Jones, Nicholas  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7098-6114
2026.
Peter Maxwell Davies’s symphonic imagination.
Jones, Nicholas, ed.
The Symphony in Britain and Ireland since 1900: A Critical History,
[Peter Maxwell Davies’s Symphonic Imagination].
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
pp. 309-325.
(10.1017/9781009254496.020)
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Abstract
Written over a period of five decades (1973–2013), Peter Maxwell Davies’s ten symphonies occupy a central position in his output. 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, the appearance of a ‘Symphony’ in the following decade surprised critics. Yet Davies was long attracted to the abstract qualities of the genre – an interest deepened by his move to Hoy, Orkney, in the early 1970s. This chapter considers how landscape, place and the natural world, issues of form and genre, the symphonic legacy of Sibelius and Mahler, and architecture – especially the works of Brunelleschi and Borromini – shaped these symphonies. It argues that acknowledging and appreciating the symphonies from these multiple musical and extra-musical perspectives can illuminate the richness of the composer’s symphonic imagination.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Publication |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > Music |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| ISBN: | 9781009254496 |
| Last Modified: | 30 Jul 2026 14:30 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/188638 |
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