Peter Maxwell Davies

Peter Maxwell Davies0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Peter Maxwell Davies0:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1983.

Peter Maxwell Davies0:11

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Speaker 20:29

As usual, the Castaway is introduced by Roy Plumley.

Speaker 20:33

On our desert island this

Presenter0:34

Week is the composer Peter Maxwell Davies.

Presenter0:38

Max, you have eight discs. Would you prefer scores? I probably would prefer scores, because then you can make your own interpretation in your own mind. Not that it would be any better than the ones on the record, but at least it would change, and records don't, you know. No, they don't, and records is what you've got. Now, in real life, you've chosen to live on a a small island, so you quite enjoy solitude.

Presenter1:02

Very much so, yes. I think it's important

Presenter1:06

for a composer not only to

Presenter1:08

be with people, working with musicians and knowing how audiences react and what the professional side of communicating music is all about, but also to be by himself so that he comes to terms with the compositional problems that he has in his own time and to the fullest possible extent. And that's my reason for in fact going to an island, but not a desert one.

Speaker 41:31

Ha!

Presenter1:32

In choosing your eight records, what were you looking for? Did you have a plan?

Presenter1:37

Not really. I didn't have a plan when I thought about this, but I didn't choose my favourite pieces in a way in the way that most people I think do because as a composer, as a musician, you carry around in your head an enormous number of scores. And I think a lot of the pieces which

Presenter1:59

Most people might think I would choose like the Beethoven symphonies or um quartets or the Mozart operas or things which are standard. Well, you know those so well.

Presenter2:10

That you can more or less just play them through in your mind and go from the beginning to the end.

Speaker 42:15

Yeah.

Presenter2:15

And uh I think that one wants to find something which perhaps one doesn't know quite so well and which is going to be very stimulating. Where do we start? What's your first one? Well the first one is by Beethoven in fact. It's the great fugue from the late B-flat quartet. Why do you choose this one?

Presenter2:37

Well, this piece intrigues me, because Beethoven finished this quartet with this fugue, and then withdrew it and put a very conventional little finale on instead of this fugue, and I wonder

Presenter2:51

Why there was this crisis of self-confidence, because this fugue is, I think, one of the most outrageously original movements that Beethoven ever wrote. And at the height of his powers, he withdrew it. And I wonder whether this was to do with his health, his deafness, um the fact that his nephew had tried to commit suicide.

Presenter3:12

Because of Beethoven's dreadful behaviour towards him, which must have worried even Beethoven quite dreadfully and attacked his self-confidence. But there's a problem here. Quite apart from the intrinsic problem of Beethoven making a fugue as an integral form of a whole movement rather than a passing reference in a movement, which I think poses problems for him, but there's also this very interesting problem for me as a composer of why he actually rejected this music.

Presenter4:45

Beethoven's Grosser Fuger,

Presenter4:47

Opus one three three, played by the Lindsay string quartet.

Presenter4:51

Max, where were you born?

Presenter4:53

I was born in Manchester. One of a large family? No, I was the only one. Was there a a lot of music in your home?

Presenter5:00

No, there wasn't. My parents were very interested in musical comedy.

Presenter5:05

and light music

Presenter5:07

But there wasn't very much interest in serious music. This was something I found myself. Do you remember your very first exposure to music, the first time Yes. Uh first time it really hit me was when I was taken to see the gondoliers.

Presenter5:21

I determined there and then that that was what my life was about. It was just one of those extraordinary experiences. I was four. Was it a Doily Cart production? No, it wasn't. It was at Salford Central Mission.

Presenter5:32

a local Methodist group amateur production, but uh I thought it was wonderful and I can still remember it with tremendous affection and detail. Was there a piano in the house?

Presenter5:43

There was eventually we got my grandmother's piano.

Presenter5:46

And I was sent off for piano lessons to Miss Jones in Swinton, Manchester, where we lived. And very quickly I became interested in the Beethoven piano sonatas and the Mozart piano sonatas and this, that and the other. And this was very largely due to being able to borrow these things from the public library in Manchester. And my gratitude for that will always be infinite. You began to explore the repertoire. Yes, quite a lot of things were just not available on record then, of course, particularly the new scores which I was interested in by Messian, Stravinsky, so on.

