8 - Amanuensis of the Sea: Peter Maxwell Davies’s Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 and the Antarctic Symphony
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 June 2021
Summary
IN JULY 1970, Peter Maxwell Davies found himself in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, literally and figuratively. He later wrote about this trip:
One Sunday I went to Hoy. It was one of those days where everything happens as if pre-ordained. I met there some people who have since become very good friends; and I met George Mackay Brown, which was strange because I had been reading George Mackay Brown for the first time in my life all night the previous night. (I had not gone to sleep because I had been so excited by his work.) We enjoyed the whole afternoon very much. I told them I thought it one of the most marvellous places I’ve ever been to – with the beautiful valley and the sea pounding it, just below the house.
The Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown describes the very same day as ‘one of those miserable afternoons of cold-drifting see-haar, when even the lovely encircling hills of Rackwick look like a group of old hags keening’. Brown observed the islands’ thrall over Davies: ‘On such a day the spell touched the composer.’ If it did not feel like home to Davies yet, after returning in November to compose the film score for Ken Russell's The Devils, it did. The month of isolation he experienced, free from all of the ostensible comforts of metropolitan city life, led him to write:
I realized that I was probably writing better music than I’d written for a number of years, because I was having to concentrate. There's no escape from yourself here, you just have to realize what you are through your music, with much more intensity than in urban surroundings.
Taken thoroughly with the experience and intent on escaping the perpetual interruptions he associated with life in London, Davies made plans for a January 1971 move to Hoy, the second largest island of the Orcadian archipelago. In the seclusion and calmness of Orkney, the very anagnorisis of Davies's future compositional voice was revealed to him: the sea. Since then, Davies has infused his surroundings into one-third of his more than three hundred and thirty official opuses: cosmopolitan noise replaced with the stimulating echoes and sonorities of the Pentland Firth, the North Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.
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- The Sea in the British Musical Imagination , pp. 151 - 176Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015