Peter Maxwell Davies

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

Mike Ostaway 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. He's wanted to compose since he was four when he was taken to a production of the gondoliers. He taught himself music at school, his head master thought it was a subject only for girls, and learned many of the works of Beethoven by heart.

Presenter0:49

At college in Manchester he teamed up with the other ground breaking musicians of his generation, Harrison Bertwhistle and Alexander Gerr among them and by the age of thirty he was launching a stream of new work on the public.

Presenter1:02

For the past thirty years or more he's lived in semi-seclusion on Orkney, islands that have inspired some of his most famous pieces, An Orkney Wedding and Farewell to Stromness among them. Music has always been an obsession, he says. I always knew I would write the music I wanted to write and get to conduct it. He is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. And you trace it all back, Max, to seeing aged four that production of The Gondoliers, Gilbert and Sullivan. Why would that inspire you to become the avant-garde musician that you have?

Peter Maxwell Davies1:34

It was more real than real. I know it was only Mrs So and So from up the street, dressed up, but there at Salford Central Mission

Peter Maxwell Davies1:45

I didn't really understand what was 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 Orchestra conducted by Mr Lane. PSA stood for Pleasant Sunday Afternoons.

Peter Maxwell Davies2:02

Ha ha.

Peter Maxwell Davies2:03

I thought I want to have to do with that world that erupted briefly on that stage.

Presenter2:09

But did you also identify that you wanted to be the chap who wrote the music?

Peter Maxwell Davies2:12

I loved the music so much, and I don't remember, but evidently I went round singing it and making up new music.

Presenter2:20

So you started composing right away.

Peter Maxwell Davies2:22

Improvising, yes.

Presenter2:23

There's another fascinating insight into how you came into being as a composer, and that's I think a little later on, I think you might have been in your teens and you got lost in the mist in the Lake District. Tell me about that.

Peter Maxwell Davies2:34

I forget exactly where it was. I think I was with my parents, walking up Helvellyn.

Peter Maxwell Davies2:39

And Miss Came down.

Peter Maxwell Davies2:41

And

Peter Maxwell Davies2:42

I heard

Peter Maxwell Davies2:44

as it were in the distance the music that I was going to write.

Peter Maxwell Davies2:48

That was the sound of the orchestral music that I write now, that I've been writing for the last years.

Speaker 42:54

What's wrong?

Presenter2:55

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies2:56

It was there, in the air. I just heard it, as if it were some kind of fairy music coming out of the mist, and I can't explain.

Presenter3:04

But there it is. And you've used another word, actually, telling your story. You said when you went to Orkney this is now much later on, um, some thirty five years ago, escaping from sleepy Dorset, you went to Orkney or noisy Dorset, I think, was your problem. That's right. When you got to Orkney, you said you felt as if this was

Peter Maxwell Davies3:23

Preordained. Yes. It was, in a funny kind of way, a homecoming. And I'd only been there two days.

Peter Maxwell Davies3:32

and by happenstance I bumped into George Mackay Brown, the poet, and various other people who became very, very important in my life.

Presenter3:41

But it wasn't just the people, was it? Again, it was the sound, the sound scape.

Presenter3:45

Oh this

Peter Maxwell Davies3:45

But it's just

Presenter3:46

Don't play.

Peter Maxwell Davies3:46

Wonderful soundscape of just see

Peter Maxwell Davies3:50

And

Peter Maxwell Davies3:51

Gull noises, wind in heather which has always stayed with me.

Peter Maxwell Davies3:56

didn't consciously set out to mirror them, but they got there, and I remember when I was writing the first symphony these extraordinary flute calls came through, and I didn't realise it at the time, but yes, those were the sea gulls that I was hearing all the time.

Presenter4:12

Tell me about your first record for your Desert Island, although I think you know all about Desert Islands.