Presenter6:21

And one just had to try to come to terms with these at the piano. And I think it's a very good thing to have to do that. You really do learn how to read a full score at the piano. And um

Presenter6:34

I found that

Presenter6:36

I was borrowing probably half a dozen scores every week and

Presenter6:40

Thundering through them at the piano, probably very badly. But at least I got to know them, and this was awfully important. How much music was there at your school? That's a good question. There was very little indeed. It was a rather sorry experience at Lee Grammar School in those days. There's a sad story you have of the day when you asked if you could take an O level in music.

Presenter7:03

Yes, and the headmaster refused. He said, My dear boy, this is not a girls' school.

Presenter7:10

Yeah, that's a terrible story. Let's have your second record.

Presenter7:14

This is something which I was very fond of when I was at Leigh Grammar School.

Presenter7:19

It's L'Enfant et les Sotilage, Child and the Witchcraft, I suppose you could call it, by Ravel. And the bit that I'd like to hear is where suddenly you're transported into the garden at night, and I think it's one of those most marvellous economic but atmospheric pieces of painting in music that I know.

Presenter8:38

An excerpt from Ravelle's L'Enfoil les Sortilaiges.

Presenter8:42

A performance by the French National Radio Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Ernest Bour.

Presenter8:49

So you were working away on your own, Max. Who was encouraging you?

Presenter8:54

Well, I don't really know. I think I was doing it on my own, with my parents' backing. My piano teacher didn't really approve of what I was doing, because I was starting to write music which had dire influences like Stravinsky and so on, which were completely beyond her ken.

Presenter9:11

And it was a very

Presenter9:13

Very lonely road that I was going along in those days. You were a very imaginative lad. You invented a language of your own, didn't you? Oh, I did all sorts of silly things like that, yes. I think um the normal sort of things that imaginative children do. We were learning German and um Latin and French at school, and of course you could turn those backwards and put the endings of one set of cases on to the other language and invent a script for it.

Presenter9:38

The kind of thing that one tends to do sometimes in one's composition of music.

Presenter9:43

Were you bright in other subjects?

Presenter9:46

I think I was fairly bright, yes. What about other school activities like sport and so on?

Presenter9:51

Sport bored me out of my mind.

Presenter9:53

It was not that I was a weakling or anything at all, never have been, but just the whole point of it

Presenter10:02

just escaped me. And I remember being in trouble for daydreaming on the cricket field. I was even writing music while I was supposed to be fielding, I remember. I found the fielding so tedious.

Peter Maxwell Davies10:12

Father Hilda's

Presenter10:14

You were obviously hoping for a career in music. How did you visualize yourself conducting a prom as a soloist, as a composer? What was your impact on music to be? I knew that I was going to be a composer. That was all that I really was interested in. Not so much playing or conducting, but just composing. And I was very interested in opera and the theatre.

Presenter10:39

And I saw myself doing something on those lines, writing music, possibly incidental music for film. I had no highfalutin ideas about being a big name composer, but I thought I might be able to make an honest living perhaps writing incidental music or something of that kind. You moved on to Manchester University as a music scholar? Yes, yes. And then to the Royal Manchester School of Music, or was that at the same time? At the same time, yes. Which contemporaries of yours would we know by name?

Presenter11:08

Well, at the Royal Manchester College of Music, now the Northern College, of course.

Presenter11:14

there was a whole group of people who banded together just for survival, I think, because it was a pretty dire institution in those days, with very little encouragement for any interest in new music.

Presenter11:26

And we called ourselves New Music Manchester. There were Harrison Bachwisle, Alexander Gurr, um Elgar Harth, John Ogden, um Rodney Friend, I remember, who's now leading the B B C Symphony Orchestra, he played some of my music then. It was a very, I think, a very

Presenter11:43

Good group of students in that we were always discussing. I remember we spent whole nights just talking around a table at Alexander Gerr's flat and that talk I think was something which I will never ever forget. It was just he he's absolutely brilliant and he was really the leader of that group and he was one's contact with well his father's teacher Schoenberg for instance who was a tremendous influence on me then. As a student did you work during the vacations in a musical line in tea shops or anything like that? Keep going. No I worked as a postman I remember.

