Peter Maxwell Davies

3 Early Pieces

Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) began piano lessons at the age of 8 and started to compose shortly afterwards. Over the next ten years he produced nearly thirty works. Much of this juvenilia was written for piano - including his first composition, Early Morning Echoes (1942) - and between 1949 and 1952 Davies himself premiered a number of these pieces on BBC Radio’s Children’s Hour. These early compositions demonstrate an indebtedness to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers (such as Chopin and Liszt, as well as French and British stylistic influences) and an acute awareness of contemporary modernist composers (particularly Bartók, Stravinsky and Schoenberg). The compositional voice, though, is unmistakably Daviesian, and certain stylistic features - distinctive rhythmic, linear and harmonic material - can be traced in his mature music.