Writing in 2000, Peter Maxwell Davies declared that his music offered no ‘ready solutions’,

Humility and humour are two of the fundamental character traits commonly associated with Davies, but as this quotation foregrounds, it was his gritty single-mindedness – an unyielding determination to ‘bear witness, under whatever circumstances’– that is absolutely key in enabling us to understand his raison d’être and comprehend the vastness of his output. Without doubt, Davies was possessed, come what may, with an obsessive compulsion – a dogged inner impulse – to compose. ‘The urge to write, the fascination with sound worlds in music’, he once wrote in his diary, is ‘too urgent to resist.’ The result of this endeavour ensured that a rich vein of music flowed ostensibly unabated from the composer's creative imagination – ‘in a hot crucible, very fast’ – throughout his working life. Davies composed primarily at the desk, away from the piano. ‘I am still a paper and pencil man’, he remarked in 2008: ‘there is such a joy in the physical sensation of pushing a pencil across a piece of blank music manuscript, which I’ve always loved, always enjoyed that as a real, sensuous experience all through my creative life and I wouldn't be without that.’

EARLY YEARS AND JUVENILIA

Davies was born in Salford (now part of Greater Manchester) on 8 September 1934. At the age of four his family moved to Swinton (three miles northeast of Salford), and it was there, in 1942, that he began piano lessons and started to compose shortly afterwards. Over the next ten years he was to produce nearly thirty works. Not all of the manuscripts for these compositions are currently available, but a good number of them have been deposited at the British Library.