Presenter12:23

A very unmusical occupation, on the whole. Although you could hum and whistle as you went round, of course. Yes, you were free to think your thoughts.

Presenter12:31

Now you were writing and obviously rejecting your first works. What was the first work to which you wanted to put your name, Opus One? Opus One was a piece I wrote for Elga Howes.

Presenter12:46

who now of course is a conductor, but then was a trumpet player. And he and I, and eventually he and John Ogden, played this trumpet sonata that I wrote. And that is my Opus One. I got as far as Opus II, and then I forgot about Opus Numbers. I thought they were too pretentious. But this piece I remember.

Peter Maxwell Davies12:59

I thought the m

Presenter13:03

I wrote this for Elgar Howth and sent it off to the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and uh they sent it back, saying it was impossible to play.

Presenter13:14

For both the pianist and the trumpeter. Well, we'd given performances of it in Manchester, so the whole lot of us just went down to London, put on our own concert, and Jollywell showed them. I hope they were duly humiliated.

Presenter13:25

Well, I doubt it.

Presenter13:27

Your second record, what's that?

Presenter13:29

Now I beg your pardon, your third record. Third record, well I mentioned Schoenberg.

Presenter13:34

who I think is one of the most underplayed but one of the most influential composers of the century. And certainly when I was a student, just by looking at the score one couldn't listen to it then, there was no record I was very influenced by these early five orchestral pieces of his, and this one

Presenter13:50

Colours, or Summer Morning by a Lake, its other title.

Presenter13:54

I still find quite, quite atmospheric and it leads me to think about all sorts of marvellous orchestral colours in my own work.

Presenter15:03

One of Schoenberg's five orchestral pieces, Colors, or Early Morning by a Lake, played by the B B C Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez.

Presenter15:12

You went off to study in Rome. How did that come about?

Presenter15:16

I got a scholarship to go there. Otherwise I never could have gone. I went for the interview for this thing in London.

Presenter15:24

And I remember the first thing that they asked me when I got into the room was, please describe this room.

Presenter15:29

In Italian. Well, I had a few words of Italian, so I had a good try, but uh I got the thing and went to study with Petrasi in Rome, and that was wonderful. Had you at that time had any professional performances of your compositions?

Presenter15:41

Very few, probably two or three, that's all, particularly at the Darkington Summer School.

Presenter15:46

Continental countries on the whole are kinder to young composers than ours, I am told. Did you get some performances in Italy or round about?

Presenter15:56

Yes, I did. I got a prize for an orchestral piece in Italy, and it was played there, and it was a very valuable experience to have an orchestral piece played at that very early stage. You learn so much from having even a bad orchestral piece played that I don't think it was a particularly good one. But it was quite wonderful to hear one's own work played by an orchestra, and also rather humiliating because you realise how much better other people have done it.

Presenter16:25

How long were you in Italy? I was there for a year. And you came back to England. This, I believe, was nineteen fifty eight. You taught in a school for a while. Yes, I taught at Cyrencester Grammar School in Gloucestershire.

Presenter16:36

I don't think I was a particularly good teacher or anything, but I did find that when the kids were writing their music, this was for me very liberating, because kids can write music if you just let them, just as they can paint and make poetry and things. And

Presenter16:53

Those kids were producing music which was a great deal less inhibited than what I was doing.

Presenter17:00

And that sheer joy and the sheer freedom of it, I think.

Presenter17:05

Taught me a lot and I probably learnt far more teaching at Siren Cesta than I ever taught. You mounted an ambitious production of the Monte Verde Vestras. Oh yes, that involved hundreds of kids and I did an arrangement of whole chunks of it specially for as many people as possible. I like to when I'm working with kids involve as many as possible, even if they're just playing open strings or something. So long as the strings are in tune and it fits the harmony and they play it in time, fine. Very unauthentic version, I'm sure, but.

Presenter17:36

Again, it was a very good way of getting to know that piece, the Montevedi Vespas.

Presenter17:41

And then a fellowship at Princeton. How did that come about?

Presenter17:45

I met Aaron Copeland. He's the senior American composer now, I think.

Presenter17:50

at the Darkington Summer School, and I got to know him quite well, and he liked my work. And he said, Hey, Max, why don't you go to America? There's a very good teacher at Princeton called Roger Sessions. And I said, Well, however would I get there? And he said, Well, there's this great scholarship going and I'll give you a reference and Ben Britton will give you one and you'll be fine. And I got it.

