayal, totally scandalous and illegal.

That's faster than I wrote it.

-But isn't it the tempo?

-Yes.

-Is that OK?

-That's lovely.

-Good.

Cos that's what we're worried about, that if we take it this speed,

it feels the whole time it's very tight from moment to moment.

Yes.

-You know these, as it were, pillars between the motions?

-Yeah.

These things.

I wonder if you can actually show us that this is a pillar in your physical attitude.

As opposed to it being an arrival?

Yes, it's a static point.

In which case, would you mind if we didn't rush on them too much?

Exactly.

-Presumably bar one's a pillar, too.

-Yes.

The flying skirts are coming out at the end.

You know that's one of the silliest bits of violin writing ever written.

Absolutely. Yes.

It is crackers, I'm afraid.

Yes, who wrote this?!

I don't know. Ought to be certified.

The Maggini Quartet were interested in at least premiering the first one, maybe two.

Well, they did the lot and did a wonderful job

and they made the recordings.

In a way, initially, retreating from the hurly burly of the South of England,

particularly of London,

was a very positive step but it was no ivory-tower existence

because there was I touring all over the world with the group,

the Fires of London,

going to performances increasingly all over the world with my work,

so there were all those outside commitments which prevented me

from becoming in any way a recluse.

Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen!

And I think that we so far rehearsed very well

so let's just very quickly go through things.

Save it for tonight, do save it.

Don't blast away everything in the rehearsal.

CROWD CHATTER

Concerto? Fine.

So somebody should inform the soloist.

'It's fascinating, not just to play contemporary music

'but to work on contemporary music with living composers.

'It's always fascinated me because I like to know what's going on in their head

'and what the exchange is, how much flexibility does one have

'and that varies greatly from composer to composer.'

No, that triplet at 86...

The triplet at 86,

# Da da da pa pam #

I was finding I had to wait.

"Oh, my goodness. That'll be difficult!"

That's the first reaction that you look at when you just see the notes on the page

and in fact it was a written manuscript

so, you know, it was daunting

and then you sit down and you take time and you take a deep breath

and you start to really read what's there

and I thought, "Ah! Interesting. Yes".

So then you get the fiddle out or I did in any case

and started going through and seeing what would be the difficulties,

you know, where were the moments in the piece that would be the most challenging for me.

Yes, I did give him quite a lot of technical challenges

and I gave them to myself, let's be fair, writing this piece.

I did things here that I'd not worked out before

and they're quite fresh and new, especially for and in this piece.

The moment I look forward immensely to,

you've had these climaxes and this very dramatic melody.

Then the double basses hold this long note

and then I have, sort of, this, this chance to really put all the feeling

that has been, kind of, gathering up in the piece

into these next three or four minutes,

which are simple but extremely touching.

To what detail did Max go in relation to having time with a fiddler

on the shore near where he lives?

Oh, I just took a walk.

With that walk, I had the idea of the piece.

It was just instantly there.

I had to work it all out but I knew I had a good idea

and that was going to be the basis of the piece.

I've never really had much personal ambition.

Right from the start, I took it for granted

that this is what a composer did -

that you have struggles, you have performances,

you find publishers, your performances increase,

you probably have to play the piano in your pieces,

you probably have to conduct your pieces,

the things that all the composers in the past have had to do.

And that is indeed what has happened

but you think back and you think,

"Well, it could not have been necessarily like that at all!"

People might not have wanted to play your work.

Nobody would possibly, if it had been just a bit different, wanted to publish it

and you would've got nowhere and you would've had to do another job.

I know that when I was very young,

my Uncle Arthur offered me very seriously

a job as a bricklayer.

And he was very annoyed with my parents for letting me take up my scholarship to go to study music.

He said, "I'm paying taxes for your boy to go and study this rubbish".

"He can come and do an honest job with me and be a bricklayer".

APPLAUSE

Personal ambition - I don't think I ever thought about that.

I didn't want to conduct orchestras. I didn't want to be famous - not interested.

I wanted to enjoy to the full a musical life

and I must admit, I have done that so far

and I intend to go on doing it.

What are the things that you still want to achieve?

What do I want to achieve?

I think the first thing is once to write a piece of music that I

feel really satisfied with.

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