Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: Master and Maverick

This is the story of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies,

the British composer who, for over 50 years,

amazed, surprised,

and sometimes shocked audiences.

If you have any problems in getting to grips with

so-called "difficult" modern music,

the answer, quite often, is to hear it often enough.

# Ah-ah-ah-ah

# Am-fa... #

HE NEIGHS LIKE A HORSE # Eee... #

Who the hell wrote that?

With astonishing clips from the BBC television archive,

we'll trace Max's extraordinary journey

from the iconoclastic young rebel from Salford...

I don't want to be pompous about it but

I am at the beginning of something.

..to his surprise appointment as Master of the Queen's Music in 2004.

The Queen has a very positive attitude to this.

There are mysterious happenings in Italy...

SCREAMING

..magic from his adopted home in the Orkney Islands,

including the most famous bagpipe solo in classical music.

MUSIC: An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise by Peter Maxwell Davies

And his music, as we'll hear,

is as charming and as complex as the man himself.

Am I this or am I this?

Or am I this or perhaps that?

Or perhaps I am not any of those things at all

and there's nothing behind the mask.

MUSIC: Farewell To Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies

Peter Maxwell Davies was a true master and a true maverick -

serious in intent but playful in approach.

He was born in 1934 to a working-class family

in the city of Salford in Greater Manchester.

There was a piano in the house of my father's parents,

which I got when I was eight years old,

and so I was pushed to learn the piano.

Before that, I loved music anyway.

I'd been taking to a local performance of Gilbert and Sullivan

and thought that was absolutely miraculous

and, even then, I had the idea that I wanted to have to do with that -

not so much interpreting it but making it -

and, evidently, I went around the house

singing operas of my own making at the age of four.

Precociously gifted, in his late teens,

he started at the Royal Manchester College of Music,

where he encountered a group of like-minded misfits.

We formed this group, which was Sandy Goehr's idea -

New Music Manchester -

and we just laughed and enjoyed it and got on with it.

What I was doing was trying to form a sort of Communist Party cadre

in the Manchester College

because, although we were very different personalities,

we had one thing in common -

we disliked the same people.

We thought that the Establishment

was so stupid

that there was no point

in being angry about it.

You just had to get on

and do your own thing, which we did.

We took my Trumpet Sonata down and did it at

a concert at the Arts Council Great Drawing Room.

MUSIC: Sonata For Trumpet And Piano by Peter Maxwell Davies

I remember the place was packed -

to our utter amazement, you couldn't get in.

And there was a gentleman standing next to me, and he turned to me,

quite pale and stressed, and said, "Who the hell wrote that?"

His next ground-breaking work was his first composition for

full orchestra, the ambitious Prolation.

MUSIC: Prolation by Peter Maxwell Davies

For me, it was ground-breaking

because I hadn't worked with an orchestra before.

I'd never had that palette.

I learnt a lot from the mistakes I made in that piece.

I think one must always

learn from one's mistakes.

I worked out, in that piece,

structural principles which have been very helpful

throughout my whole lifetime,

and I felt that this was very important,

then in the late '50s particularly,

because the whole question of the composition techniques

that a composer employs had gone into some kind of melting pot.

It all had to be pulled together and fashioned into something

that would stand me in good stead for the next 100 years.

There was no better time to be a rebel,

a revolutionary, an iconoclast,

than the early 1960s,

and Max's radicalism was about finding a new musical language -

bringing the avant-garde to Britain.

But what made him so distinctive was that

he found his materials in the deep musical and spiritual past -

in medieval plainchant, in techniques of rhythm

and melody and harmony, and in a heightened sense of mysticism,

as well as the experimentation of the 20th century.

And from the start, Max was no ivory-tower ascetic.

He wanted his music to connect with the audiences who heard it

and the performers who played it.

He believed that he could unleash

a social as well as imaginative power through his pieces,

whether they were written for his brilliant musical friends

in Manchester, or for professional ensembles, or for schoolchildren.

And all of that is captured in Max's first TV appearance,

Humphrey Burton's luminous film,

made for the BBC arts programme Monitor.

Peter Maxwell Davies is 26 and he lives in the country.

As a composer, he's a revolutionary.

His music is advanced, difficult and highly individual.

Everything he writes is seized upon by the critics

and his music is already played,

not only in England, but all over the world.

This sort of thing.

