When I started my Symphony in 1973, I had no idea that that was what it would grow into. The Philharmonia Orchestra had commissioned an orchestral work for 1974, and I wrote a moderately long single movement, provisionally called Black Pentecost. The title was taken from the end of a George Mackay Brown poem (which I had set for soprano and guitar, a short time before) concerning the ruined and deserted crofts in an Orkney valley—

The poor and the good fires are all quenched.

Now, cold angel, keep the valley

From the bedlam and cinders of a Black Pentecost.

Even given that the birth of a first full-fledged symphony must be a symbolic moment in the life of any composer, Peter Maxwell Davies has approached the word ‘symphony’ with an impressive caution not unreminiscent of his illustrious predecessor Johannes Brahms. The fact that few composers are writing symphonies these days does not in itself explain his delay in using the term, since he has given us numerous works of symphonic weight and proportions. Nor is it simply a case of taking a ‘trial run’. It is one thing to have tested the water with the Second Taverner Fantasia but quite another to have tested it with the Fantasia and then Worldes Blis, St. Thomas Wake and Stone Litany. Since the Second Taverner Fantasia is a symphony in everything but the name, we are left with a double question: why is the new symphony called a symphony and why is the Second Taverner Fantasia not called one?

After the spate of pieces completed in 1970—the grand and scandalously neglected Symphony in One Movement, the two music theatre pieces, Shadowplay and Sonata about Jerusalem, and the Concerto for 11 with its folkloristic connotations—nothing new was heard from Goehr until the first performance of his Piano Concerto in May 1972. He himself confessed that its elaborately compound homophonic-contrapuntal first movement had cost him almost a year of effort; others began to wonder about the demands of his new Leeds professorship, the more so as the next apparent silence lasted two and a half years.

The music which Peter Maxwell Davies was writing immediately before his appointment as Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School in 1959 was of quite startling originality, and after 20 years the shock effect has scarcely diminished. Perceptible beneath the austerely note-against-note composition of St. Michael (1957) and Prolation (1958) there is, as John C. G. Waterhouse pointed out as far back as TEMPO 69 (Summer 1964), a latent dramatic gift. But despite the high degree of tension inherent in his language, Maxwell Davies seems almost obsessively to avoid opportunities for attractive orchestral dress. One is reminded of his revealing off-the-cuff remark of 1965 (quoted by Bayan Northcott in TEMPO 121): ‘The young composer's only salvation in today's stylistic chaos lies in submitting to the most stringent technical disciplines; then if anything individual comes through at all, at least he will know that it is his own’. Today we can recognize that the harmonic language of Prolation is much more characteristic of its composer than the almost Nono-like appearance of the printed page. But the fact remains that the precisely interlocking multiple Klangfarbenmelodien of St. Michael (section four), like the various rhythmic intricacies of Prolation, are still extremely difficult to bring off in performance, and almost as difficult to hear even when played well.