A review of this volume should emphasize at the outset that in no way is the book intended to add up to a comprehensive study of Peter Maxwell Davies and his music. Rather, in their introduction, the editors express the hope that it will instead ‘provide a meaningful reflection of the current condition of research and suggest possible directions for future investigation and interpretation’ (ix). The ‘incomplete’ nature of the volume, also stressed on the dust-jacket, is regrettable only because we still await a definitive analytical biography of this composer, in the manner of Michael Hall's volumes on Harrison BirtwistleFootnote ¹ or Ian Kemp's study of Michael Tippett.Footnote ² Both Paul Griffiths's useful monographFootnote ³ and David Roberts's seminal thesis on Davies's compositional techniquesFootnote ⁴ are now almost thirty years out of date. In Richard McGregor's collection of essays published in 2000Footnote ⁵ there is a reasonable spread of focus across the composer's career as a whole, with three of the chapters concentrating on compositions of the 1990s (particularly the later symphonies), but this still leaves a lot of ground for this most recent publication to cover. The fact that it does not take this opportunity is most certainly a ‘reflection of the current condition of research’ into Davies's work. There is a definite feeling among Davies analysts that, symphonies aside, it is the music of the 1960s and 70s that is most deserving of investigation. This book reinforces that bias, and leaves one hoping that before long someone will take up the task of filling the sizeable gaps in the discussion of Davies's work from the last thirty years. Once this self-professed limitation is accepted, the book can be appreciated for the light it sheds on both the man and his music, using an impressive variety of means ranging from analysis to biographical treatments of the composer as writer and teacher.

There are a number of chapters that attempt to bring together the uncomfortable bedfellows of analysis and hermeneutics. Most writers on Davies seem chastened by the austerity of Roberts's thesis, which derides any attempt by analysts to search for the influences behind Davies's compositional techniques or to extrapolate meaning from them, insisting that a pure and isolated consideration of technique is the only valid approach to this music. It is refreshing, therefore, to see such a doyen of twentieth-century music analysis as Arnold Whittall juggling the influences of Mahler, Berg, Wagner, Sibelius, Bach, and Haydn. In his chapter Whittall perceptively situates Davies's compositional impulses between the opposed continuums of Mahler–Berg and Mahler–Sibelius, the first of these referring to the level of irony at work in Davies's music, and the second to his fusion of the fractured collision of styles characteristic of Mahler with Sibelius's ‘Classical restraint’ (12). The most beguiling aspect of the chapter is Whittall's willingness to link his analyses with personal traits that he sees in the music – of the ‘stoical spirit’ (16) that Davies shares with Sibelius or the importance of Berg's ‘passive, melancholy resignation’ (17). In this first chapter Whittall sets the parameters of the rest of the book, which is by turns analytical and revealing of the composer, and never afraid to connect the two aspects.

Taken together, Philip Rupprecht's and David Beard's chapters demonstrate the need for research into Davies's earlier works to overcome the tyranny of Roberts's thesis. Roberts had explained in considerable detail the pitch and rhythmic construction of all these earlier works, with the implication that one can then close the score confident that there is nothing more to find. Rupprecht manages to humanize Roberts's stark analyses of early works ranging from the Trumpet Sonata, Op. 1 (1955), to the First Taverner Fantasia (1962) by giving more weight to the textural components and the dramatic effect of the music, elements that Roberts eschews. Ultimately, however, if one were to sieve out the Roberts from the Rupprecht one would not be left with a great deal, despite the latter's more user-friendly explanations of the technical processes at work in these pieces. Beard goes further in his interpretation of Davies's first opera, Taverner (1962–70), to construe dramatic and personal meaning from the compositional processes that Roberts identifies. In particular, he draws analogies between the thematic transformations that form the backbone of Davies's music and the dramatic concept of Taverner's own transformation through the course of the opera. Beard deals with the reservation that such study can compromise appreciation of the work (because of the implication that one should be able to hear such processes easily for them to be of any meaning) by arguing that one can be affected by the music without deeper understanding of its structures, but the more one knows the greater one's appreciation can be. He connects compositional processes such as the application of transposition squares and the conversion of one theme into another to the dramatic processes of certain scenes, such as the changing fortunes of the King and the Church in Act 2 scene 1, and the depiction of Taverner's conversion in Act 1 scene 4. Beard shows, with reference to sketches, that these dramatic concerns shaped Davies's use of his transformational systems and that he carefully paced their manifestation throughout a scene to correspond to key dramatic points. The chapter provides an excellent introduction to this complex opera, explaining concisely the compositional techniques and connecting them to Davies's dramatic preoccupations not only in this opera but also in later works such as The Lighthouse (1979), Resurrection (1986–7), and The Doctor of Myddfai (1995). It also discusses the reasons behind the mixed critical reception of the opera's first performances. This chapter is a model of how Roberts's analyses can be used as a spur to further research.

