English Deutsch Français An introduction to the music of Maxwell Davies by Paul Driver
Peter Maxwell Davies is one of Britain’s most fecund and fascinating composers, a
leading member of a generation of composers for whom the twelve-tone technique of
Schoenberg held no fears and demanded no slavish adherence. Davies and his fellows took a
continental view of modern music with an easy and assertive confidence that marked a
decisive shutting of the cattle-gate on the Vaughan Williams-influenced pastoralism
prevalent in British music up until the 1950s.
For Davies, the Schoenbergian approach was crucially enriched and personalized by what
he peceived as its link with medieval methods of systematically deriving a musical work
from lengths of plainchant. He saw comparably stimulating connections between medieval
music’s rhythmic structure and that of the Indian ragas on which he wrote his
university thesis. Thus he carved out his own creative path; and the subjection of
emblematic plainsong fragments to quasi-serial permutation and elaborate
‘isorhythmic’ patterning gave him not only those rigorously made, texturally
austere early pieces like the
Five Motets (1959), but allowed luminously lyrical
statements such as the cantata
Leopardi Fragments (1962); and has been the basis,
indeed, of virtually every work he has written.
Maxwell Davies quickly found himself at the head of a new British avant-garde: a
shocker but clearly a figure of the utmost artistic seriousness. The seriousness was most
evident in big, broodingly neo-expressionist scores, sometimes with a surprisingly
Mahlerian hue, like the orchestral
Second Fantasia on John Taverner’s ‘In
Nomine’ (1964) and
Worldes Blis, a ‘motet’ for large orchestra
on a 13th century English monody (1969); as of course in the complex opera
Taverner
(1970), about the life and conscience of the eponymous English composer.
The shocker came into his own in a series of brilliant, flamboyant music-theatre
pieces. In
Eight Songs for a Mad King for male voice and ensemble or the chamber
ballet
Vesalii Icones (both 1969), the thematic transformation process erupts at
climaxes into wicked parody. Plainsongs flare up into foxtrots; and the acid of betrayal
runs down the score even as it burns into the subject matter.
Betrayal – religious, artistic, personal – was the abiding expressionistic
theme of Davies’s works, often written at a white heat of inspiration, during the
1960s and early 1970s. But a more calmly classicising impulse gradually took him over; and
with the achievement of his first symphony (1976) – an intriguingly intricate and
ambitious work, over 50 minutes long – the way was clear for a long-term exploration
and reinterpretation (in Davies’s own plainsong terms) of classical sonata form and
its accompanying tonal functions.
After years of copious production for his chamber ensemble The Fires of London, Davies
now preferred to write chiefly for large or small orchestra: three more symphonies
followed, a
Trumpet Concerto, and the near-completed series of ten Strathclyde
Concertos, each featuring one or more of the principals of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra,
with which Davies has formed a close bond as composer-conductor.
The exigencies of regular orchestral conducting are reflected in the simpler rhythms
and textures of Davies’s later orchestral works. There are, of course, important
continuities: his manner of pacing and paragraphing, his fondness for plainly functional
orchestral colours (sombre, suspenseful strings, declamatory drumstrokes!), remain more or
less constant. But the wilder gambits of pieces like the ‘foxtrot for
orchestra’,
St Thomas Wake (1968), or
Worldes Blis have been supplanted
by the constituents of a remarkable evocation of the Orcadian landscapes in which Davies
has made his home since the early 1970s. From the vocal-orchestral
Stone Litany
(1973) to the recent spate of concertos, his orchestral music is permeated by the cries of
gulls, echoes of Scottish folk-tunes, and the thrashings of the North Sea.
During this period of Davies’s development, mainly devoted to abstract symphonic
writing, the tutelary influence of Mahler has perhaps been replaced by that of Sibelius.
Of course, Davies remains very much his own man, pursuing his high creative ambitions with
an extremely distinctive language and vocabulary; composing as prolifically as ever; and,
albeit in a quieter formal register, as daringly as ever.
Paul Driver, 1993
Walter Steffens
