Mad Kings and Magic Squares
A personal celebration of Peter Maxwell Davies on his 90th birthday
Jack Van Zandt
It’s hard to imagine the impoverished world of working class Northern England where Peter Maxwell “Max” Davies grew up in the 1930s and 40s, but if you have ever read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, you will have some idea of it. In his 1937 book, Orwell described the Dickensian conditions and widespread unemployment that Max was born into three years before. Born and raised in Salford, a suburb of Manchester adjacent to the Wigan of Orwell’s title, Max’s early life was first dominated by the great worldwide depression that affected England as it did the USA, and then the horrors of World War II and the German bombing of Manchester and other British cities during the Blitz. These experiences would color the rest of his life, and are of crucial importance to understanding his work.
Max has said that his first musical memory of attending a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers when he was four was the event that put him on the road to becoming a composer. I can imagine that the make-believe world of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas would have given the young boy his first view of a better, happier world outside the confines of the grimy industrial city he lived in. A precocious youngster, he began piano lessons at 8, and by the time he became a teenager, he had taught himself to compose and was familiar with a great deal of classical repertoire and popular dance music. He became an excellent pianist—he could play Beethoven’s piano sonatas and the piano reductions of all of his symphonies from memory—and had a great affection for popular music styles of his childhood and his parents’ generation, as well as the types of operatic set pieces he would have heard in Gilbert and Sullivan. You can hear this interest in much of his work through the mid-1970s, especially the music theater pieces like Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot and the earlier Eight Songs for a Mad King.
After his school years, Max was accepted as a student at the Royal Manchester College of Music, now known as the Royal Northern College of Music, a twist of fortune that would change everything and influence his work for the rest of his life. His time there coincided with that of a group of remarkable students of similar age: then-clarinetist and future composer Harrison “Harry” Birtwistle, who came from a similar Lancashire working-class background; John Ogdon, who would become one of Britain’s greatest pianists; trumpeter and future conductor Elgar “Gary” Howarth; and most importantly, the older budding composer Alexander “Sandy” Goehr, who was from a Jewish émigré family considered to be musical royalty and who became the leader of this group of musicians soon dubbed the New Music Manchester Group, all under the tutelage of their teacher, composer Richard Hall.
I had discovered the music of these British composers during my undergrad studies with Peter Racine Fricker and Thea Musgrave at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the mid-1970s. In our library we had recordings of some of their works up to that time, and I remember the first work of Max’s I heard then that really grabbed me was his Second Fantasia on John Taverner’s In Nomine for orchestra (1965). I was especially taken with the final Lento Molto section that has remained a favorite of mine and the analysis of which led me to discover how his characteristic compositional techniques when applied to a cantus firmus could yield a new and exciting sound world that still had distinct ties to the past. I became a fan, and when I was required to present a contemporary opera to my small class of composers at UCSB in Thea Musgrave’s workshop on 20th Century Opera, I chose Max’s monodrama about King George III, Eight Songs for a Mad King (1968), which was then only a few years old. It opened my ears and eyes to a completely new way of thinking about theatrical chamber music which has had an enormous impact on me and many of my generation.
This new “British Music Theater” had an interesting history and set of principles which I learned from my discussions on the subject with Sandy Goehr. Goehr’s father, Walter, a conductor, composer and former Schoenberg pupil, was a specialist in the dramatic madrigals of Monteverdi and his production of Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda made a big impression on the young composers, as did Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Soldier’s Tale and Renard, and Ligeti’s Aventure.
In 1964, Max, Sandy and Harry founded the Wardour Castle Summer School and began discussions there about creating a new kind of musical theater. This new music theater was to be performed by small ensembles, singers, actors, and mimes, with minimal stage requirements and low budgets. Primary theatrical influences were Brecht and Beckett, the Theater of the Absurd, Noh theater, and Erwin Piscator’s Political Theater. Soon after the Wardour discussions, Goehr would establish his Music Theater Ensemble for which he wrote his Triptych of theater pieces (Naboth’s Vineyard, Shadowplay and Sonata about Jerusalem), and Birtwistle would establish his Pierrot Players, soon joined by Max. Harry would leave the ensemble in 1970, and Max renamed the ensemble The Fires of London, and they would become the main focus of his theater and chamber music until 1987. The instrumentation of “The Fires” is known as “Pierrot plus percussion,” after the fact that it was the same ensemble as specified to perform Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (soprano with flute, clarinet, piano, violin/viola and cello) with an added percussionist. Max was the ensemble’s artistic director and conductor.
