Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

20 Jul 2005 in Festival, Music, Orkney

26 June 20St Magnus Festival, Orkney

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

EDUCATION and the importance of interaction between artists and their communities were two of the main themes Max dealt with in this 45 minute talk. Those elements always play a central role in the Festival he founded and to which he remains unswervingly committed. This was the fourth “Meet the…” event in a festival programme designed, as always, to involve people of all ages from as many parts of the community as possible, performing and listening.

A packed King Street Hall mostly knew already that an important engagement in Italy had meant that Max missed the start of the Festival this year, but he took some trouble to describe his itinerary since returning to the UK. An award ceremony in Newcastle on the Saturday had, he said, given him the opportunity to extol the virtues of the Festival and Orkney to an influential international gathering. Between then and now he’d been home to Sanday, for a community gathering with Gael Force Winds and the Sanday Fiddle Club.

“The important thing for me,” he said, speaking of the Sanday event, “was that all those people I know were there – farmers, people who work in the shop… – hearing traditional fiddle music, a baroque concerto, and also my own pieces.

“A place, to my mind, has no real existence until the people of that place – the ordinary people – have sung and created music about that place. So that the place comes out in the sounds that they are making. This Festival brings together people like myself with the absolutely basic elements of music-making – place and people.”

Thus he insisted that an artist has a responsibility to respond both to his muse and to his community, and he expressed his feeling that the era of more recondite experimentation in music in the twentieth century could perhaps now begin to be put into a historical context. It had been useful, but it was over. And he was pleased to note that the composers who visit the Festival – this year Sally Beamish and Nigel Osborne – were “absolutely aware of their social connection”. Doubtless referring to the thematic core of Festival 2005, Max praised those composers for their awareness that it was essential “to make music that heals wounds.”

The past – musical, social, environmental – is clearly very important to his work and his life, and that’s no surprise.

Speaking of the ongoing composition of his own quartets, he said that he will continue to write music that “in many places is damned tough.” Nothing else will answer the times we live in. The community for which he was writing in his Third Quartet – including two “wretched” politicians in particular, in spite of the fact that they don’t pay any attention, “they don’t work like that” – is a world for which in some respects his “despair and frustration” is so intense that nothing else would give the truth.

An apt question from chairman Ian Ritchie led Max into a discussion of two of his Festival programme works in particular. “A Sad Paven for these Distracted Tymes”, the test piece for the quartet competition that had lately taken him to Italy, was based on a seventeenth century response to the puritan mad pride that had trampled and smashed ancient ritual in England.

In that piece and in his 1971 “Missa Super L’Homme Armé”, his reference to earlier music had not, of course, simply been stylistic, and in the context of the contemporary “crusade” that has seen sacred Middle Eastern sites bulldozed for military bases, the recent performances had lamented the loss of these places – and the human destruction that accompanied it. “No matter how powerful you are,” he said, “you don’t attack a national psyche in that way.”

“I think he’s mellowed a lot,” one member of the audience said to me afterwards. He himself acknowledged as much. Referring to his “expressionistic” and “sometimes hysterical” work of the late sixties, he said, “You get through all that, not smiling, necessarily, but determined to go on.”

But he disagrees that the quartets on which he has been working are “autumnal”. “They’re something new!”

Teachers, he said, are too often frightened of their own creativity.

It was fascinating to hear him speak about his compositional process. About the walking, and the experience of musical structure as a pattern in space – an exploratory dance, it seemed. About the intense importance of natural sounds and forms, including that sense in the rocks themselves of the ancient layering he’d earlier mentioned in reference to his music on the Cross Kirk. About how close he felt in that timeless context to the medieval masters whose work means so much to him. And about the Haydn Quartets, his “sacred texts”, that lie back at home on his writing desk.

The past – musical, social, environmental – is clearly very important to his work and his life, and that’s no surprise. It’s the significance he finds for the present in the links and lines, “the perspective lines that lead you right back through a vanishing point at the earth’s beginning”, that marks his greatness as a composer, as does the responsibility he takes for the present, and for the future.

In that connection, a question from the floor led to some interesting remarks about education, and his work with children. “The good thing is they don’t know who the hell I am,” he said, and that it was pleasant to write simply. Recently he’d heard “Songs of Hoy” sung by children in Peckham, followed by their own “Songs of Peckham.”

Teachers, he said, are too often frightened of their own creativity. Once children get excited there’s an anarchic sense, apparent chaos, as often existed in his own classroom in Cirencester. But the youngsters were fully involved in a creative process. “I do feel,” he said, “that we have to get teachers into a position where they are not afraid of the seeming anarchy of their own creativity.”

It was a fascinating, fluent exposition of deeply-felt ideas and strongly held views from a man obviously fully in touch both with his own creativity and with the strict responsibility that helps give it value to the world. For all his travelling of the past few days and for all the work involved, he seems no less determined and capable of making a difference now than at any time in his life. I’m sure Sanday and its people, and Orkney in general, have a lot to do with that, and much to gain in return.