Peter Maxwell Davies is not alone among contemporary composers in having changed his mind about tonality. Nor, indeed, is he the only one to have moved from an attempted serial extirpation of tonal harmony—the work he seems to be talking about in his 1959 article in The Listener is Prolation (1957–8)—to an ironic resumption of tonality in terms of quotation and parody, and thence to some kind of inner acceptance of tonality. But in Davies's case, quite unusually, the effect has been to make his music more complex as it becomes more whole, more challenging as it becomes superficially smoother: we are, of course, being warned of this in the second quotation above, which comes from a programme-note on the Second Symphony (1980), and it is not, after all, a new paradox to find music which is easy to follow but difficult to understand, though it might seem so after so much music that has been hard to follow but very easy to explain.