Peter Maxwell Davies4:18

The Victimi Pascali Laudis is an Easter hymn, and I do remember when I was a student in Rome, hearing a very large congregation, led by the monks of the monastery at S. Anselmo, singing this, I associate it with such joy and such

Peter Maxwell Davies4:37

I think a sense of wonder.

Speaker 44:40

It was a delong.

Speaker 44:44

I more like

Speaker 14:45

You more like Christian.

Speaker 44:49

Of your heavenly home, Christ was in your sense of

Speaker 14:50

Of your brethren is more.

Speaker 45:05

More safety God, more and more, home free seven Lord.

Speaker 15:05

What saith it the Lord?

Speaker 45:13

Loose meet and water goes when you are.

Speaker 15:14

Thomas Smith and Morgan

Speaker 15:17

Pray in your name.

Speaker 45:22

In all his mighty love, with this heart.

Speaker 15:22

Oh, this party

Presenter5:31

Victimi Pascali Lades, sung by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos.

Presenter5:37

People have tried time and time again, Peter Maxwell Davis, to define what kind of composer you are. You've written in every genre, haven't you? From orchestral to ballet to music, theatre. You did the film score for Ken Russell's The Devils and so on. The only adjective I think that that can't be contradicted is prolific.

Presenter5:57

I mean, you just never so have you ever walked into your studio, sat down and not been able to write a note?

Peter Maxwell Davies6:03

Yeah.

Presenter6:04

I can save

Peter Maxwell Davies6:05

Very honestly, I hope that day never comes. It would be horrible. And it never has. It never has, no, no. I have been criticised a lot for writing in different styles and different kinds of music. But last time.

Presenter6:18

Prostituting yourself.

Peter Maxwell Davies6:19

That's right. I've been called a prostitute.

Peter Maxwell Davies6:22

Fine In that case so was Mozart. But I don't see why one shouldn't write in these different genres, because life is complex, and I don't think one

Peter Maxwell Davies6:36

Can

Peter Maxwell Davies6:37

Honestly say that one is a person who is only one thing.

Presenter6:40

And and you write quite quickly, I understand. You you write it down and sort of post off the first movement to the publisher. You don't revise.

Peter Maxwell Davies6:47

No, I don't. I'd much rather get on with a new piece. I just couldn't be bothered. It's so marvellous to face the blank page and do the next thing, rather than trouble about what you've just been doing.

Presenter6:59

Is it also because you've written it in your head beforehand, perhaps, when you're out walking on the beach, or?

Peter Maxwell Davies7:04

Yes, I think that's a very large part of it.

Peter Maxwell Davies7:07

It's a question of walking the beach with the dog. It's as if you're walking inside the harmonies in three dimensions all around you, and you can move this note and shove that one, and then walk that bit again, so that you get from that chord to that chord in another way.

Presenter7:22

Back over the same ground it looks as if

Peter Maxwell Davies7:24

I'm back over the same ground. It looks as if I'm being very lazy and just enjoying the

Presenter7:28

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies7:28

I think it's a very good idea.

Presenter7:30

So you do revise and refine.

Peter Maxwell Davies7:33

But not so much on paper. Yes, it's on the hoof.

Presenter7:33

On the zoof

Presenter7:35

Yes, it's all

Presenter7:37

And and on your desk, I understand you have a seashell, because you are inspired by the natural world in in a in a broader sense, aren't you?

Peter Maxwell Davies7:44

Yes, I think the proportions of natural objects and the seashell particularly with the Fibonacci series, which so influenced Debussy, where there are certain proportions which are natural, um trees grow in those proportions, plants grow in them, and animals of certain sorts grow in them.

Presenter8:04

It's a mathematical structure. It's very precise.

Peter Maxwell Davies8:06

Yes, it's very precise.

Presenter8:08

This is a Fibonacci spiral.

Peter Maxwell Davies8:10

Yes, yes, exactly. And I think that it's something which grows naturally because of a

Peter Maxwell Davies8:17

A longing in one's being for things to make clear sense.

Presenter8:24

Hmm.

