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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE (born 8 September 1934) is an English composer and conductor and is currently Master of the Queen's Music.
Davies was born in Salford, Lancashire, the son of Thomas and Hilda Davies. He took piano lessons and composed from an early age. As a 14-year-old he submitted a composition called "Blue Ice" to BBC Children's Hour in Manchester. Producer Trevor Hill showed it to resident pianist Violet Carson who said "He's either quite brilliant or mad". Conductor Charles Groves nodded his approval and said, "I'd get him in". They did and his rise to fame began under the careful mentorship of Hill who made him their resident composer and introduced him to various professional musicians both in the UK and Germany. (The full story can be found in Over the Airwaves, the autobiography of Trevor Hill published by Book Guild in 2005). After education at Leigh Boys Grammar School, Davies studied at the University of Manchester and at the Royal Manchester College of Music (amalgamated into the Royal Northern College of Music in 1973), where his fellow students included Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Together they formed New Music Manchester, a group committed to contemporary music. After graduating in 1956, he studied on an Italian government scholarship for a year with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome before working as Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School from 1959 to 1962.
In 1962, he secured a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University, with the help of Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten, where he studied with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt and Earl Kim. He then moved to Australia, where he was Composer in Residence at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide from 1965–66.
He then returned to the United Kingdom and moved to the Orkney Islands, initially to Hoy in 1971, and later to Sanday, where he lives with his partner Colin Parkinson. Orkney (particularly its capital, Kirkwall) hosts the St Magnus Festival, an arts festival founded by Davies in 1977. He frequently uses it to premiere new works (often played by the local school orchestra).
Davies was Artistic Director of the Dartington International Summer School from 1979 to 1984 and has held a number of posts. From 1992 to 2002 he was associate conductor/composer with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and he has conducted a number of other prominent orchestras.
He has been awarded a number of honorary doctorates, at various institutions. He has been President of Making Music (The National Federation of Music Societies) since 1989. Davies was made a CBE in 1981 and knighted in 1987. He was appointed Master of the Queen's Music for a ten-year period from March 2004. Oxford awarded him an honorary Doctor of Music degree in July 2005. On 25 November 2006, Sir Peter was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University at a service in Canterbury Cathedral. He is also a visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2009 became an Honorary Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge.
Davies was one of the first classical composers to open a music download website, MaxOpus, (in 1996). The site became temporarily unavailable after the arrest in June 2007 of Michael Arnold (one of MaxOpus's directors) on fraud charges arising from money missing from Davies's business accounts.
Davies was known as an 'enfant terrible' of the 1960s, whose music frequently shocked audiences and critics. One of his overtly theatrical and shocking pieces was Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), in which he utilised 'musical parody' by taking a canonical piece of music, Handel's Messiah, and subverting it to suit his own needs.
Davies is known informally as "Max", after his middle name "Maxwell". A reporter for The Independent humorously recalled the confusion this brought about when Davies was staying in Las Vegas. No one seemed able to locate him at any hotel, despite trying "Maxwell Davies", "Davies", "Max", "Sir Peter" and every other imaginable permutation. |