Peter Maxwell Davies, "St. Thomas Wake"

-- Louisville Orchestra First Edition Records LS-770 --

St. Thomas Wake (1969)
by Peter Maxwell Davies
Born in Manchester, England, September 8, 1934.

The very titles of the works of Peter Maxwell Davies suggest a composer of daring imagination and restless experimentation. In 1969 alone, the same year in which St. Thomas Wake was premiered in Dortmund, Davies published Vesolii Icones, a chamber work featuring dancer and cellist in fourteen movements based on fourteen anatomical drawings by the sixteenth-centuy Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius; an instrumental motet entitled Eram Quasi Agnus; Solita for solo flute and music box; and the remarkable Eight Songs for a Mad King. The present work was commissioned by the City of Dortmund, a West German industrial town near the Ruhr, and premiered there by the composer and the City of Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra on June 2, 1969. Subtitled "Foxtrot for Orchestra on a Pavan by John Bull," the audacious work features a main orchestra and a band with an "out-of-tune honky-tonk" piano. Among the instruments are a police whistle, empty piano, a large biscuit tin filled with pieces of glass, two hammers, a referee's whistle, and a large empty biscuit tin. All this may seem a bit removed from the work's original inspiration, a pavane by the English organist and composer John Bull (1562-1628), but the juxtaposition of the courtly dance so beloved of the English virginalists and the modern American ballroom step is curiously convincing, and the work earned this accolade from The Daily Telegraph: "The skill and the imagination shown in this montage of two pasts, one present and an ugly implied future rivals Stravinsky in his experiments with musical time."

Raised in Manchester and educated at the Royal Manchester College of Music and Manchester University, Peter Maxwell Davies is at forty-five at the very forefront of modern music composition. In 1957, he won an Italian Government Scholarship and studied in Rome with Goffredo Petrassi. A Harkness Fellowship in 1962 brought him to Princeton University where he studied with Roger Sessions. After his appointment as Composer in Residence at the University of Adelaide in Australia, Davies returned to England where he devotes himself to composing, conducting and lecturing. Davies has nearly fifty published works to his credit in virtually every medium from opem to piano solo. His 1957 work for seventeen wind instruments entitled St. Michael Sonata has been recorded by Jorge Mester and The Louisville Orchestra on First Edition Records LS-756.

Mr. Davies has kindly provided a detailed analysis of the present work:

This work is based on the St. Thomas Wake Pavan of John Bull, the 16-17th century English composer. This pre-existing material is "projected" through a progressive series of mathematical curves, which affect it as much, in visual terms, as would distorting mirrors of systematically varying degrees of convexity and concavity. At the outset, however, the Pavan is not given in its original form but appears already in the process of transformation into a slow foxtrot played by a small band seated apart from the orchestra. The orchestra immediately takes this up and, in "commenting" upon it, transforms it into a complex isorhythmic structure in which stylistic elements of the band are exaggerated. This "comment" leads to a slow dissolution from which the band takes up fragments of ideas in the process of disintegration and refashions these into a sequence of five foxtrots, each in a distinct style. Over the last of these dances, the orchestra starts a slow, declamatory reworking of its material, leading to a further fast "commentary" upon all five foxtrots. A final foxtrot from the band cuts across this, having the exact harmonic skeleton of the John Bull Pavan, which is now heard simultaneously from the harp in the orchestm in its original form. There is no attempt to integrate the styles of the band and the symphony orchestra - each goes its own way on its own terms. The use of the separate band is not meant to imply in any sense a kind of sinfonia concertante nor even a parodic element. The foxtrot band music exists as an object, and the orchestra music implies, if such a thing is possible, an attitude in purely musical terms towards this object. The use of a Renaissance pavan as the binding factor throughout is not gratuitous. The historical reality of the original may be destroyed in the process, refurbishing one dead dance form in terns of a more recent dance form which is just as dead. Moreover, thirties dance music was the first music I myself heard, therefore having personal, rather sentimental associations. Heard now, at a distance, it can perhaps become not only a comment on the political and moral climate of its time (because it completely ignored that irresponsible climate) but, by extension, on our own time as well. -- P.M.D.