Presenter8:25

Does the listener know it's there and what would happen if it weren't there? I think I can tell you the listener doesn't know it's there.

Peter Maxwell Davies8:32

The listener doesn't know it's there, but there is a sense of, I think, perfection.

Peter Maxwell Davies8:36

with the great composers, when they have structured a thing well

Presenter8:40

But I think you've you've drawn the uh comparison with an architect before now, haven't you? And you said that if an architect didn't m mathematically calculate his dome or his arch, it would collapse. It would collapse, yes. Are you saying that you could hear music collapsing or your music collapsing if it weren't there? It's just that we can

Peter Maxwell Davies8:55

Oh yes, yes, yeah. As as a composer, you can hear all the faults and all the

Peter Maxwell Davies9:01

struts across a piece, when they don't work you wish that the damned thing would crash down, and you have a terrible experience in a concert.

Presenter9:10

What you suddenly hear.

Peter Maxwell Davies9:11

Yes, it's crashing.

Presenter9:12

It's crashing.

Peter Maxwell Davies9:13

You know

Presenter9:16

Equal number two.

Peter Maxwell Davies9:18

part of the first movement of Mozart's thirty eighth Symphony, the Prague Symphony. And again, structurally, I don't think Mozart worked things out. For instance, right at the beginning of this extract, you hear the second violins, the violas, and the cellos play this

Peter Maxwell Davies9:36

Product.

Peter Maxwell Davies9:38

you call it swelling figure in the base, which the oboe then takes up in an inversion, but you wonder whether it is the inversion. And it's this ambiguity in the structure, which is very tight, this looseness and tightness together, which makes it so perennially fascinating. You can come back and still you don't know how he did it.

Presenter10:55

Part of the first movement of Mozart's Symphony No. thirty eight in D, the Prague Symphony performed by the Dresden State Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis.

Presenter11:03

Peter Maxwell Davis, you were born in Salford in 1934 into a northern working class family. You were, it's been said, an unlikely son for your parents to have produced. Is that fair?

Peter Maxwell Davies11:14

I think it is, but then

Peter Maxwell Davies11:16

I suspect that in that kind of setting there would have been no chance for anybody to study music that

Peter Maxwell Davies11:26

It just wouldn't have occurred. You'd have had to go to work at the age of fourteen, and that was it. Well, you might have done, of course. I nearly did. I got myself a scholarship to go to the college and the university in Manchester.

Peter Maxwell Davies11:40

But

Peter Maxwell Davies11:41

I remember being at home, and we were visited by my uncle, Arthur, and Aunty Kitty, my mother's sister, and my uncle was saying to my mother and father, What's this I hear about your lad getting this scholarship and going to study this rubbish music? Why don't you have him come along and be a bricklayer's apprentice with me? Then he'll have a proper job. What'd your parents say? Ah, they defended my right to take up my scholarship. And I must say for my mother, she didn't speak to her sister for about four years after that.

Presenter12:13

Kicked Auntie Kitty out. She did.

Presenter12:16

You escaped from the possibility of becoming a bricklayer. I mean, obviously, your mother encouraged you. I mean, she she.

Presenter12:23

She adored you, didn't she?

Peter Maxwell Davies12:25

Oh, she was absolutely marvellous. Yes, she spoiled me in a way.

Presenter12:28

She said when she was eighty, I think that it'd been a thrilling experience to live with you.

Peter Maxwell Davies12:32

Uh

Presenter12:32

She's a wonderful thing for a moment.

Peter Maxwell Davies12:33

That's a marvellous thing to say. And uh she believed in me and I think that uh I always appreciated that she had that Scottish blood and there was something there which was very, very special.

Presenter12:46

Hm. And you were her only child.

Peter Maxwell Davies12:47

Can you try? Uh

Presenter12:48

And you were quite a solitary chap.

Peter Maxwell Davies12:50

In some ways, yes. I really did study nature. I was crazy about uh pond life, about bird life. And also from a very early age I was reading, and of course that is a solitary activity. But I was, by the age of fourteen, I remember, reading Dostoevsky and all the plays of Bernard Shaw.

