DAVIES, PETER MAXWELL

born Sept. 8, 1934, Manchester, Eng. English composer, conductor, and teacher whose powerfully innovative music made him the most influential British composer since Benjamin Britten. Davies studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music (195256) and at Manchester University (195257) and then in Italy (195759) with the composer Goffredo Petrassi. From 1959 to 1962 he taught music at the Cirencester Grammar School, where he developed teaching methods that enabled children to perform relatively complicated works of modern music. A scholarship enabled him to study with Roger Sessions at Princeton University in 196264. Back in England, Davies in 1967 cofounded, with the composer Harrison Birtwistle, the Pierrot Players (renamed the Fires of London in 1970), a highly skilled ensemble formed to play contemporary music. He often conducted this ensemble in Britain and abroad and wrote many works for it. Davies' large output as a composer was marked by uncompromising innovation and a bold exploration of various musical forms. Especially striking in his early works was his borrowing of plainchant fragments and other materials from medieval and Renaissance music, which he incorporated into highly complex contrapuntal or serial compositions. The Prolation for orchestra (1958) and the Second Fantasia on John Taverner's In Nomine (1964) exemplify the compositions of this first period, in which elements of musical parody and satire came increasingly to predominate. Revelation and Fall (1965) and such pieces of musical theatre as Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) mark his second stylistic period, in which weirdly disparate musical elements are combined to create histrionic effects of violence and emotional frenzy. The opera Taverner (196270) summarized his evolving musical vocabulary in its 16th-century themes, complex rhythms, parodic elements, and expressionist power. In the early 1970s Davies moved to the Orkney Islands, and the austere landscapes and solitary working conditions he found there came to exercise a shaping influence on his music, in which more lyrical and reflective qualities became apparent. His better known works of this third period include the Symphony No. 1 (1976), Symphony No. 2 (1980), and Sinfonia Concertante (1982).