Composers

Over the course of his career, Maxwell Davies’s status has changed from enfant terrible to leading cultural figure at the heart of the British establishment. His appointment in 2004 as Master of the Queen’s Music is a tribute to the revolutionary influence he has had on the British contemporary music scene and the public’s perception of it. From his radical works of the 1960s, he has developed a more conventional, but no less startlingly original, idiom often drawing on the music and landscape of the Orkney Islands where he has lived since 1971.