Jones, Nicholas  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7098-6114
2025.
Resurrecting the ‘mouldering corpse’? Peter Maxwell Davies and the symphony.
Presented at: Symphonic Music After 1945,
Belgrade, Serbia,
29–31 October 2025.
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Abstract
Written over a period of five decades (spanning 1973 to 2013), Peter Maxwell Davies’s ten symphonies occupy a central position in the composer’s voluminous output. Given their international standing and wider impact, they arguably comprise one of the most significant symphonic series produced by any British composer since 1945. Having established a reputation in the 1960s as the ‘enfant terrible’ of British music, chiefly as a result of a number of radical music-theatre works (such as Eight Songs for a Mad King), the appearance of a ‘Symphony’ in the following decade caught many critics off-guard and caused others to furrow their brows. Davies also later revealed that some of his colleagues thought the move was ‘outrageous, treacherous, decadent, retrogressive’ – an ‘irresponsible attempt to resurrect the mouldering corpse of the symphony’ (Jones, 2017, 304). Yet, there is little doubt that the composer had always been deeply attracted to the abstract nature of the symphonic genre and the symphonic legacy of Sibelius and Mahler, and this interest was intensified by his move to the Island of Hoy, Orkney, in 1971. His adoption of the genre also enabled him to employ it as a vehicle to express creatively an array of extra-musical interests, impulses and preoccupations. This paper focuses on selected examples to demonstrate the richness of the composer’s symphonic imagination.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Status: | Unpublished |
| Schools: | Schools > Music |
| Subjects: | M Music and Books on Music > M Music |
| Related URLs: | |
| Last Modified: | 06 Nov 2025 14:18 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/182041 |
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