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Devotional aids

Susan Bradshaw

For those – not excluding Peter Maxwell Davies – who first absorbed the elements of a contemporary musical vocabulary from the works of the twentieth-century Viennese masters, the postwar Americanisation (‘Babbittisation’?) of an entire serial terminology may well seem both irrelevant and tautologically irritating. Despite its latter-day prevalence as the basis of state-of-the-art analysis, this is a language that even now remains ‘largely incomprehensible to anyone untrained in the higher reaches of contemporary mathematics’ – a context in which ‘conventionally trained musicians are laymen themselves’ (John Rockwell, ‘The northeastern academic establishment & the romance of science’ in All American music). Interestingly, All American music dates from 1983, making it almost exactly contemporary with the first (and earliest written) chapter of Perspectives on Peter Maxwell Davies, which, as its editor readily admits, ‘is, by any measure, overdue’.

Generally speaking, the kind of micro-analysis suggested by this transatlantic approach stops short of investigating the macro purpose of it all – or any aspect of rhythm tout court. Yet with the time for note-counting (the 1–12 notes of the chromatic scale now recast to read from 0–11) and relabelling long gone, it is in Davies’s case the defining character of method, of his particular transformational procedures, that eventually came to dominate the (by then) subsidiary nature of the material itself. Whether drawn from a fragment of plainsong or a note row (‘pitch-class set’), this initiating material was soon to relinquish any thematic function it might once have automatically claimed in favour of the ‘partitioning and permutation’ of rows [sets] and their consequent re-forming into the pitch squares that would eventually generate vast reservoirs of macro-options. However, the relationships contained by these options were not necessarily to assume an audible function, but ‘would seem both to satisfy Davies’s desire that each note should be "governed by an inner logic", and to give free reign to his creative fantasy’ (and, from time to time, creatively to cheat his own system). It was only much later (1989) that he was not only able but even eager publicly to announce that ‘the magic square, its mechanics and its derivations are, for the first time [in Strathclyde concerto no.3], exposed very clearly on the surface of the music.’ In other words, in hitherto supressed melodic sequence.

It is evidently assumed that potential readers of this book will have a chronological work list to hand; there is at any rate none here. And since a piecemeal imparting of information is one of the major hazards of compiling any symposium, it is a pity that an absence of sub-headings, not to mention dates and forces involved, creates quite unnecessary confusion throughout. To take but one example: aficionados will of course not need to be told of the relationship between the Sixth Symphony and the unidentified Time and the Raven (which merits mention four times on p.85), or that ‘the [Sixth] symphony’s link with Time and the Raven strengthens its international credentials.’ A chapter on Davies’s indebtedness to his own earlier scores is more specific in referring (on p.91) to ‘the concert overtures, Time and the Raven, or Maxwell’s Reel, with Northern Lights’ – which could leave the reader to ask whether the latter is one piece, as printed here, or two separate ones, as shown in the index? But it is not until p.122 that we are handed a missing piece of the jigsaw by way of ‘The aboriginal song that underpins the occasional piece, Time and the Raven’ (but still no date). Elsewhere, the editor seems to have settled for allowing his eight contributors to agree to differ in methodological approach to their subject(s) – which is fine, as far as it goes; it is less easy to forgive him his laissez-faire attitude to grammar and to a syntactic organisation that too often fails to identify the subject of a sentence other than by a contextually puzzling recourse to the indefinite pronoun.

It is clearly not his fault alone that the book is printed on paper with a dispiritingly bluish tinge nor, perhaps, that quite a few of the music examples are too simplistically repetitive to be useful, and that yet others are printed in a format both too small to read and often too dark for rhythmic values to be distinguished; moreover, since musicians absorb information in terms of pitch, not through any form of substitute lettering, it is odd that ‘interval’ is mentioned only marginally -– as for instance in ‘sic/vic’ (p.7), later (p.14n) explained as ‘scalar/vector interval class’ [sic.].

Much more pertinent to the early stage of Davies’s career is the opening phrase of the plainchant Alma Redemptoris Mater. In an opening chapter that sets the tone and introduces much of the esoteric vocabulary for what follows, this is shown to span the ninety or so bars of the third and last movement of the seven-minute sextet of the same name (1957). Holding tight to an already complex analytical terminology, next down the line comes a concentrated technical survey (including the ‘satellite’ workings of pieces dating from c.1966–1972). Along with characteristically distinguished contributions from two Emeritus Professors, there is a chapter on the music theatre works by an opera director, followed by a general round-up of recent-ish music, including the stage works, that partly overlaps with and generally prepares the context for two penultimate chapters on the sketch material. These detail the row structure of some of the instrumental music of the 1980s as well as the noticeably more thematic working of Symphonies 3–6, including some all-too brief evidence of an Ivesian rhythmic layering.

Almost at the outset (p.3), the statement that ‘it is more usual to find Davies confining himself to originals and retrogrades only in a work, and the [Schoenbergian] restriction to just two aspects is characteristic’ would seem at a stroke to dispense with the need for an ensuing complexity that is certainly not of the composer’s making. On the other hand, his propensity for inserting marginal notes in his own scores – as compositional aides-memoire, so to speak – has proved irresistible to analytical researchers, none but the best of whom can yet see beyond the ‘algorithms’ (rules of procedure) to search out the music beyond.

From all this, the concept of ‘Structure and effect [in Ave Maris Stella]’ emerges as a reminder that without effect (musical outcome), structure is a coldly utilitarian subject, not in itself touching upon the emotive. Nonetheless, the composer has reason gratefully to acknowledge ‘these detailed, devoted studies [...] from which I have learned much.’

Susan Bradshaw is a pianist and writer.