Sir Peter Maxwell Davies CH CBE (1934–2016) was an English composer and conductor, who in 2004 was made Master of the Queen’s Music.
He was born in Salford, Lancashire. He took piano lessons and composed from an early age. After attending Leigh Boys Grammar School, Davies studied at the University of Manchester and at the Royal Manchester College of Music (amalgamated into the Royal Northern College of Music in 1973), where one of his teachers was Hedwig Stein; his fellow students included Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Together they formed New Music Manchester, a group committed to contemporary music. After graduating in 1956, he studied on an Italian government scholarship for a year with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome.
In 1959, Davies became Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School. He left in 1962 after securing a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University (with the help of Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten); there he studied with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt and Earl Kim. He then moved to Australia, where he was Composer in Residence at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide, 1965–66.
In 1966, Davies returned to the United Kingdom and moved to the Orkney Islands, initially to Hoy in 1971, and later to Sanday. Orkney (particularly its capital, Kirkwall) hosts the St Magnus Festival, an arts festival founded by Davies in 1977. He frequently used the festival to premiere new works (often played by the local school orchestra).
Davies was Artistic Director of the Dartington International Summer School from 1979 to 1984. From 1992 to 2002, he was associate conductor/composer with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a position he also held with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and he has conducted a number of other prominent orchestras, including the Philharmonia, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. In 2000 Davies was Artist in Residence at the Barossa Music Festival when he presented some of his music theatre works and worked with students from the Barossa Spring Academy. Davies is also Composer Laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, for whom he wrote a series of ten Strathclyde Concertos.
He was awarded a number of honorary doctorates, including Honorary Doctor of Music from Oxford University in July 2005. He had been President of Making Music (The National Federation of Music Societies) since 1989. Davies was made a CBE in 1981 and knighted in 1987. He was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music in March 2004 but, in a break from the tradition of lifetime tenure, his appointment was limited to ten years. He was made a Freeman of the City of Salford August 2004. On 25 November 2006, he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University at a service in Canterbury Cathedral. He was Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2009 became an Honorary Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. Davies received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2002.
Davies was a prolific composer who wrote in a variety of styles and idioms over his career, often combining disparate styles in one piece. Early works often use serial techniques (for example Sinfonia for chamber orchestra, 1962), sometimes combined with Mediaeval and Renaissance compositional methods. He wrote app. 300 works, including Trumpet Concerto, 10 Symphonies, and 10 Strathclyde Concertos written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, many works for young performers and music for the cinema.