Peter Maxwell Davies17:59

Uh

Presenter18:09

Was that rewarding? Oh, it was marvelous.

Presenter18:12

I had time to write full time, which after Siren Sester I really needed.

Presenter18:18

And Princeton University itself had such a stimulating atmosphere

Presenter18:23

The students there and the people who were lecturing, they were so inquisitive about new music and even.

Presenter18:31

people like I remember Professor Strunk doing um Byzantine music, early medieval stuff. I've got so much out of those things. And even things like the philosophy course and um

Presenter18:42

Fine art courses, you could just drop in on those things and it was a very stimulating time indeed. At the end of that two years, wasn't it? Yes. Did you feel then that uh

Presenter18:53

Your academic activities as as pupil and teacher were at an end. You were now to be a composer. Was there any kind of a a breakthrough feeling? Yes, there was. I came back and signed a contract with the publishers Boosey and Hawkes.

Presenter19:07

which gave me a retainer, which was just about enough to live on if I got a few royalties from the odd performance. And so I could now be a full-time composer and not have that financial worry. Right, that's a watershed, so let's have record number four.

Presenter19:24

I've chosen a piece of American music by Eliot Carter, his concerto for orchestra. I find Carter's music very stimulating and for me it in some way sums up the whole experience of coming to terms with particularly New York, which I find a very difficult place indeed, and the whole American experience that I've had over the years.

Presenter20:46

Elliott Carter's concerto for orchestra played by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Did you know Elliott Carter? Or do you know Elliot Carter? Oh yes, he was another composer who had an enormous influence on me. I met him at the Dartington Summer School. So many people I've met there.

Peter Maxwell Davies21:01

Spend

Presenter21:04

Right, so you were working in London as a full-time professional composer. Now you formed a group. It was the age of groups. Everybody had a group. Tell me about yours. Well, it was really Bertwhistle's idea in the first place. Harrison Bertwhistle, my fellow composer. And we decided that we weren't getting enough performances of our work. And those that we did get, many of them were not all that good because players were being reluctant and sometimes conductors were also being reluctant or hadn't studied the score enough. You know how it is with young composers. People don't take you terribly seriously. And so we formed our own group called Piero Players, now the Fires of London.

Presenter21:42

And this, I think, has been an enormous help to me to have a group like that, of players that you can trust. You know they're going to

Speaker 421:47

Uh

Presenter21:50

Really work very, very hard to prepare a piece properly, and you'll get a first-class performance, and many of them do. How many regular members?

Presenter21:59

We are basically eight people.

Presenter22:02

And we can add to that as we need to. And a rather theatrical bias to the group. Very much so, yes. I'm very interested in opera and music theatre.

Presenter22:12

And uh I've written quite a number of pieces for the group which involve mime or dancing or some kind of theatrical element. You can put across all sorts of um strange points of view in a very

Presenter22:26

direct and minimal way which really grabs people when you do this and it's as if the so-called problems of contemporary music just disappear if you get their attention like that. And of course The Fires of London is a good dramatic title, an inspired title. Yes, it is.

Presenter22:42

Now you were working hard, you were very productive, much in the public eye. Then in nineteen seventy you decided to go to live on the island of Hoy in the Orkneys. Beautiful, I'm told, but about as isolated as you can get. Was retirement to work in a concentrated way your only reason?

Presenter23:01

It's hard to say. It really is. You know, it just seemed to happen and it was right. What's the population of Hoy? Oh, I don't really know. It must be about two hundred down the other end, along Hope and Liness. Where I am, very few indeed. Two families, basically. And when you went there, there was no electricity? Oh, no. No luxuries like that. In fact, until recently, I believe the only records you played were the good old-fashioned 78s that you had to wind up the gramophone. That's right. I've still got this marvellous.

Peter Maxwell Davies23:22

That

Presenter23:31

Um English handmade gramophone garden party size.

Presenter23:36

Witchem

Presenter23:38

It had to go in the house before the roof went on because um it's so enormous and the door would be too narrow and of course the house had no roof when I took it over. This had to be put on and uh first thing that went in even before the roof was this seventy eight RPM gramophone.

