Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE is an English composer and conductor and is currently Master of the Queen's Music.

Davies was born in Salford, Lancashire. After education at Leigh Boys Grammar School, Davies studied at the University of Manchester and at the Royal Manchester College of Music.

After graduating in 1956, he studied on an Italian government scholarship for a year with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome before working as Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School from 1959 to 1962.

In 1962, he secured a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University, with the help of Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten,where he studied with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt and Earl Kim. He then moved to Australia, where he was Composer in Residence at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide from 1965-66.

He then returned to the United Kingdom and moved to the Orkney Islands. Orkney hosts the St Magnus Festival, an arts festival founded by Davies in 1977. He frequently uses it to premiere new works (often played by the local school orchestra).

Davies was Artistic Director of the Dartington Summer School from 1979 to 1984. From 1992 to 2002 he was associate conductor/composer with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and he has conducted a number of other prominent orchestras, including the Philharmonia, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Davies is also Composer Laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

He has been awarded a number of honorary doctorates, at various institutions and he has been President of Making Music (The National Federation of Music Societies) since 1989. Davies was made a CBE in 1981 and knighted in 1987. He was appointed Master of the Queen's Music for a ten-year period from March 2004. Oxford awarded him an honorary Doctor of Music degree in July 2005 and he is also a visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.

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