Presenter13:05

But

Presenter13:11

I get the impression that your father was a bit more bemused than your mother by his progeny. And didn't he have a marvellous exchange with Lord Harwood, an an eminent man of the opera, when when he came to

Presenter13:23

The Royal Opera House.

Peter Maxwell Davies13:24

That was lovely and made me love the man so dearly. It was absolutely fantastic because it had been the first performance at Covent Garden of my opera taverner. And it had gone very well, and Lord Harwood was there, and there was a champagne party in the long bar afterwards, and my father was there. He said, Look here, Lord Eywood, this stuff what our Max writes, do you think it'll go?

Peter Maxwell Davies13:54

R

Presenter13:54

Brilliant.

Peter Maxwell Davies13:55

Yeah.

Presenter13:55

Record number three.

Peter Maxwell Davies13:57

This is the first of John Darwin's lachromy, or Seven Tears. It has for me something of the extraordinary atmosphere of, say, John Donne's poetry of much the same period. That intensity, that extraordinary indulgent melancholia. You have to come, I think, right forward to the Seven Last Words on the Cross of Joseph Haydn, or perhaps even to Shostakovich, to find anything quite as slow and quite as intense and burrowing into your melancholy innermost soul as this music.

Presenter15:32

Lachrymae Antiquae, the first of John Darlin's Lachrymae or Seven Tears, performed by the Parley of Instruments Renaissance Violin Consorts, directed by Peter Holman. Um you were obviously, Max, a very bright boy. Uh you got your first piano aged eight. Did you teach yourself to play that?

Peter Maxwell Davies15:49

No I was sent to piano lessons with Miss Jones, and she taught me from Smallwood's tutor book.

Peter Maxwell Davies15:56

And I didn't dare tell the lady that I had learnt the key of C and G and D very, very quickly, and could.

Peter Maxwell Davies16:04

find my way round all the majors and minors in about three weeks,'cause she was still, as far as the lessons were concerned, teaching me D major, and I was far too polite to tell her that I knew D major very well by that stage.

Presenter16:17

Why? I mean a lot of kids would have liked to have shown off that they could do it that quickly. I thought I would have

Peter Maxwell Davies16:23

upset her.

Peter Maxwell Davies16:24

And she was so keen to explain these things. I thought, no, no, I can't upset the lady, and she was an old lady, and I was very, very careful.

Presenter16:36

You did teach yourself, didn't you, when you got to grammar school? You taught yourself music because of this headmaster, who was a complete Philistine by the sound of it.

Peter Maxwell Davies16:43

I taught myself a great deal to do with music, yes. And when it came to the exams, I asked the headmaster could I do music? and he said no, no, this isn't a girls' school. So when it came to the advanced level I didn't even tell him and went in for it and I

Presenter16:59

How would you

Peter Maxwell Davies17:00

I just sent away for the syllabus.

Peter Maxwell Davies17:03

and learnt the pieces which we were given as set works and went to do the written exam and then the viva voce exam and I got the Lancashire County Music Scholarship as a result of that.

Presenter17:20

Sorry, you'll be villainy.

Peter Maxwell Davies17:22

Well

Peter Maxwell Davies17:23

I didn't realize it. You were only supposed to be able to play on the piano extracts from Bassette works. I'd learnt them from top to bottom. And I think the lady who interviewed me was quite amazed.

Peter Maxwell Davies17:35

Yeah. Uh

Presenter17:35

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies17:35

Yeah.

Presenter17:35

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies17:36

Yeah.

Presenter17:36

But

Peter Maxwell Davies17:36

Okay.

Presenter17:36

But by this time you you'd composed pieces, you'd had them played on B B C Children's R hadn't you or played them yourself?

Peter Maxwell Davies17:42

I played them myself, and the very first person who played anything of mine on The Children's Hour was Violet Carson, who became quite well known later as Ina Sharples in Coronation Street.