Presenter23:53

How much has Hoy influenced your music?

Presenter23:56

Oh, a lot

Presenter23:58

Not only in that I've been able to concentrate and work many, many hours for a long time together, many, many weeks together, but just the experience of having your ears cleaned out so that you can hear natural sounds, sounds of the wind, sounds of the waves, without machine noises, without electric humming or anything, which really

Presenter24:20

In a city, it's always there, even if you don't notice it.

Presenter24:22

And um traffic noise causes no road anywhere near. So just this encounter with natural sound I think was a revelation at that stage for me and I was very concerned with not reproducing these sounds in my own work but somehow conveying to the listener something of this joy and the sheer newness of being able to hear those tiny natural sounds. And of course they do get into the music but they're transformed into musical terms rather than being raw natural sounds. How much of the year are you there?

Presenter25:01

Present two years I'm there very little, what with the opera and Covent Garden and a great deal of travel. But for the past few years I've been there eight or nine months a year. You run an annual Orkneys Festival on on on the main island. What's that called? That's the Saint Magnus Festival, yes, in June, mid midsummer. And uh that I decided to do really just to

Presenter25:21

Say thank you to the islands,'cause I've got so much out of them. It's nice to be able to put something in. And you get a lot of visitors? We get a lot of visitors, but basically that festival is for the local people. And uh we try to give as big a variety of uh

Presenter25:36

Fair drama, concerts, theatre.

Presenter25:39

Percher reading folk music as we can and of course I feel that I must contribute by writing pieces particularly for the schools there which the children can perform, the cathedral choir sometimes and sometimes for visiting orchestras or whatever so that I'm making a very firm contribution myself. I feel I must do this.

Presenter26:04

We've got to record number five.

Presenter26:06

An old favourite, Bartock's fifth string quartet, one of those pieces where as a boy I realized that music isn't only in three, four, and four, that it can be at seven, eight and nine, eight and change all the time.

Presenter27:19

An excerpt from Bartok's String Quartet No. 5, played by the Hungarian String Quartet.

Presenter27:26

Max, early on you became fascinated by medieval and Renaissance music.

Presenter27:32

Yes, I did. This was not only because the professor of music at Manchester University advised his students, me in particular, to take no notice of music after 1900 except Delius, no notice of music before 1500 because it's dangerous. And of course that which is, as it were, forbidden is always very attractive.

Presenter27:55

But I was really drawn to the sound and feel of medieval music.

Presenter28:00

Um right from

Presenter28:02

First days at university.

Presenter28:04

And that led to an interest in a Tudor musician named Tavernagh. Yes, it did, about whom or upon whom I pegged an opera, if you like, an opera which takes place in his own mind, and I've used him as

Presenter28:19

Well, really?

Presenter28:21

a peg upon which to hang some of my own preoccupations, I suppose, because I've made the whole opera happen really inside John Tavenagh's head, and um he gives up his music when he becomes a Protestant and an agent of Thomas Cromwell.

Presenter28:38

And uh he in the early part of the sixteenth century was had up for heresy and nearly burnt at the stake, it seems, but let off because he was a musician. And after that he might have, and in my work he does, become rather vindictive about persecuting people who will not accept the new faith. Um I wanted to make a work

Presenter28:59

which exposed this whole problem of betraying that which really makes you tick, that which even if you don't think you do, you really do believe in the essential you for a political or a religious reason after a conversion. Taffner, of course, is in the repertoire at the Royal Opera House, Carpenter Garden. In fact, it's currently being revived for the second time, isn't it? It's the second revival, yes. That's your only full-scale opera, but there have been a number of chamber operas and masks and so on. Yes, there have. I find that if you write a smaller one, not such a big force, you get many more performances. And The Martyrdom of St Magnus, which I first read for the Orkney Festival, and The Lighthouse, particularly which I read for the Edinburgh Festival, must be, what, three years ago now.

Presenter29:44

They're getting an awful lot of performances, uh not so much in Britain, but around Europe and America and so on. And children's operas, uh as you as you said, you like working with children. Yes, um that's a very fruitful field and I thoroughly enjoy that. You had a big success in Copenhagen with a ballet, Salome. Is that going to be done here?

