NOTES ON A PORTRAIT OF SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES

Ian Charles Scott

A painting evolves slowly. I was studying mime in the Pineapple Dance Studio, Covent Garden, London in the early 1980s. The teacher for the session was the great Lindsay Kemp, the man who had once taught David Bowie and Kate Bush. Kemp is an extraordinary being and the chance to be taught by him was too good to miss. I was nothing great at mime but in the changing rooms I got chatting about a film script I was writing about the Mandragora plant and that I was looking for a soundtrack. “I know the very thing,” said the woman next to me, “Peter Maxwell Davies,” and so from this lady—a BBC music producer—I was introduced to the music of Maxwell Davies.

To say it was difficult music is an understatement. Like most modern classical composers, niceness and pleasant sounds are rare; however, intellectually and spiritually the workout was unlike anything I had ever experienced. His “8 Songs for a Mad King” for instance, explores the madness of King George III, the king during the American revolutionary war. This piece involves the most extraordinary range of voices to the accompaniment of a series of sounds based on an actual musical instrument that contained live birds. These poor creatures would be urged to pro- duce sounds by the instrumentalist pulling various strings that would cause them to shriek! Strangely, however, this dissonance produces a strangely hypnotic quality and a fascinating build-up as all pretensions of the King’s normality are stripped away and in the coda he is revealed shrieking like one of the tortured birds himself. I knew instantly this was work of genius.

A few years later, while a student in Dundee University, I went to see Max con- duct the Scottish Symphony orchestra in St Andrew’s University (our Sister University just over the river Tay). I sketched his face as he conducted and used the work in a series of etchings. By this time, Max had “emigrated” from southern England to the remote northern island of Hoy in Orkney. Things were starting to converge. In Orkney, Max became great friends with George Mackay Brown, Scotland’s most famous poet of the 20th century and my own friend who has inspired about 50 paintings, drawings and etchings from me over the years.

In fact, George was pivotal in Max’s move to Orkney. On his first holiday there he had picked up a copy of George’s book about Orkney—The Orkney Tapestry— and spent all night in his hotel reading it. The next day he was introduced to George who suggested—as a joke—that an old abandoned croft nearby would make an

ideal dwelling for a composer. Two years later, Max was living in it with no electricity and composing his best pieces. Oh for those chance meetings.

Max has used several of George’s poems as librettos and over the years he has become less of a rebel and the music, while still difficult, is sometimes more lyrical. He fashioned an opera, for example, from George’s magnificent novel, The Martyrdom of St Magnus, a spellbinding story based on the true story of the killing of St Magnus the patron saint of Orkney. Max has also written several other operas including 1980’s The Lighthouse, which is a haunting scenario based on the true story of the three lighthouse keepers on the island of Muckle Flugga, who mysteriously disappeared one night in the 19th century. He is now Master of the Queen’s Music, the official composer to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the 2nd.

Before Max was able to survive as an independent composer, he was an innovative musical educator and his approach is virtually identical to my own. We share the vision of treating pupils with absolute seriousness and working with them on serious pieces of art. People will respond exactly as how you treat them. If you treat them poorly, they will perform badly; however, if you treat them as musicians and artists in their own right they will produce masterpieces. Max’s compositions with school pupils prove this one hundred percent; however, it does need the teacher to be a serious artist in his or her own right and able to come from the space where true creative miracles can happen. This of course is rare and when found should be cultivated.

Max has continued this cultivation with his creation of the St Magnus Festival, which is held every May in Orkney. The festival attracts the finest musicians from all over the world such as Isaac Stern and André Previn but perhaps more importantly, Max works with the local school children to produce pieces of music that are premiered at the festival. In my experience, they are always magnificent productions. During May you can hear the St Magnus Festival broadcast on BBC Radio 3—easily accessed on the Internet.

I started work on the older Max after he came to give a talk near my home town of Wick this summer. The talk was brilliant and it was interesting to see how Max had evolved since our last encounter in the 1980s. I started on the head after deciding I would give him a fencer’s costume. The reason? I had one lying in the studio after an earlier painting where I ordered a fencing mask from ebay and I was sent the whole outfit! Well it was interesting and there is a nimble quick parrying quality to Max that this encapsulated. He holds a Scottish thistle to represent his adopted country and the slightly prickly sharp quality in his music, an aesthetic single mindedness.

The location was a problem and I went through several ideas over in the weeks before deciding on an interior from Stromness Museum, the Orkney Islands’ local museum and one of the best I have ever seen. The seashells on the windowsills show we are near the sea and they are acoustic symbols. However, I really had to struggle with the views outside the windows. It would have been nice to show the sea and the Orkney landscape, but I decided on some of the local buildings to push us into the interior and fix us in space. The air is impregnated with the salt sea but I do not want to just serve it up on a plate. I need the viewer to work through the claustrophobia of the buildings into an inner freedom, not one I implant in their retinas.

The painting is still far from finished and so far has taken five months. The last feature I worked on was the small clay armature maquette of a man on the window- sill. Max created an Opera on Frankenstein, Resurrection Symphony, and this figure could be an echo of that creation in defiance of God which a lot of Max’s earlier works were (he did after all create the soundtrack for the hugely controversial film The Devils directed by Ken Russell in the 1971). The maquette can be an echo of this and Max’s expression and looks into our eyes as a counterpoint to his mature work which has begun to allow God in and lyricism. Perhaps it is a symbol for many of our existences?

When I was being assessed for my post-graduate degree in Fine Art in Dundee, the assessor Ian Mackenzie Smith, OBE, the current President of the Royal Scottish Academy, noticed that my influences were George Mackay Brown’s writing and Peter Maxwell Davies’ music. He suggested that together we form a triangle with me being the visual part of that equation: a daunting task to match such men at the

pinnacle of their brilliance. So I guess for the last 20 years and with all my travels and works, I have trying to live up to that suggestion and produce works of the quality needed to form part of that triangle. Anyway, this is my first portrait of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies—oils on wood—and its development over 20 years.

Ian Charles Scott

Humanities Department

Ian Charles Scott, “Portrait of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies,” oil on gesso panel, 18” x 24”.