Another facet of the book is the continuation of what Christopher Fox, in another review of this book, calls the study of the ‘iconography’ of Davies's musicFootnote ⁶ – a taxonomy of written and recorded material relating to Davies's compositions. In the past some of the contributors to this book have taken on this aspect of Davies study,Footnote ⁷ and in the present volume there are two appendices, the first of which, compiled by Nicholas Jones, lists the composer's available writings and broadcast material, while the second, compiled by Richard McGregor, is an inventory of the source material used by Davies throughout his career. In his own chapter McGregor demonstrates how an understanding of Davies's sources can reveal a great deal about compositional process and issues of meaning in music, and he deals confidently with the seeming conflict between Roberts's approach and the one he is espousing here. He demonstrates that Davies uses plainchant melodies from the Liber usualis not only as the basis for thematic development but also for the texts with which they are associated, often linking works that are separated substantially in time through the use of the same plainchant: the inclusion in Symphony no. 5 (1994) of a plainchant originally used in Antechrist (1967) brings a host of associations and meanings into the later work. Similarly, the name of the magic square employed as a transformational device can be of significance, as with the Venus square in the ballet Salome (1978). McGregor puts meat on the bones of these suggestions with detailed analyses of the motet In illo tempore (1965) and the flute and bass clarinet duo Veni creator spiritus (2002), which seek to ‘dramatize’ Davies's choice and manipulation of these compositional sources:

McGregor is convincing in his assertion that Davies creates a level of meaning purely through his selection, manipulation, and juxtaposition of source material. As in Beard's discussion of Taverner, some may be uneasy that an understanding of a piece should require the ability to identify a plainchant and its attendant text, but the point, again, is that a work should be able to be appreciated at many different levels of understanding. The importance of this kind of analysis is that it provides the necessary information if one wishes to explore a work further.

The attempt to develop what we know of Davies as a man has tended to be omitted from academic study of the composer but is a most welcome addition to this volume. Mike Seabrook's biography of the composer is enjoyably anecdotal but provides little insight into the music or the composer's artistic motivations.Footnote ⁸ Nicholas Jones provides a fascinating account of Davies's development as a young composer in the 1950s and 60s through his published writings of the time, chiefly articles and programme notes. Davies's articles, particularly, remind us of the revolutionary firebrand that he used to be, fearlessly challenging the antiquated attitudes of the musical establishment and the state of music education, an iconoclasm still occasionally seen today in the generally genial Master of the Queen's Music, whether it be directed at muzak in restaurants, the right to consume swan meat,Footnote ⁹ or, more seriously, in his outrage at the invasion of Iraq, which found an outlet in the composition of his Naxos String Quartet no. 3 (2003). What communicates itself above all in the early writings is the fierce intelligence and commitment of an extraordinarily gifted young man who refused to be beholden to any trend, whether it be hidebound academic institutions or the Darmstadt school of avant-garde composers. Jones rather overstates the brilliance of Davies's 1956 undergraduate thesis, ‘An Introduction to Indian Music’,Footnote ¹⁰ calling it ‘scholarly in tone, methodically researched, and meticulous in its detail’ (30). My own closer inspection has revealed it to be little more than a paraphrase of Alain Daniélou's Northern Indian Music,Footnote ¹¹ which itself has been subjected to a lot of criticism by later ethnomusicologists for its inaccuracies, especially on the subject of microtones. Davies's analyses of certain rāgas are illuminating, however, and go into greater depth than Daniélou's, though in doing so they reveal more about Davies's musical thinking than about the actual rāgas, concepts like thematic inversion having no meaning within Indian traditions. Jones's analysis of Stedman Doubles (1955) for clarinet and percussionist according to the structural principles of a rāga is extremely persuasive and certainly invites investigation into whether this approach could bear fruit in other works of this period.

