Last week a great musician passed away, a man who brought pleasure to millions and had an incalculable influence on 20th century culture.
But that's enough about George Martin. What about Peter Maxwell Davies?
Opposite my parents in Manchester lived a girl who went to the Northern College of Music (as it then was). She later played the viola in the Halle. My mum remembers a young man coming round to her house. That was Max. I never saw him.
Twenty years later Maxwell Davies had become Britain's pre-eminent composer, along with Harrison Birtwhistle. In the year before I went to Trinity to study with John Tavener I remember borrowing Maxwell Davies' first symphony - both score and vinyl - from a library, and struggling desperately to extract any pleasure or enlightenment from the experience. Faced with such incomprehensibility it is common to cringe; I'm rather proud that I thought instead, "Christ this is a load of shit".
A year or so later the RCM put on a performance of Maxwell Davies' A Mirror of Whitening Light at which the composer rehearsed the chamber group and discussed the piece. I was in the audience. At one point he had written something for the first violin which was actually off the instrument's register. "Here", he twinkled, "the player has to imagine the right notes even when he is actually unable to play them".
Adding to the faint but palpable atmosphere of bullshit in the room, he revealed that the piece's material was derived from the musical equivalent of a magic square, in which notes were laid out on a grid and the composer could choose which direction around the grid to travel. I remember thinking, "But since the listener can't hear that this process is going on, the point is what exactly? So that the composer doesn't have to think up any notes himself?"
Afterwards Tavener and I discussed this gloomily. He commented, "It's a beautiful title. But what's the point of writing the piece when the title's so descriptive?" John was unimpressed by Maxwell Davies. Around the same time I went to a performance of the 3rd Symphony, which Kent Nagano conducted from memory. I found it turgid.
To be fair, a number of the Orcadian exile's middle period pieces are quite likable (although Elliott Carter does something similar much better). I always thought Maxwell Davies had a good ear for texture which the spare writing for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra concertos brought out. And I was at the first British performance of the 5th Symphony (under Simon Rattle); it was mightily impressive.
In his later years Maxwell Davies's star faded somewhat. The people who run classical music discovered Mark Turnage and then Thomas Ades. Maxwell Davies was apparently up north carrying on doing what he'd been doing in previous decades. Then a couple of revelations. First I heard his Orkney Wedding With Sunrise. It was a dreadful piece of Brigadoonery. And then on the radio, Farewell to Stromness, a solo piano piece which attempted the trad style. It was even worse: plodding, dreary, lumpen, unimaginative and - perhaps worst of all - incompetent.
Like many a modernist (although, to give him credit, not the recently deceased and unrepentant Pierre Boulez), Maxwell Davies suddenly appeared to grasp late in life that he had written almost nothing that anyone would want to listen to twice, and was flailing around to rectify the situation before the Reaper called. So far so unsurprising. What I found horrifying was the revelation that here was someone who couldn't even do the simple things properly. Was Maxwell Davies a fraud all along?
Well not necessarily. Any competent trad musician would have been able to write a much better piece than Maxwell Davies's faux-Jockery; but they couldn't have put together his 5th Symphony. I contend however that a really good classical composer should be able to do both. Everything, in fact. Davies couldn't.
(Incidentally I came upon a performance of the 7th Symphony last year without knowing who it was by, and my first thought was "This bloke has no idea how to write for orchestra". It was a further foray into a kind of late Romanticism, and I found it wretched. The discovery that it was by Maxwell Davies wasn't a surprise - it fitted the narrative of someone belatedly discovering that out there is something called an audience, but running out of time to learn the technical skill required to write the kind of music which might connect with it).
It will surprise readers to discover that I don't think Maxwell Davies was a bad composer. Not so much bad as typical. My friends have heard repeatedly the thesis that most composers outside the first rank only write half a dozen really good pieces. That's likely to be as true of Maxwell Davies as anyone else. If you put Bach, Beethoven, Mozart et al in the first rank however, and people like Sibelius or Mahler in the second, where does that leave Davies? In the third row with people like Percy Grainger? I would have said not. Music lasts because the quality of the invention, and because people want to listen to it. No doubt Davies will be all over Radio 3 for a few days, but the test of durability is a cold and ruthless one which I think his music is likely to fail. Ironically the pieces most likely to survive are ones - like Orkney Wedding - which reveal the limits of his talent most starkly.
Davies was lucky to have been working in the years after the second world war during which to be Northern and working class appealed to the inverted snobbery of the time. He was lucky to be a modernist in a period when modernism was the height of fashion, and - for that reason - to attract the patronage of William Glock at the BBC. He was also lucky to be living in a period when his sexuality was no longer the personal millstone and professional block it might have been only a few decades previously (perhaps the reverse in fact). But above all he was lucky to have made a long career out of a very modest talent.