Presenter17:55

If you play the

Peter Maxwell Davies17:55

The piano then, as well. She and the pub. She was a yes, she was a wonderful musician, absolutely first-class musician.

Presenter17:56

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies18:03

And what's

Presenter18:03

What sort of pieces were you composing then? And it's possible.

Peter Maxwell Davies18:07

Modern? They were. Some of them were. Everybody was telling me off for writing these dissonant pieces at that stage. I must have been fourteen or fifteen.

Presenter18:15

But and exactly, and I asked because, you know, I mentioned b your being ins inspired by G and S earlier, and also the foxtrot, I think, had had quite an effect in your early life, didn't it?

Peter Maxwell Davies18:25

I think this came from.

Peter Maxwell Davies18:28

The bombing in the war, where I used to go in the pantry under the stairs with a wind-up grammar phone and my parents' great pile of Foxtrot and Charleston records from the twenties and thirties, and while the bombs were falling I'd be playing these and indeed this bomb did go off next door, and I remember the next thing I saw was the lady from two houses away running up the street on fire. And so foxtrots they've become associated with, yes, hilarity and

Peter Maxwell Davies19:02

Wonderful freedom of movement, but also an extraordinary sense of menace in there.

Presenter19:09

I want to ask you some more about that, but let's pause for the next record, which is not a foxtrot.

Peter Maxwell Davies19:12

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies19:14

The next record is yesterday, and I play it because.

Peter Maxwell Davies19:20

This tune works perfectly in canon with itself, and also if you do play with it a little bit, you can make inverse canon. I've got that kind of mind that sees mathematical and arithmetical possibilities in material, and there's so much more implied than is actually written down. It's pregnant with further musical and literary meaning.

Speaker 419:43

Yesterday.

Speaker 419:46

All my troubles seem so far away

Speaker 419:51

God looks as though they're here to stay, oh I believe

Speaker 419:58

Yesterday, suddenly.

Speaker 420:03

I'm not half the man I used to be

Speaker 420:08

Does the shadow hang in old

Presenter20:12

Beatles and Yesterday, which we now hear with a whole new ear, thanks to your introduction. The foxtrot has cropped up in your compositions on many occasions, hasn't it? I mean, mentioned by name, Sir Thomas Wake Foxtrot for Orchestra, which you wrote in 1969. Is that a direct inspiration from the cubbyhole under the stairs? Because you've got sort of kettle drums in the background, they're like bombs.

Peter Maxwell Davies20:33

Yes, it is. And the extraordinary thing was, when I was writing that piece, I didn't realise it was only.

Presenter20:35

Mm-hmm.

Peter Maxwell Davies20:40

When I was coming to the end of writing it, I remembered the whole experience of the cubbyhole under the stairs, and thought that is what I'm touching here. This has to be lived through again in order to come to terms with it.

Presenter20:53

And then it it occurs in your eight songs for a mad king, doesn't it, which you wrote about the same time about the madness of George the Third. I mean, isn't there a foxtrot before he finally we visibly we see him go mad? He snatches a violin from a musician and smashes it up.

Peter Maxwell Davies21:09

Yes, the foxtrot there, which is completely out of context with the historical setting, of course, of George III. It sounds crazy in that setting. And I was just now, for the first time for a good number of years, conducting that piece in Rome. And that moment where the violin breaks and the just before that the foxtrot erupts, it still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And you can feel the audience tense up. He's not actually going to break that violin, and of course he does.

Presenter21:38

So beware Maxwell Davis when you hear the foxtrot, something horrible is going to happen. That's right.

Presenter21:43

So back to the the post-war years in which you rebelled against authority, as we've said, and and and uh but eventually you managed to get scholarships and prizes all the way round, and you ended up um at the Royal Manchester College of Music and Manchester University to study for your music degree. But again you found yourself cast in the role of rebel, didn't you? Because they were

Peter Maxwell Davies22:03

So conservative. They were extremely conservative there, and the professor of composition, Humphrey Proctor Gregg, he said, well, avoid music written after 1900 and avoid music before 1550 because it's dangerous. Not explained why it was dangerous, but of course I loved music after 1900 and I've always loved Renaissance and medieval music.