Max composed several important theatrical works for the Pierrot Players/Fires: Revelation and Fall (1966), Eight Songs for a Mad King (1968), Vesalii Icones (1969), Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (1974), The Martyrdom of St Magnus (1977) and The Lighthouse (1980). These and several other works by Max for The Fires, as well as the ensemble itself, would become international sensations, and the group traveled the world over the following two decades. The works that Max wrote for his ensemble over the years would be some of the very best of his music, many of which continue to be performed today. Outside of his work with The Fires, Max was incredibly prolific and he wrote hundreds of works in every genre. There were full scale operas, multiple orchestral works and symphonies, string quartets, concertos, choral works, solo pieces, film scores and numerous works for young people.
Max was an excellent teacher, most famously for many years at the Dartington Summer School where he was in residence with The Fires of London, and where I was fortunate to join his class of eight young composers in 1977. Max was then 42 and I turned 23 during my summer at Dartington. Meeting Max, attending his class at Dartington, and meeting and working with The Fires was a high point of my life and I learned a great deal from the experience that I have carried with me personally and in my music to this day. At that time I was in my first year of graduate studies at Cambridge with Sandy Goehr, and it was Goehr who suggested that I go to Max’s Dartington class, and he helped arrange it and get a bursary for me to attend from the BBC, who managed Dartington. The class was quite intense and lasted all day every day for two weeks. I had received a letter from Max beforehand asking me to purchase and bring scores that we would analyze: Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131, Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli, Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, and Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. We were asked to familiarize ourselves with this music before arriving, which I did. But this was only the beginning!
The class analysis of Beethoven Op. 131 was especially powerful and influential, but there were other matters equally important. For instance, I learned from Max during those weeks how to create contexts for my ideas in composing a piece that were just as important as the material I made my pieces from. As an illustration of this, he was describing a moment in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata where there is a dramatic turn of events carved from the composer’s basic material that relied on how it was placed in the stream of music that came before and after. He sat down at the piano and played at least 100 bars from the middle of the sonata from memory up to the bar he wanted to emphasize, and it was easy for all of us to see his point. It was an incredible memorable moment of understanding for me that had far-reaching consequences in my own music.
We were also required to work closely with the members of The Fires and compose pieces for them, spending the whole night writing them and coming into class the next day with scores and parts (all handwritten) to rehearse with the group in front of the others. I was especially friendly with pianist Stephen Pruslin (1940-2022), a fellow American, who was one of the founders of the ensemble. Stephen played a solo piano piece of mine to the class which was the best performance I ever had of my music at that time. The Fires played a couple of my pieces very well too. It’s all a bit of a blur now, but having to write something quickly to a prescription of Max’s was a great experience that increased my confidence and improved my craft.
We looked at the scores of three of Max’s large-scale works, Worldes Bliss (1969), Stone Litany (1973) and the then-new First Symphony. We also got to hear The Fires play some of Max’s music. The most incredible was their performance of what I believe is his masterpiece, Ave Maris Stella. It was a new piece then and it blew everyone away, and still has that effect on me today. We students studied his handwritten score and the associated “magic square” that he used to make it. Max made a lot of his music at this time from magic squares, a numerical device he adapted for generating musical material. The pitch content was derived from the ancient Ave Maris Stella chant. Max was very much a “cantus firmus” composer and much of his music is composed around a borrowed Gregorian chant or other traditional or invented linear material. Ave Maris Stella is a towering testament to that technique.
Max made his home for most of his life in the Scottish Orkney Islands, where he founded and directed the St Magnus Festival. He once told me it was what allowed him to focus on his work without any distractions beyond the North Atlantic storms, which he loved the sound of. The history, geography and customs of the Orkneys inspired many of Max’s works. He was knighted in 1987. His appointment as the Master of the Queen’s Music in 2004 came as a surprise to many, but by all accounts he excelled in the position, which required him to create new music for royal occasions including preparing the celebratory music for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Max died from leukemia in his Orkney home in March of 2016.
In the years after Dartington, I saw and corresponded with Max several times and he was always very generous with his time and advice. He would invite me to concerts, premieres and after parties in London and elsewhere, which I enthusiastically attended. His influence on my music is very deep, and I am extremely grateful to him for his mentorship and friendship during my young composer years and for his legacy of great works that will live on. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, 8 September 1934 – 14 March 2016.
Jack Van Zandt (b. 1954) is a Grammy-winning composer of music for concerts, film and TV, and a music educator and writer. He is based in Los Angeles and Ireland. He attended the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Cambridge University, and studied composition with Alexander Goehr, Thea Musgrave, Peter Maxwell Davies and Peter Racine Fricker. His book with Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors and Models, was published by Carcanet in October 2023. His music is published by Composers Edition.
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