HE PLAYS DISSONANT NOTES IN A STACCATO RHYTHM

I don't want to be pompous about it but I have got enough confidence

to know that I am at the beginning of something.

It's difficult to make a living as a composer

and Peter Maxwell Davies, when he stopped being a student,

became a teacher - a music master at Cirencester Grammar School.

He's no ordinary teacher.

HE PLAYS: Noel by Olivier Messiaen

Messiaen's Noel, contrasting absolutely and completely

the much more sober prelude which we had of Johann Sebastian Bach.

HE PLAYS: Prelude by Bach

Peter Maxwell Davies has organised

-his life with fanatical efficiency.

-HE PLAYS HARPSICHORD

This apple loft is his studio. He converted it himself.

It's a strictly functional place, stripped for musical action,

and almost like a monk's cell in its implicitly.

This is the nerve centre of his small universe,

and he's got twice the nervous energy of most people.

As a composer, Maxwell Davies makes no compromises

and no concessions to popular taste.

Even at festivals of contemporary music, audiences are baffled,

and one British Symphony Orchestra laughed at a score of his,

saying it was unplayable.

HE PLAYS DISSONANT PIANO

A lot of people have criticised me

for writing music in which they find no meaning.

What does keep me awake at nights is the method of expression,

the technique of composition.

My mode of thought is often very complex.

This piano piece, which I wrote in 1955 is,

in the first place, very simple,

but the later development

is more complex.

MUSIC: Five Pieces For Piano by Peter Maxwell Davies

It's the next section of the piece which might cause trouble.

I have often been criticised for this sort of music.

I know that a lot of people find that disagreeable but

I'm very encouraged by the reception this music gets

with the children at the school, who enjoy it.

# Pro virgine Maria

# Hallelujah Hallelujah

# Pro virgine Maria... #

My own music, I think,

communicates something to those children who take the trouble

to listen to it, and certainly to those

who have performed in it.

I'm quite confident that they have enjoyed doing

O Magnum Mysterium, for instance.

THEY PLAY: O Magnum Mysterium by Peter Maxwell Davies

His horizon is wide.

His music is performed in Venice and Berlin and London,

and also in Cirencester which saw the first public performance

of O Magnum Mysterium.

MUSIC: O Magnum Mysterium by Peter Maxwell Davies

REVERENT CHORAL MUSIC

ORCHESTRA PLAYS

Education was right at the core of Max's ideas.

And in 1968, the BBC Schools Department approached him to present

a series on modern classical music for sixth-formers.

DISSONANT PIANO CHORDS

HE PLAYS DISSONANT PIANO

If you have any problems in getting to grips

with so-called "difficult" modern music,

the answer, quite often, is to hear it often enough

and to forget your preconceived prejudices.

THEY PLAY DISSONANT PIECE

# Wie ein blasser Tropfen Bluts

# Farbt die Lippen einer Kranken

# Also ruht auf diesen Tonen

# Ein vernichtungssuchtger Reiz. #

Don't always imagine that you should be able

to whistle melodies immediately.

There is a good deal of Beethoven

that doesn't lend itself to whistling.

And there are even tunes by The Beatles or The Beach Boys

that nobody whistles correctly.

But you can always carry the sounds in your head.

The performing group featured in the Modern Music programmes

had been founded by Max and his friend Harrison Birtwistle

under the name the Pierrot Players.

With a shrewd eye for the spirit of the time,

Max soon relaunched the group

under the hipper label of the Fires Of London.

That name sounds like a pop group and it was intended to.

Birtwistle and I were very conscious

that we had to create a music theatre

of a particular kind which we could transport around,

conduct ourselves with our own group

and it wouldn't cost a great deal of money

because there was no money available.

So, we had to make something which was easy portable,

used a small number of players,

and we hoped would have some kind of impact.

Their next project together, would shock the music world -

Peter Maxwell Davies's anarchic music-theatre masterpiece,

Eight Songs For A Mad King.

And it still shocks now.

I remember there were posters all over the Underground

for the Eight Songs For A Mad King.

Even if you didn't know who Maxwell Davies was,

you knew, if you used the Underground,

that there was going to be a piece based on George III off his trolley.

# If you tell me, I lie

# Let it be a black lie! #

And the central core of it is this classic moment

of pure Maxwell Davies parody.

That was his way of

punching the Establishment.

He took one of the most iconic arias from Messiah,

written by Britain's greatest ADOPTED composer, Handel,

Comfort Ye My People...

