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Prelude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2020

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Summary

CONTEXTS, AIMS, METHODS

The status of Peter Maxwell Davies (1934–2016) as one of the leading international composers of the post-war period is widely acknowledged and celebrated. This pre-eminent position is, for the most part, a direct result of six decades’ worth of high profile commissions, recordings and performances of his music; but it is also a reflection of Davies's wider contributions to the world of music, culture and society through his work with music education and the teaching of composition, and his activities as conductor, as public commentator and speaker, and as Master of the Queen's Music (a position to which he was appointed in 2004 for a ten-year period). This prolific, protean composer left behind a highly significant body of work that, as the Catalogue of Works at the end this book demonstrates, comprises almost 550 compositions in every major genre, including art song and ballet, sonata and string quartet, mass and oratorio, symphony and concerto, music-theatre and opera, as well as music for children and amateurs.

It is, then, perhaps surprising that there is no recent, extended study of his music. Paul Griffiths's book, Peter Maxwell Davies, was published in 1982 and therefore does not reflect the development of Davies from that point, and Mike Seabrook's 1994 book, Max: The Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies, was chiefly focused on matters of biography with very limited detailed discussion of the music itself or the technical means of its construction. Nevertheless, Davies’s compositional technique has been discussed by a number of writers, one of the first authoritative studies being David Roberts's doctoral thesis of 1985. The approach adopted by Roberts was fundamentally analytical and score-centric, with its focus on pitch-class matrices and magic square derivation. In the 1990s this approach was allied with the study of Davies's sketch material. In the last twenty years or so, there has been a steady shift from this broadly positivistic approach to one that also embraces context and a wider sense of interpretation.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2020

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