Music at its Max

Max, as the composer Peter Maxwell Davies is fondly known, has been living in the Orkneys for nearly three decades now and is, at 63, one of the most prolific and successful composers of his generation. His catalogue runs to some 200 works, around half of them readily available on CD and his website (MaxOpus) boasts 200 sound-samples, 25 video clips, and over 600 photographs and images, along with full details of works and recordings.

His burgeoning success and apparently ready availability as conductor of his own music has, however, impacted but little on Irish audiences. Maybe that's why the Sonorities Festival has chosen to play safe by presenting performances of two of his two bestknown music theatre pieces, Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot (1969 and 1974 respectively) and his 1988 Cello Concerto, all of which have been heard in Ireland before.

Eight Songs for a Mad King originated from a visit with Randolph Stow to Steven Runciman's castle at Lockerbie. Runciman had "this little automatic organ which had belonged to George III. It still played recognisable tunes when you turned the handle, one of which I used in my piece eventually. There was a drawing of the king in a dressing gown and a note from the keeper of George III in his madness to the effect that he used this organ to teach birds to sing, caged birds. In Randolph Stow's mind the possibility for this piece came up, of George III in his madness using this organ. But then I thought, yes, this can be the actual players, we don't need an organ."

The music was written quickly, with Roy Hart in mind, who could sing a dazzling range of strange-sounding multiphonics. "I wrote the piece for him, thinking that nobody, but nobody would ever do it again, once he'd gone. Unfortunately, he went very soon afterwards, killed in a car crash. This was devastating. But the piece was taken up by other singers and it's been done a lot. They don't do most of the multiphonics, but you don't expect them to. It's dramatic, and I think the ending of it, where he takes the violin from the cage of the violinist of the group and actually breaks it (of course you have to have a fake violin for that) is for the audience a shocking moment. You realise that it's himself that he's crushing and killing."

Miss Donnithorne's Maggot originated at a post-concert party after the premiere of the Eight Songs which "had been quite disrupted by people shouting `Rubbish' and whatever, although we did have a full house, which was nice. Randolph Stow and Steven Runciman were there, and Randolph Stow said, `Well, after this one, we've got to write a funny one. Something which is really funny. And I know the idea that I will use for this'." It took quite a while to emerge, however. "And it wasn't funny. It's a very serious and rather tragic piece, although it has got its funny side. Miss Donnithorne goes through what is obviously a nightly ritual of quite simply imagining that her lover, the British naval officer who jilted her, is in the next room, going to come in and claim her. At the end of the piece she goes to meet him, and it's all in her imagination. It's very sad." The real-life Miss Donnithorne, after she'd been jilted, "spent the rest of her life cooped up in that house with her maid, dressed in her wedding gown, which got worse and worse and shabbier and shabbier. And she kept the wedding feast spread there, and of course it moulded away, and she never left until she went out in her coffin. Again, it's a solo piece, this time for a female voice. It demands tremendous acting."

The Cello Concerto is the second of the Strathclyde Concertos, "this whole series commissioned by Strathclyde Council, the late Strathclyde Council. I suppose the whole series of 10 concertos has in a way become their monument. One of the lovely ideas of the Tory government was to break up these councils, I suppose in the hope that they would have no opposition in local government. Split up the opposition, but that didn't do them much good in Scotland, did it? "Part of this commission, too, was that there were education projects involving the schools in the Strathclyde region, which was a very big region, for each of these concertos. There were kids inventing their own pieces based on ideas from my piece, with one or two young composers, usually Scottish composers, involved, going into the schools and helping kids. Obviously very, very different pieces. They would have jamborees where they all came together with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the pieces were played, in part by members of the SCO, in part by their school friends, members of the school orchestra, chorus, whatever. And of course, at the first performance, you always got a load of kids, which I thought was very, very good." Small wonder, then, that he later describes the Labour government's dismantling of music education in Britain as "philistinism at its savage worst".

The Cello Concerto, he says, is "one of the most lyrical, and certainly one of my favourites among the concertos. I don't think it's even got pizzicatos in it, if I can remember. It really does have a line that goes all the way through it."

Asked about the difference between early and recent work, Max says "I think each of the pieces now probably develops part of an area that I mapped out on a very large scale in some of those large Sixties pieces." And does he think that there's been any softening in his output? "I probably have been seen or heard to soften to some extent in my own work. I think that's to some extent an illusion, in that I make the notes work much harder than I did." Where he once might have written fiveor six-part counterpoint, he says, he'd now make do with two-part.

He recalls recent German performances of his Second Taverner Fantasia. "It actually has got nine and 10-part counterpoint in it. When you're young you want to show off and you write a young man's music. At my age now I can't be expected to write a young man's music, and I think that's the core of it. I hope it's as intense, but I do hope that it's very different. If I'd gone on writing the same sort of music, I would have been very unhappy."

What does he think of the phenomenon of simpler and softer music coming more into fashion? "I think that a lot of composers do take soft options. But I can't blame them having a reaction against what went before. Composers always did. They do something different. I think the Fifties and Sixties had just as much bad music, even though it had a hard edge and it was fashionable to be, as it was called, `avant-garde'. It's in its way just as bad as a lot of this music which is being written now and is very soft. It's just as bad in its soft way as that was bad in its hard way. There aren't many composers that can rise above that."

Yet he takes pleasure, he says, in contemporary music good and bad, and clearly has a voracious appetite for it both as listener and performer. His current vademecum, however, is Haydn, whose quartets he reads in trains and planes, and whose symphonies he conducts with ever-renewed admiration. "When you think you're going somewhere new, you discover that Haydn's been there before, in some way."

And he's hearteningly optimistic about audiences, who now receive with enthusiasm works of his they once walked away from. Although he was born in working-class Manchester, it's Scotland that Max's name is now most commonly associated with, and it's to a Scottish example he turns to drive home his point. "A lot of people criticise Jimmie MacMillan's music. But at least he's getting through to the audiences and making people aware that there is such a thing as serious classical music being written now which they have access to and which can mean something in their lives. I think that that, particularly in Scotland, has been very, very important. It gives a lot of other composers hope."

The composer/audience "gap" is, he says, "one that can be bridged. It depends how you present the music. It depends whether the music has got a really musical argument as opposed to some pseudo or pseudo-intellectual or pseudo-mathematical argument which doesn't translate into musical terms. I think there have been a lot of misconceptions about what music is. I hope that doesn't sound old-fogeyish, but I think one really does have to work very hard on one's parameters."

Peter Maxwell Davies gives the Sonorites keynote lecture on The composer in society in the late 20th century at Queen's University at 5.30 p.m. on Thursday. His two music theatre pieces are performed by Psappha at Stormont Parliament Buildings later that evening, at 8.30 p.m; his Cello Concerto is played by Raphael Wallfisch with the Ulster Orchestra under Robert Houlihan in a free concert at the Spires Centre on Friday.

Opera theatre Company will go on tour with a production of Peter Maxwell Davies's The Lighthouse from July 17th-Augsust 7th, to Longford, Ennis, Galway Arts Festival, Dublin, Sligo, Boyle, Belfast Feile an Phobail, New Ross and Portmagee. Form more information, tel: 01-6708326