Presenter30:02

I doubt whether it will be done here.

Presenter30:05

It probably will get performances in well, it's being performed now in America and in Germany rather than here. But uh these things are very, very slow to take off in Britain. Having a nude Salome did no harm to the business in Copenhagen, I gather.

Presenter30:20

And a couple of film scores? Yes, I did a couple of film scores for Ken Russell. One of them based on the boyfriend tunes from Zandy Wilson. Yes, we're doing that at the Proms quite soon.

Presenter30:31

Ken Russell, a colourful man, not always a very easy man to work with, I believe. Sometimes not. I remember on The Boyfriend he said, Oh, yes, I promise you that we won't record this bit until you've finished the score, which I was going to have ready in a couple of days.

Presenter30:47

I thought he was going to record it just with piano and then expect me to dub the music on the top of it, and he promised me he wouldn't. And then he actually did it. And so I had to record this music over a whole day listening to a tape of this wretched thing.

Presenter31:05

going all over the place, extraordinary rubatos, in C major, and my arrangement was in C sharp, so I had a band playing in C sharp, and the cans on my head were in C. I don't think I've ever had a worse headache in my life, and did I curse him out?

Presenter31:24

We've got to record number six.

Presenter31:26

This is um opera, Monteverdi, the coronation of Poppea. This intrigues me, this work, because throughout the opera Nero behaves disgracefully, murdering this and that one, and at the end there's a complete triumph of evil, and Poppeare and Nero sing this love duet very innocently right at the end, and it is so beautiful and so touching, and one knows that they are wholly evil. It makes me think.

Speaker 432:13

Oh, be your praise song.

Peter Maxwell Davies32:13

Be on this

Speaker 432:17

Oh, holy crap. Uh

Presenter32:47

The closing duet from Monteverde is The Coronation of Popper and the singers Helen Donat and Elizabeth Soderstrom.

Presenter32:55

Now, your concert music, Max, you've written two symphonies, is that right? Yes, two to date. And you're working on a third.

Presenter33:02

Not yet. At the moment I'm doing a sequence of, well, three at least, I don't know whether there are going to be more, quite large chamber orchestral pieces. Present one for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for Edinburgh University's four hundredth anniversary. Um these are smaller symphonic works. Before I tackle another big one, I want to have worked out one or two things on a smaller scale. Your list of published works of one sort or another stands at well over a hundred. You're very prolific, aren't you?

Presenter33:32

I suppose so. Yes, I do.

Presenter33:34

I spend most of my time actually writing music. My waking hours and probably my sleeping hours too without thinking about it. And apart from the creative writing, I suppose every composer has a certain amount of routine work to do, like arranging, rearranging or reductions of published works. Do you find that a chore? Yes, I do. I usually do that more or less automatically, but it's a good opportunity for listening to music. Of course, you tend to do it more slowly and you tend to make more mistakes when you're listening to music, when you're doing some purely routine thing like reducing or copying. But otherwise it gets very tedious.

Presenter34:16

You mentioned Dartington. You also find time to be musical director there. How long in the year does that take? The summer school at Dartington only takes one month of the year. Of course there's a lot of other time thinking about it and um meetings of one kind or another.

Presenter34:31

Planning, but I think that's a very worthwhile thing. When I was a student, Dartington certainly did a lot for me, and I'd like to do something for it. And a very pleasant place to be. Lovely place, yes. Record number seven.

Presenter34:43

The Symphony No. Seven by Sebelius. I remember hearing this in, I think it was a whole cycle of the Symphonies of Sebalius that Barbara Ollie did with The Halley when I was a boy in Manchester. And I remember hearing this trombone tune in the Seventh Symphony, and I think my hair must have stood on end. It struck me as one of the most, well, ominous sounds I'd ever heard, but so invigorating and so enormously atmospheric, like black clouds and thunder. Tremendous piece. And I I've never forgotten the first time I ever heard it in Manchester.

Presenter36:22

An excerpt from the seventh Sebedia Symphony, Sir John Barbie Rowley conducting the Halley Orchestra.

