Born in Salford, near Manchester, Peter Maxwell Davies studied at the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music (now the Royal Northern College of Music) alongside a number of other musical luminaries, including composers Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr (a former student of Schoenberg and the son of conductor Walter Goehr), pianist John Ogdon, and trumpet player Elgar Howarth. Maxwell Davies and his classmates would go on to found New Music Manchester in 1953, an ensemble dedicated to the performance of their own music, as well as contemporary European works and “classics” of 20th century repertoire, notably the music of the Second Viennese School. The group’s sole concert in London (on 9 January 1956) included a performance of Maxwell Davies’ Sonata for Trumpet (written for Howarth), which was praised by critics. Upon completing his studies in Manchester, he moved to Rome for further study with Goffredo Petrassi. From 1962 to 1964, he was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton University, where he studied with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and Earl Kim. He subsequently returned to Great Britain and embarked on a career as a composer and conductor.

In 1964, with his former classmates from Manchester, he co-founded the first of the two Wardour Castle Summer Schools (based on the format of the Darmstadt Summer Courses) in which contemporary music was performed, taught, and promoted. In 1967, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, clarinettist Alan Hacker, and pianist Stephen Pruslin created their own ensemble, the Pierrot Players (in reference to the work by Schoenberg), which allowed them to workshop various projects, and notably, small-scale theatrical forms. This collaboration gave rise to the composition of a number of striking neo-expressionist works from Maxwell Davies’ early period: Revelation and Fall, Missa Super L’Homme Armé, Vesalii Icones, and, most significantly, Eight Songs for a Mad King. During this time, his larger-scale works were also performed (albeit to more conservative audiences who were generally less receptive to music of this nature), including Worldes Blis, described by Paul Griffiths as a “vast symphonic meditation,” conducted by the composer at its premiere at the BBC Proms, and his first opera, Taverner, premiered at the Royal Opera House in London.

In the early-1970s, Maxwell Davies moved to the Orkney Islands, where he lived and worked for the remainder of his life. The natural landscape and culture there were sources of inspiration for major works such as Black Pentecost, Image, Reflection, Shadow and The Lighthouse. It was also there that he met poet George Mackay Brown, whose work proved to be another source of inspiration, and with whom he would collaborate on numerous projects, including Into the Labyrinth, Westerlings, Solstice of Light, The Beltane Fire, and the chamber opera The Martyrdom of St. Magnus. In 1977, Maxwell Davies founded the annual St. Magnus Festival in Kirkwall, which has since become one of the most important new music festivals (within a broader artistic setting) in the United Kingdom. Settling in the Orkney Islands also gave rise to a significant change in Maxwell Davies’ creative aesthetic: he began to reflect on and “reinterpret” the major forms of tonal music in his works. In 1973, he embarked on the composition of a cycle of symphonies (for which the Orcadian landscape, as well as the symphonies of Sibelius, were major sources of inspiration) which he would work on, periodically, for the remainder of his life. The First Symphony was premiered in London in 1978 by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by a young Simon Rattle.

In addition to working with his own ensemble, “The Fires of London” (he had essentially rebranded the Pierrot Players with this name in 1970, assuming sole control of the group), with whom he toured extensively over a period of some twenty years, he established long-lasting relationships with a number of other groups, both as a composer and conductor, including the London Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Manchester Philharmonic, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh. He composed the series of ten Strathclyde Concertos for soloists from the latter orchestra. Another ambitious project was a cycle of ten quartets for the Maggini Quartet, started in the early 2000s and subsequently recorded and released on the Naxos label (as a consequence, the works were nicknamed the “Naxos Quartets”). The extra-musical dimensions of these quartets provide a sort of summary of Maxwell Davies’ various fields of interest during this period in his life: politics (No. 3), the landscape of the Orkney Islands (No. 5), music of the Renaissance (No. 8), etc.

In addition to collaborations with professional performers, Maxwell Davies regularly worked with amateur and young musicians. From 1959 to 1962, he taught at Cirencester Grammar School in the west of England. This experience led him to advocate strongly for the importance of musical education for all. Formerly a critic of the monarchy, in 2004 he accepted the post of “Master of the Queen’s Music,” ostensibly on the grounds that the position could serve as a platform from which to denounce the political tendency at the time towards austerity and privatisation which was having a severe impact on funding for the arts in general, and on the quality of music programmes in British schools in particular. Throughout his life, he composed dozens of works for children and for specific communities (notably in Scotland) in the form “musical representations” of places, including Five Klee Pictures, Songs of Hoy, Kirkwall Shopping Songs, and the children’s opera Cinderella, among others. The Hogboon (2015), a children’s opera based on an Orcadian folk tale, is his last major work.

Maxwell Davies served as Artistic Director of the Dartington Summer School of Music from 1979 to 1984, where he also led masterclasses in composition. In 1987, he received the title of “Knight Bachelor,” and in 2014, the Queen made him a “Companion of Honour”. In the final decade of his life, he was a guest professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London.