Presenter22:27

And you would anyway, having heard somebody say that. I mean, it's in the nature of the man, it too.

Peter Maxwell Davies22:31

It is.

Peter Maxwell Davies22:33

Yeah.

Presenter22:34

Record number five.

Peter Maxwell Davies22:35

The

Peter Maxwell Davies22:36

Fifth record is the opening of Alexander Gerr's Little Symphony. I choose this because Alexander Gerr was such a good friend and such a wonderful guru when I was a student at Manchester, and the opening chords, they always struck me as being so beautifully balanced and so well heard. There is a marvellous inner ear working here, which goes beyond.

Peter Maxwell Davies23:02

anything which you could calculate. And I must say that these opening chords they've been quite seminal, and I've used something similar in so many of my pieces. You've pinched them. I've pinched them, and I acknowledge it, and I'm very grateful to Alexander Gerr for the idea.

Presenter24:18

The opening of Alexander Gerr's Little Symphony, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Colin Davies. So you met and worked alongside as a student in Manchester Alexander Gerr and Harrison Burtwhistle, John Ogden.

Presenter24:32

People who, like yourself, took notice of new music or wanted to write it, or were writing. It must have been such a relief to discover there were other people thinking like you.

Peter Maxwell Davies24:40

It was a great relief, and of course Alexander Gerr was the leader of the group, there was no doubt about that, and Harry Burtisall and I came tagging along somewhere behind. And it was an extraordinary experience for us, because we were really hitting our heads against the wall. I do remember we put on a concert. We had an audience of six.

Peter Maxwell Davies25:02

We just were

Peter Maxwell Davies25:04

Absolutely despised is the only word for it.

Presenter25:09

And yet what was happening was something enormously important. We can now see with the perspective of history that you were opening up the stylistic floodgates, weren't you?

Peter Maxwell Davies25:20

I think we were opening up stylistic floodgates and

Peter Maxwell Davies25:25

I think that eventually

Peter Maxwell Davies25:28

people did realize that we were not a threat, that we were a part of a long musical tradition which in the case of Bertrasland and myself I think goes right back.

Presenter25:39

Mm.

Presenter25:40

And yet

Presenter25:42

You spool on, what, thirteen years from there and uh the premiere of your piece World's Bliss is played at a prom and people are still walking out.

Peter Maxwell Davies25:52

Yes, that was in nineteen sixty nine and

Peter Maxwell Davies25:55

I had that happen at the proms, where quite a sizable bit of the audience left.

Speaker 426:00

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies26:00

And that same year, Eight Songs from Mad King was performed, and I was conducting that, and it was very difficult because people were shouting out rubbish and shut up from behind.

Presenter26:09

So how do you feel in the moment? Do you feel dismayed, or couldn't you care less?

Peter Maxwell Davies26:14

Oh, it was very upsetting. It really is discouraging. And

Peter Maxwell Davies26:19

You have to fight away a despair. But I think I did that, and went on and went on, and I remember that Colin Davies conducted World's Bliss not long after that, and I put it about mischievously that I'd done some revision. I did none at all, and the press said how much better this revised version was.

Presenter26:42

But obviously then it matters to you whet whether your music is well received. And I I I have in mind your erstwhile chum Harry Birtwhistle, who's always said that he absolutely couldn't care less if anybody played or listened to his music at all, that the writing of it was an end in itself.

Peter Maxwell Davies26:58

Yes, I do care.

Peter Maxwell Davies26:59

And particularly I feel that I do want to tell people how it is to be PM D, and I hope that my music reflects something of the spiritual values and helps people to understand their own

Peter Maxwell Davies27:16

musicality, their own spiritual development, and that it means something in people's lives. This is terribly important to me. I would hate to not have my pieces played. I would hate not to be able to communicate, because it's it's a love of people, I think, basic as that.

