An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise for Orchestra with Bagpipe Solo
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (born in 1934)

Composed in 1985.
Premiered on May 10, 1985 in Boston,
conducted by John Williams.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, one of Britain’s most celebrated and
successful modern composers, was born on September 8, 1934 in Manchester and educated at the Royal Manchester College of Music and Manchester University. Upon his graduation in 1957, he won an Italian government scholarship to study with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome; his orchestral work Prolation, performed at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Rome in 1959, won the Olivetti Prize and helped to establish his reputation. Davies returned to England in 1959, and taught for the next three years at the Cirencester Grammar School, where his practical experience with youngsters helped him both to develop a theory of music education and to bring a simpler, leaner quality to his creative style, previously much influenced by Viennese serialism. An enthusiastic recommendation from Aaron Copland helped Davies secure a Harkness Fellowship in 1962 that allowed him to study with Roger Sessions at Princeton. In 1965, Davies joined the UNESCO Conference on Music in Education and traveled around the world on a lecture tour, spending 1966-1967 in Australia as composer-in-residence at the University of Adelaide.

Back in Britain in 1967, Davies helped to organize a contemporary music performance group called “The Pierrot
Players” (later renamed “The Fires of London”) with composer
Harrison Birtwistle, a fellow student at the RMCM, and wrote for it a number of avant-garde theatrical pieces, most notably Eight Songs for a Mad King, a fantastic suite for male voice and chamber ensemble dealing with the origins of the madness of King George III. Since 1970, Davies has lived in the distant Orkney Islands, off the northern tip of Scotland, whose customs, topography, music and people have served as catalysts for many of his works. In 1977, he established a festival at the Norse Cathedral of St. Magnus at Kirkwall, where he has performed a number of his compositions, some of which were inspired by medieval chants. The remoteness of his Orcadian home has not kept Davies from being an active fi gure in the world’s music — he has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Manchester, Bristol, Warwick, Glasgow, Durham and Hull, and memberships in the Royal Philharmonic Society, L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Royal Swedish Academy of
Music, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and
Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste (Munich); served as
director of the Dartington Summer School; been composer-in-residence and associate conductor with the Scottish Chamber
Orchestra in Glasgow; participated in festivals in Aspen, New York, Montepulciano and elsewhere; fulfi lled commissions from many notable ensembles and agencies; and taught at London’s Royal Academy of Music. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1981 and knighted in 1987; in 2004, he was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music for a ten-year period. From 1991 to 2000, Davies was Associate Conductor-Composer with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester; he served in a similar capacity with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1992 to 2002.

Of An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, commissioned by the
Boston Pops Orchestra in 1985 on the occasion of its centennial, the composer wrote, “This work is a picture-postcard recording of a wedding on [the island of] Hoy, Orkney, with the guests arriving out of violent weather, the processional, the tuning up of the band, the increasingly inebriated dance, the walk home through the night across the island, then the sunrise (denoted by the entry of the bagpipe).”

Notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda