Peter Maxwell Davies

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2005

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Peter Maxwell Davies.

He is one of Britain's greatest living composers. His career has seen him go from enfant terrible and champion of new music, writing pieces such as Worldes Blis and Eight Songs for a Mad King, to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music. Peter Maxwell Davies was born in Salford, near Manchester, in 1934. Whilst studying at Manchester University and the Royal Manchester College of Music he formed the key friendships which were to influence his musical career - with Harrison Birtwhistle, Elgar Howarth, Alexander Goehr and John Ogdon. It was during the 60s that Peter composed some of his most influential works - including often cacophonous, expressionist pieces like Vesalii Icones, St. Thomas Wake and Worldes Blis. Music-theatre pieces like Eight Songs were groundbreaking in their use of drama, as well as music. He is fascinated by the mathematical structures and patterns that exist in nature - and tries to replicate them in his music. For more than 30 years he has lived on and been inspired by the Isles of Orkney where, he says, the sounds that surround him creep into his music almost without him knowing it.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Victimae Paschali Laudes by The Benedictine Monks of Silos Book: Sanskrit dictionary Alternative to Bible: Bhagavad-Gita Luxury: Copper plate engravings of Durer's Passion

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. Mike Osezaway this week is a composer. He started his career as a controversial firebrand, but is ending up as an honoured man of the arts and master of the Queen's music.
0:38.0	He's wanted to compose since he was four when he was taken to a production of the gondoliers.
0:42.0	He taught himself music at school,
0:44.3	his headmaster thought it was a subject only for girls, and learned many of the works of
0:48.0	Beethoven by heart. At college in Manchester he teamed up with the other groundbreaking musicians of his
0:54.4	generation Harrison Bertwhistle and Alexander Gure among them and by the age of 30
0:58.9	he was launching a stream of new work on the public. For the past 30 years or more he's lived in semi-secclusion on
1:05.8	Orkney islands that have inspired some of his most famous pieces, an Orkney wedding and
1:10.4	farewell to stromness among them.
1:13.0	Music has always been an obsession, he says.
1:16.0	I always knew I would write the music I wanted to write and get to conduct it.
1:20.0	He is Sir Peter Maxwell Davis. and you trace it all back Max to seeing aged for
1:26.8	that production of the gondoliers Gilbert and Sullivan why would that inspire you
1:30.8	to become the avant-garde musician that you have?
1:34.8	It was more real than real.
1:37.0	I know it was only Mrs. So-and-so from up the street, dressed up, but there at Salford Central Mission, I didn't really understand what was
1:47.0	going on, but there was an orchestra and it was the most wonderful thing I'd ever heard in my life, a live orchestra. Fine, it was the PSA
1:56.0	orchestra conducted by Mr Lane, PSA stood for pleasant Sunday afternoons, and I thought I want to have to do with that world that erupted briefly on that stage.
2:09.2	But did you also identify that you wanted to be the chap who wrote the music? I love the music so much and I don't
2:15.8	remember but evidently I went around singing it and making up new music. So you started composing
	...

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