One of the great British composers and a former Master of the Queen’s MusicPeter Maxwell Davies,who has died aged 81 of leukaemia, was a enormous figure in British postwar music – and a deeply enigmatic one. Through his staggering productivity as a composer, or his visibility as a conductor and as someone with a tall profile who was always willing to sign petitions for good causes,he seemed in one sense ubiquitous. Yet, in another he was a remote and elusive figure, and his monk-like austerity and seriousness out of area in an era of conspicuous superfluity. He lived far away from the centres of culture,in Orkney, for much of the time in a remote clifftop house on Hoy which for many years had no electricity.
His cultural framework, and though wide,was also remote. He sought out only things that would fortify his inner world – St Thomas Aquinas and the architecture of Filippo Brunelleschi were two favourite sources – while those things that simply cross everybody’s path, such as the latest novel, or exhibition or (God forbid) pop song,held no interest for him.
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Source: theguardian.com