# Comfort ye! #

..and he has this poor mad king kind of howling it...

# ..Comfort ye

# ..Comfort ye... #

..and the accompaniment underneath,

based on Handel's harmony, is a foxtrot!

# ..With singing and with dancing

# With milk and with apples

# Sin!

# Sin!

# Sin! #

TUMBLING DISSONANT CHORDS

A tremendous ovation

from a packed and enthusiastic Roundhouse audience for composer

Peter Maxwell Davies with the Fires Of London

of Eight Songs For A Mad King.

The 1970s saw Max's international reputation steadily growing.

This report is from Hans Werner Henze's workshop festival

in Montepulciano in Italy.

THEY PLAY DISSONANT NOTES AND RHYTHMS

Tradimenti, the most audacious show, was staged in the local school

by the avant-garde director Meme Perlini.

To music by Peter Maxwell Davies -

Scottish Dances and Antechrist -

he organised a happening.

Various unconnected scenes ran simultaneously in the classrooms.

Perlini used a mixture of music, poetry,

mime and drama to evoke surrealist images.

I had a dream. There's food all around me

and I'm starving hungry. I can't touch it.

-PERLINI:

-People were embroiled very much there.

People acted in it - local people, I mean, young and old.

And those who had been in it, liked what they did,

whereas many people who just came to see the show

were shocked and provoked and even angry.

SHE SCREAMS

The modernity of this work alienated many people

who were not properly prepared for its inscrutability.

DISSONANT PIANO NOTE

MUSIC: St Thomas Wake by Peter Maxwell Davies

Good evening and welcome to the Royal Albert Hall,

where we'll have echoes of dance music from the 1920s

in tonight's Sunday Prom.

MUSIC: St Thomas Wake by Peter Maxwell Davies

These days, a composer like Peter Maxwell Davies

takes us by surprise when he writes for the orchestra

in a way that departs from tradition.

Well, earlier, I listened, with Max, to the orchestra rehearsing.

And afterwards, I asked him what it was about the foxtrot

that had specially attracted him.

It was the first music that I ever really heard when I was a small boy.

And you heard it under difficult circumstances, if I remember?

Yes, well, I was in Manchester, and Manchester was regularly bombed.

And I remember, I used to have this wind-up gramophone,

and it was one way of getting rid of the din of the exploding bombs...

Was to play foxtrots on the gramophone.

Sir Charles Groves conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra

at the BBC Proms.

But Max's music was changing.

From the 1970s onwards, he would use his hard-won compositional craft

to construct pieces on the biggest possible scale -

a whole series of symphonies, concertos and string quartets.

It might have looked like a change from avant-garde iconoclasm

to paying homage to musical conventions,

but it was nothing of the sort.

Max's project was just as ambitious and radical as ever,

because he wanted to fill these forms with his dynamic

and elemental musical language.

His first symphony was premiered

by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Simon Rattle.

Bear in mind that in 1978,

the average price of a house was well under £15,000.

About 1,500 people saw tonight's premiere

of the Maxwell Davies Symphony,

and it's a sobering thought that the cost of presenting

this single performance is something in excess of £15,000.

Maxwell Davies himself, talking here to conductor Simon Rattle,

is regarded as a major talent among the younger generation

of experimental composers.

With music that's reputedly difficult to play

and hard for the more conservative music lover to understand,

what had urged him to compose an entire symphony?

It took a bit of courage to call it a symphony, I must say,

because it's a term which has got such a weight

of historical authority behind it that you're very daunted by it.

MUSIC: First Symphony by Peter Maxwell Davies

The First Symphony had been inspired by the wild landscape

of the Orkney archipelago,

that starkly beautiful group of islands

off the north-east coast of Scotland.

Max visited the Orkneys in 1971

and fell in love with the Orcadian land and seascape.

And it was to be his home and inspire music like the charming

and popular wedding favourite, Farewell To Stromness.

MUSIC: Farewell To Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies

His first home was a broken-down crofter's cottage

on the Isle of Hoy.

I had to carry all supplies,

including crates of wine and sacks of coal,

a mile up the cliff, a very tall cliff.

And also, I had a garden,

and I dug my own onions and peas and beans

and strawberries and things.

Welcome to Orkney, to meet one of Britain's

most distinguished contemporary composers, Peter Maxwell Davies.