Presenter36:29

Now, with your experience of living on an island, a fairly remote island, I should surmise that you are pretty good at survival. Could you run up a hut to live in? I suppose I could, yes. What about fishing? At home I'm quite content to eat the fish that uh my neighbour brings occasionally, or he calls up when he's bringing the boat in and I go down and help him up with his boat and he gives me fish. But I don't think

Presenter36:54

Under normal circumstances I would have the patience to sit there with a line or go out in a boat and do it. I prefer to be writing music, but um needs be, of course one would.

Presenter37:04

Are you a good cook?

Presenter37:06

I think so. Do you enjoy it? I love cooking. You do a lot of it. I do. I think it's quite an important part of my life, in fact.

Presenter37:14

I know that en hoy sometimes well, most days, when I've done perhaps a twelve hours' stint of work, more or less uninterrupted, unless I've done a bit of gardening or gone for a short walk, that uh I will, even if it's midnight,

Presenter37:29

cook a meal, set out the table properly for myself, with the right cutlery, the right glass, for the right kind of half bottle of wine.

Presenter37:38

And um

Presenter37:39

have my meal in candlelit style, all by myself, and this I think is very important. Splendid. We'll allow you to take a dinner jacket to your desert island.

Presenter37:49

Do you enjoy sailing?

Presenter37:51

I have never sailed as such, but I'm not seasick. I've never been seasick. Yes. Except once on a dreadful boat called the St Clement, going from the north of Scotland to Orkney, and I think the weather must have been the worst it has ever been, and I felt slightly queasy. But uh normally I'm not seasick at all and I very much enjoy the sea. If you could construct some kind of a craft, would you try to escape?

Presenter38:14

You know, I'd have to think about that one. Do you know anything about navigation? Do you know which is south and which is north? I probably know that, yes. That's a help. That is certainly a help. But I don't know whether I would even want to escape if I had a supply of music paper and pencils.

Peter Maxwell Davies38:21

Glad to help.

Presenter38:29

Right. We're coming to your luxury in a minute. Let's have your last record.

Speaker 238:31

Let's have your last record.

Presenter38:34

The Bird Four Part Mass, the Anus Day, particularly the last bit, I find very moving the Donanubi's Parchum Givers Piece.

Speaker 438:55

We touch birth, we say all the time.

Speaker 439:09

We say the word is worth.

Speaker 439:15

He's there, he's free.

Speaker 439:36

Uh

Presenter39:44

An excerpt from the William Byrd four part mass, The Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, conducted by Simon Preston.

Presenter39:51

If you could take only one disc of the age of Plato's,

Presenter39:55

Probably the William Buddh. The last one. Yes. The Mass.

Presenter39:58

And one luxury. Well, you mentioned a supply of manuscript paper and pencils.

Presenter40:03

Yes, this is a hard one. You know, one thing which I think would probably be very useful would be a few loo rolls, to be quite practical. Yes. On the other hand, I would be very tempted to have a good supply of claret, or perhaps unusual Italian wines or something.

Speaker 440:21

Mm-hmm.

Presenter40:22

But I think music paper would be it, so long as I had pencils. All right.

Presenter40:27

And one book apart from the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare already there. This is a difficult one, again.

Presenter40:34

very tempted to take something very serious, like the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, or perhaps the Divine Comedy of Dante.

Presenter40:44

But then I thought that it might be better to have something funny.

Presenter40:48

It would help no end.

Presenter40:50

And I thought, well, Rabelais,

Presenter40:52

But then I thought you know that perhaps rather well, so why don't you take one that you don't know all that well? I've read it about eight times, I think.

Presenter41:00

But it really is one of the funniest books and the most thought-provoking books in creation, I should think. And that's The Ulysses of James Joyce. And it's a good long one, too. It's very long. Ulysses by James Joyce. And thank you, Peter Maxwell Davis, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 241:27

Desert Island Discs was introduced and devised by Roy Plumley. The producer was Derek Drescher. You may like to know that Tavena, the opera which Peter Maxwell Davis talked about, is being broadcast by Radio 3 direct from the Royal Opera House at 7.30 next Wednesday evening, the 6th of July. In fact, July seems to be Peter Maxwell Davis' month on Radio 3, as on three Thursdays, Music in Our Time will be devoted to his music.

Speaker 241:51

Next Friday, the Castaway and Desert Island Discs will be one of the Monty Python team, Terry Jones.

Peter Maxwell Davies41:59

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