Peter Maxwell Davies27:36

Record number six.

Presenter27:37

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies27:39

George Mackay Brown, the Arcadian poet, he was a very big influence on me. I've set his poems, I've made operas and music theatre pieces out of his work, and I would hate to be on a desert island without him reading some of his own poetry, and here he is reading The Old Woman.

Speaker 128:00

Go sad, or sweet, or riotous with beer, Past the old women gossiping by the hour They'll fix on you from every close and peer An acid look to make your veins run sour.

Speaker 128:14

No help, they say his grandfather that's dead Was troubled with the same dry throated curse, And many a night he made the ditch his bed.

Speaker 128:24

This blood comes welling from the same crack source.

Speaker 128:28

On every kind of merriment they frown

Speaker 128:32

But I have known a gray eyed, sober boy Sail to the lobsters in a storm and drown.

Speaker 128:39

Over his body dripping on the stones, Those same old hags would weave into their moans An under song of terrible holy joy.

Presenter28:49

The Aucadian poet George Mackay Brown reading his poem The Old Woman.

Presenter28:54

Mackay Brown, whom you met on your first visit, as we've said, to Orkney, it is the most.

Presenter28:59

inhospitable

Presenter29:01

place. Well, it sounds like it, I don't know. I've never been there. But, you know, the winter months are so long and the days can be so short and dark and amenities aren't exactly many and varied. Um and you you appear to be such a gregarious person. I mean it it feels like a perverse posting you've given yourself.

Peter Maxwell Davies29:19

I think both on Hoy, where I lived for twenty eight years, and in Sandey, where I'm living now in the Northern Isles of Orkney, there are very good communities, and I think part of living in a community like that is to be in that community.

Presenter29:32

One of your friends, and I I do believe it is a friend, has said that that that perhaps you are always destined to live in a place like Orkney because you

Presenter29:40

like to have a kind of fiefdom.

Peter Maxwell Davies29:43

Ha ha

Presenter29:43

Ha ha ha.

Peter Maxwell Davies29:43

I don't know whether it's a fiefdom or not. I would doubt it. I'm a very, very quiet and retiring member of the community there.

Presenter29:52

But you get off quite regularly and you come out and you talk a lot like today and then you go back there. I mean are there two different maxes though?

Peter Maxwell Davies29:56

Yeah.

Peter Maxwell Davies29:57

That means

Peter Maxwell Davies29:59

No, I don't think so. I think they're the same one. When I'm there I write my music, but I also entertain a lot. I also go into the school, work with the children, and there

Peter Maxwell Davies30:08

I'm nobody important, I'm just Max. I hope I hope

Peter Maxwell Davies30:13

Next piece of music. This one's interesting.

Peter Maxwell Davies30:16

This is a March and it's uh

Peter Maxwell Davies30:19

This extraordinary

Peter Maxwell Davies30:21

Experience I had as master of the Queen's Music, making it my duty to get to know all sorts of.

Peter Maxwell Davies30:27

byways of musical life that I'd never explored before, and I realized that there was a whole different world of music there, with its own laws, its own regulations, and

Peter Maxwell Davies30:44

I was absolutely fascinated by this, and the music's not bad either. Some of it is excellent in its own terms, and this for me is a new experience which I hope I can do something about in the next years.

Presenter31:27

The Staffordshire Yeomanry, played by the Band of the Corps of Royal Engineers, the Band of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and the Fanfare Trumpeters of the Royal Military School of Music, written and led by Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Kingston. So that's the kind of stuff you're going to write now as Master of the Queen's Music, is it, Ma?

Peter Maxwell Davies31:42

I am not quite so sure of that. I will have a go, perhaps, when I've learnt more about it, but it's early days yet.

Presenter31:49

What's your answer to those people who say that you're a conformist now, ac accepting this kind of post and the knighthood you accepted before, you know, having been someone who for so long resisted the establishment in so many ways?