In his review of the volume Fox is scathing about Philip Grange's chapter, which deals with his experiences of Davies as a teacher at the Dartington Summer School, calling it a ‘disappointment’ and ‘frustratingly opaque’.Footnote ¹² As someone who witnessed Davies's teaching at first hand on one occasion Fox understandably wants to find out more about the experience of other students and what they learnt from Davies. Grange's focus is not on this, but, more enlighteningly, on what the substance of his teaching strategies reveals about Davies as a composer. The tasks that Davies set young composers, some reminiscent of those given to him by Goffredo Petrassi in the late 1950s,Footnote ¹³ reveal the primary importance he placed on the analysis of as much existing music as possible, and the integration of lessons learnt from these pieces into the composer's technique through exercises and experimentation. Grange's observation that ‘Davies's approach to analysis treated the composers studied as colleagues who were part of a tradition to which we were all the latest heirs’ (230) is crucial to Davies's relationship with the musical traditions that influence him; he feels neither the pressure of Harold Bloom's belatednessFootnote ¹⁴ nor a desire to wrest himself free of such precursors as the Darmstadt composers. Grange suggests that all the works studied on these courses had some connection to past, present, or projected works by Davies, and can therefore give a valuable insight into his compositional process. He gives ample illustration of this by comparing ‘distorted mirror technique’ in Beethoven's Piano Sonata in A♭, Op. 110, with similar techniques in Davies's Piano Sonata (1980–81) and Image, Reflection, Shadow (1982), and the relationship of Boulez's Pli selon pli and Schumann's Symphony no. 2 (both analysed at the 1976 summer school) to Davies's First Symphony (completed in 1976). These and other examples given by Grange offer tantalizing glimpses into a highly complex process of influence and integration that is at the heart of Davies's artistic identity and could provide the basis of a great deal of future research.

Among other contributors to the volume, Rodney Lister slightly wrong-foots himself by claiming that the principal determinant of sonata form is tonal contrast, thereafter struggling to place sonata principles in certain Davies works in which there is a clear but non-tonal influence. Still, he gives a convincing survey of the relevance of the structure to Davies. Kenneth Gloag investigates the problems attendant upon a ‘progressive’ composer appropriating such a traditional form as the symphony in a discussion of Davies's Symphony no. 1 (1973–6); Peter Owens provides a thorough and admirable guide to how a researcher might approach the baffling array of sketch and precompositional material that exists for many of Davies's pieces; and Grenville Hancox supplies a diverting snapshot of Davies as a collaborator with performers, with particular reference to his relationship with the Maggini Quartet and his creation of the ten Naxos String Quartets.

The tone of the book manages to avoid hagiography, but is nonetheless clearly designed to celebrate the works more than to judge them critically. A single chapter giving a wider view of the composer's development or perhaps an investigation into the mutable relationship between the composer and the public would have balanced the collection. This last point definitely deserves investigation. Despite his royal office Davies remains little known to the general public. The works most recently performed at the Proms (the excellent Violin Concerto in 2009 and the interactive Musica benevolens given at the Last Night of the Proms in 2011) were received much more warmly than Birtwistle's Panic, which scandalized the worldwide audience of the Last Night in 1995. But would an operatic première from Davies garner the attention and fascination of as wide a public as Birtwistle's recent The Minotaur (2008)? Does this imply that the firebrand of the 1960s has gone soft? Impertinent though that question might seem, it demands a response – and this is just one of the many points I hope the next book on Davies addresses. The most admirable quality of this volume is that it not only demands a further book but greatly assists in its creation, both through the information it provides and in the way it shakes off the strictures of Roberts's profound but limited thesis and finds new, more holistic ways of approaching this composer's work. The writing is admirably consistent and accessible in tone, unusual for such compilations. Despite its omissions, therefore, this publication is a significant addition to Davies research.