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Saw it on the Indie newsfeed at lunchtime, Peter Maxwell Davies has died. Not unexpected, he'd been undergoing chemotherapy for leukaemia.
When I was getting into music in the late sixties, he was one of the "new" composers I head a lot of. His opera Taverner was staged at Covent Garden in 1972 and was broadcast and in 1973 I moved to London and soon started going to concerts he gave with his group The Fires of London.
Very much a seminal composition of his at this time was the music theatre piece Eight Songs for a Mad King. The Fires of London had a staging of this that they performed frequently. It's about George III who, in his periods of madness tried to teach his mechanical birds to sing. There are four giant bird cages on the stage and an instrumentalist sitting in each. After the music starts, the singer playing the king enters, often in a straitjacket. The vocal techniques employed are extreme, growling, groaning, shrieking. The music quotes parts of Handel and there are some foxtrots. Finally, the singer addresses the audience in more or less a normal speaking voice to announce the king is dead. The monologue ends, "Poor fellow, he will die howling" at which point he starts to howl. Meanwhile, the percussionist has strapped a bass drum to his chest, marching band style, and starts beating it with a bullwhip and chases the singer of stage. A truly harrowing piece.
About this time Max, as he was always known, moved to Orkney and his music was performed often. He did the music for the two Ken Russell films The Devils and The Boyfriend. More foxtrots in both of those. Max loved foxtrots. When he got round to writing a symphony in the mid-seventies, the premiere got reported on the BBC news. I was there. A second symphony was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In all, he wrote 10.
Some said his music started to get boring and I was certainly less interested in some of his later works. But he did write Orkney Wedding and Sunrise, which ends with a Highland piper marching on stage, pipes blaring. And there was another "lighter" piece that had an interesting back story.
Max was doing a tour of the US with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and did a concert in Las Vegas. The music critic of The Independent wanted to do an interview with him and contacted the Hilton where he was staying. The hotel claimed not to have heard of him. They looked in their booking computer under Davies, Maxwell, Peter and even Sir, but they couldn't find him. The critic checked the other Hilton hotel in the area and they didn't have him, either. Finally, he did turn up at the first hotel. They had him registered under the name "Mavis". So Max wrote a piece called Mavis in Las Vegas, full of parodies of the sort of tunes you might expect to hear there.
When I was getting into music in the late sixties, he was one of the "new" composers I head a lot of. His opera Taverner was staged at Covent Garden in 1972 and was broadcast and in 1973 I moved to London and soon started going to concerts he gave with his group The Fires of London.
Very much a seminal composition of his at this time was the music theatre piece Eight Songs for a Mad King. The Fires of London had a staging of this that they performed frequently. It's about George III who, in his periods of madness tried to teach his mechanical birds to sing. There are four giant bird cages on the stage and an instrumentalist sitting in each. After the music starts, the singer playing the king enters, often in a straitjacket. The vocal techniques employed are extreme, growling, groaning, shrieking. The music quotes parts of Handel and there are some foxtrots. Finally, the singer addresses the audience in more or less a normal speaking voice to announce the king is dead. The monologue ends, "Poor fellow, he will die howling" at which point he starts to howl. Meanwhile, the percussionist has strapped a bass drum to his chest, marching band style, and starts beating it with a bullwhip and chases the singer of stage. A truly harrowing piece.
About this time Max, as he was always known, moved to Orkney and his music was performed often. He did the music for the two Ken Russell films The Devils and The Boyfriend. More foxtrots in both of those. Max loved foxtrots. When he got round to writing a symphony in the mid-seventies, the premiere got reported on the BBC news. I was there. A second symphony was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In all, he wrote 10.
Some said his music started to get boring and I was certainly less interested in some of his later works. But he did write Orkney Wedding and Sunrise, which ends with a Highland piper marching on stage, pipes blaring. And there was another "lighter" piece that had an interesting back story.
Max was doing a tour of the US with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and did a concert in Las Vegas. The music critic of The Independent wanted to do an interview with him and contacted the Hilton where he was staying. The hotel claimed not to have heard of him. They looked in their booking computer under Davies, Maxwell, Peter and even Sir, but they couldn't find him. The critic checked the other Hilton hotel in the area and they didn't have him, either. Finally, he did turn up at the first hotel. They had him registered under the name "Mavis". So Max wrote a piece called Mavis in Las Vegas, full of parodies of the sort of tunes you might expect to hear there.