HAUNTING CHORAL SINGING

Writing music is the one thing I knew,

when I was a very small boy, that I wanted to do,

and I think even if I had had to

do something else in order to eat,

I would have still spent an awful

lot of time writing music.

There is no satisfaction in this world like the moment

when you finish a piece of music and you think,

"Well, perhaps that's not too bad."

I'm not here just to provide decoration

and something which is going to

slip into the ear very easily all the time.

I'm also here to enquire, to provoke, to make people think,

to examine their own reactions to the music,

and say, "What is that music about? I don't understand that."

And perhaps, think a bit further than that

and enquire into the nature of the music and their reaction,

and perhaps, by implication,

enquire into their own attitudes and what they themselves think.

Max's politics were the opposite of isolationist.

He was unafraid to protest at the injustices -

social, environmental, educational - that he saw in Britain,

and he fearlessly put those ideas into his pieces.

There should be no compromises,

no patronising to any lowest cultural common denominators.

Max's own upbringing was proof of what was possible

if people's talents were supported, nurtured into life.

Hello.

As a composer, my output ranges from film scores to operas.

I don't often get asked to write television title music,

but I couldn't resist the challenge of this one.

I was asked to compose music which moved, stylistically,

from the 13th century through to the present day,

and all in 40 seconds.

It was great fun to do and I hope you like it.

That clip has been here in the vaults

of the BBC Television Archives in Perivale unseen since 1987,

the year that Max received his knighthood.

By then, he was well on his way on his journey

from being the composer who loved to shock

to someone who audiences felt was a national treasure.

And Max was always a composer who knew

how to have serious musical fun,

writing pieces that are designed to be flat-out entertaining.

And they're brilliantly done.

They're made with just as much care and craft

as anything else that he wrote.

Here's his riotous An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise

raising the roof at the Royal Albert Hall

at The Last Night Of The Proms in 1992.

MUSIC: An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise by Peter Maxwell Davies

LAUGHTER

CHEERING, LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

WHISTLING AND APPLAUSE

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

CHEERING

WILD CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Now in his late 50s, Max accepted an appointment

as the associate conductor

of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester.

A local news programme, North West Tonight,

was there at his first rehearsal.

Sir Peter's first major rehearsal with the Philharmonic

wasn't quite what he'd expected

when he walked into the studios at New Broadcasting House.

Tuning up had to take a back seat

as the orchestra serenaded their new conductor

to the surprise tune of Happy Birthday.

One, two, three, four, five!

MUSIC: Happy Birthday

Sir Peter, obviously delighted with the rather offbeat version

said birthdays were something he would rather not think about,

especially if you're only a couple of years off from being 60.

For him, the challenge lies in working with a large orchestra,

something he wishes he had done a lot sooner.

Excellent! Good sight-reading!

I don't pretend that I'm a hotshot conductor or anything like that.

There is an openness to what I think of

as really worthwhile serious music

and there is still, very often,

a kind of inverted snobbism about this,

that people who, like myself,

come from a totally working-class background,

they feel, "Oh, that music isn't for us."

DISSONANT CHORDS AND TONES

Coming back to Greater Manchester and his home town of Salford

was a strange experience for Max.

Sometimes, even now, I wake up and I think,

"Well, that dream, it was Salford,

"or it was Swinton, or it was the middle of Manchester."

And I haven't lived here for so many years.

MUSIC: The Beltane Fire by Peter Maxwell Davies

It was Orkney that Max now called home,

and the sound of the traditional music of the Islands

infused itself more and more into his writing.

MUSIC: The Beltane Fire by Peter Maxwell Davies

Max's commitment to Orkney was indefatigable.

In 1977, he founded the annual St Magnus Festival.

I wanted, really, to say thank you

for the inspiration that I'd got from the Islands.

MUSIC: Orkney Saga No 5 by Peter Maxwell Davies

Each midsummer,

Max brought internationally celebrated performers

to the Islands, he premiered his new pieces, and above all,

he wrote works with and for the communities of Orkney.

I think any community really has to bring itself to life

by having things like a composer in residence

who is IN residence not just a visitor.

MUSIC: Orkney Saga No 5 by Peter Maxwell Davies

At the festival - still going strong -

place, people and music are all connected.

-APPLAUSE

-Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you, chorus.

As he got older, Max seemed to become more prolific.

And now, here to conduct the BBC Philharmonic

in his Seventh Symphony, is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies himself.