Peter Maxwell Davies32:02

I think I had to resist the establishment in so many ways, and I hope that I can perhaps make it a bit easier for people coming along who might be in my position. And part of the thing

Peter Maxwell Davies32:15

with the royal appointment is, I am sure, enhancing the profile of serious new music. And I also, having spoken with the Queen and learnt to respect her very much, I hope that she is going to enjoy this appointment as well, can I say very quietly?

Presenter32:37

There's a hint there then that we might expect something quite unusual to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War later this year.

Peter Maxwell Davies32:46

Watch yeah.

Presenter32:47

This

Peter Maxwell Davies32:48

Yeah.

Presenter32:52

Let me quote you to yourself to end with. You said only a few years ago

Presenter32:56

Am I this, or am I this? or perhaps that, or perhaps I am not any of those things at all, and there's nothing behind the mask.

Presenter33:04

Well now, um are you

Presenter33:07

You're no longer rebellious. Um you you've become venerable, which is what we're discussing here. Are you simply enjoying as ever being?

Peter Maxwell Davies33:12

Buildings

Presenter33:15

Impossible to pigeonhole. I think I'm saying do you know who you are?

Peter Maxwell Davies33:19

Every piece of music that I write, whatever its style,

Peter Maxwell Davies33:23

It's

Peter Maxwell Davies33:25

A step on the way to finding out. No, I don't know, but when I've written the next quartet, or the next choral piece, or the next whatever it is, I'll be that much closer to finding out. I hope

Peter Maxwell Davies33:40

In a way

Peter Maxwell Davies33:42

I can never give you a an answer in words because I might stop writing music.

Presenter33:47

Last record.

Peter Maxwell Davies33:49

The last record is the opening of Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony, and I love this because it was so unexpected. Stalin was expecting Shostakovich, after the end of the Second World War, to write a Ninth Symphony which would be perhaps like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, triumphal, something which would really celebrate the defeat of the uh Nazis. But he came up with this cheeky little number.

Peter Maxwell Davies34:17

And we learnt later that he even paraded his Stalin in it, although he didn't dare tell anybody at the time. And it's just the unpredictability of the man, and the sheer naughtiness of the man, in a situation where he could have disappeared into the gulag for his cheek.

Peter Maxwell Davies34:37

That makes me love him and makes me love this piece so much.

Presenter35:33

Part of the Allegro, the opening movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. Nine in E-flat major, played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazi. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Max, which one would you take?

Peter Maxwell Davies35:46

I think I'd take the plain song because I think it's pregnant with meaning, pregnant with ideas, and could.

Peter Maxwell Davies35:55

possibly fertilize my brain evermore.

Presenter35:59

And your book, we give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Peter Maxwell Davies36:03

I think under the circumstances, as I have spent quite a lot of time with the Bible, and I don't know about Hindoo religion, I might take the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana.

Peter Maxwell Davies36:14

In Sanskrit with a good translation and a Sanskrit dictionary and

Presenter36:19

How many books is this?

Peter Maxwell Davies36:20

Oh, I that's five volumes in the Gita Press from Gorakhpoor, I know that. But I would like to spend time with that, and in the normal circumstances of life you don't really you just don't, and it's terrible.

Presenter36:34

Okay, so one replaces the Bible and the dictionary is your chosen book. Well, we'll we'll let that pass. Um and your luxury.

Peter Maxwell Davies36:42

I think my luxury would be the copper plate engravings of Durer's Passion.

Peter Maxwell Davies36:49

Because they are technically masterpieces, their spiritual content is overwhelming, and it was something which was made for home use, for everybody. Anybody could have them. It wasn't a work of art which was just for one person. It was printed and done off in thousands. And I wouldn't feel guilty about that.

Presenter37:10

Sir Peter Maxwell Davis, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Peter Maxwell Davies37:14

Thank you.

Speaker 437:23

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.