Dr Nicholas Jones: 'Peter Maxwell Davies’s Symphonic Imagination'
Written over a period of five decades (spanning the years 1973 to 2013), Peter Maxwell Davies’s ten symphonies occupy a central position in the composer’s voluminous output. Given their international standing and wider impact, they arguably comprise one of the most significant symphonic series produced by any British or Irish composer since 1945. Having established a reputation in the 1960s as the ‘enfant terrible’ of British music, chiefly as a result of a number of radical music-theatre works (such as Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969)), the appearance of a ‘Symphony’ in the following decade caught many critics off-guard and caused others to furrow their brows. Yet, there is little doubt that the composer had always been deeply attracted to the abstract nature of the symphonic genre, and that this interest was intensified by his move northward in 1971 to the Island of Hoy, Orkney. His adoption of the genre also enabled him to employ it as a vehicle to express creatively an array of extra-musical interests, impulses and preoccupations. This paper will consider the influence of landscape, place and the natural world; issues of form and genre; the symphonic legacy of Sibelius and Mahler; the influence of architecture, especially the works of Brunelleschi and Borromini; and the importance of autobiography, meaning and symbolism. By acknowledging and appreciating the symphonies from these multiple musical and extra-musical perspectives, we, as listeners, can more fully comprehend the fecundity of the composer’s symphonic imagination.
Dr Nicholas Jones is Head of the School of Music at Cardiff University. His is currently editing The Symphony in Britain and Ireland since 1900: A Critical History, a multi-authored volume for Cambridge University Press. He has a specialist interest in British music since 1900, especially Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Michael Tippett and Welsh art music. He is co-editor of and contributor to Peter Maxwell Davies Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett (CUP, 2013) and Harrison Birtwistle Studies (CUP, 2015). Other publications include Peter Maxwell Davies, Selected Writings (CUP, 2017) and The Music of Peter Maxwell Davies (Boydell & Brewer, 2020, co-authored with Richard McGregor). He is Co-director of the Cardiff University British Music Research Centre (CUBRIT), Co-curator of the Peter Maxwell Davies Research Network, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the music journal Tempo, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Website: https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/jonesn3