APPLAUSE

The only reason I conducted

was that I wasn't getting performances for a start,

and when I did, they were so damned awful sometimes,

the kind of performance sometimes where you hear your piece played

and it sounds miserable and you know it's not like that.

And it's universally condemned

and you just want to go, not even to the nearest pub,

but to the nearest cemetery!

MUSIC: Symphony No 7 by Peter Maxwell Davies

This Seventh Symphony of Max's, deliberately echoed

the great European symphonists, Haydn and Mahler,

but his next symphony, the Eighth,

would take its inspiration from Ralph Vaughan Williams

and a very different continent.

The flight here was quite extraordinary.

A perfect, perfect day.

The mountains, the crags,

the icebergs, well...

all such a new experience.

I'm here in the Antarctic

as the first stage of writing

a symphony jointly commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra

and the British Antarctic Survey.

And a part of the deal wasn't only that I should write the piece

but that I should experience the Antarctic first-hand

and here I am.

I hoped that the experience of the landscape and the frozen sea

would be an intensification of the experience of the Orkney landscape.

Here I shall be working and thinking, walking about,

and just absorbing the feeling of this magic place.

My agenda was one of my perpetual interests - which is the environment.

If the ice cap were to melt,

once it starts, the oceans will fill very, very rapidly with water,

places will begin to disappear, that we know and love,

and the world will be a very different place.

And at the end of the piece, if you like,

the catastrophe happens.

MUSIC: Symphony No 8 (Antarctic Symphony) by Peter Maxwell Davies

Max never stopped pushing himself as a composer

and he never underestimated his audiences, either.

Music like the Antarctic Symphony is challenging in the best sense.

There will always be more to discover in Max's music,

and that's just as true of his lighter side, too.

WILD CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Max was openly homosexual,

fiercely republican

and always deeply radical in his outlook.

He spoke out against the possibility of uranium mining

in the Orkneys in the 1980s

and in 2003, he marched against the Iraq War.

So, it came as a surprise when, in 2004,

he was appointed Master of The Queen's Music,

the musical equivalent of the Poet Laureate.

BBC Two's The Culture Show

took their cameras to the Orkneys to investigate.

I will walk on Cata Sands

and along one of the beaches here

and think about the music that I'm writing.

You can plan your harmonic progression

and walk through it, as it were, in three dimensions,

pushing the notes this way or that way.

And then, you can go back and walk through it again,

and it's as if it's actually there,

and you're INSIDE the music.

My role as Master of The Queen's Music, a new job for me -

I've only had it for just under a year...

I know people have questioned, "How can you do it?"

Because that is a terrible role,

it's being some kind of courtier or lackey or whatever.

Oh, no, it's not.

The Queen has a very positive attitude to this,

and I think that we can make something

which is going to be only good for the future.

I hope that this piece has got

something a little bit pompous and regal about it,

I tried to give it that quality.

The piece sets a poem by Andrew Motion.

And the Queen's constancy through troubles, through changes,

was what we came up with.

# The stars still shine,

# The stars still shine although their names... #

But whatever the Queen might make of Max's music,

audiences have grown to love it.

There's often a sheer gorgeousness in his orchestral writing.

A superabundance of ideas, of textures and of passions.

As in Ebb Of Winter. He'd started writing it

as a piece about seasonal change, winter turning into spring.

Then something happened,

and the confidence of the opening began to be undermined.

And it was only much, much later that I thought,

"Well, that music that I was writing,

"it knew something that I didn't.

And I found myself,

shortly after writing it, in hospital with leukaemia,

being told, I had, if I didn't go into hospital,

a maximum of six weeks to live.

An extract from Ebb Of Winter, played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Max's legacy is, of course, his catalogue of around 300 pieces,

works that I think are going to become more and more important

for performers and audiences,

and the whole story of music in the 20th and 21st centuries.

There's also his musical activism,

his insistence on the highest possible standards

of music education, his challenge to orchestras and institutions

to include the contemporary as part of their repertoires.

But there's something else.

Max believed in magic.

When I met him at his home on Sanday in Orkney,

he had charms to ward off ghosts above each of the doorways.

Just like that strange visionary experience of being on Orkney,

where you're suspended somewhere between sea and sky,

Peter Maxwell Davies's music sounds out a region of transcendence.

It's a world of endless mystery.

# O magnum mysterium

# Et admirabile sacramentum... #

OVERLAPPING CHORAL HARMONIES