As 2016 was also the year that the Festival's founder, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, sadly died, my poem is a tribute to him. I did not know him personally but the poem came out of my experience of a self-imposed writing residency on the Isle of Sanday where Max, as he liked to be known, lived and died. I knew that he would be familiar with Sanday history and landscape and would have experienced what I did when I explored the island and I use these elements as metaphors for the different aspects of Max's music.
I walked past his remote house, keeping my distance, imagining him composing in the room with a large plate glass window looking out at the shore and sea, and I too walked that shore where I knew he used to walk, composing in his head. On researching Max's own writings about his method of composition, I discovered that he used the physical landscape of the shore to act as an aide memoire. Those dunes might be the intro, others the development and so on. He explained that it was like walking through his score and when he turned back he would walk through it the other way round, giving him another point of view which he might incorporate or make it clear what he needed to change. When he got home, he used to sit down and write out the score - rarely revising.
The other thing I learnt was that Max collected shells - Sanday is famed for its white shell beaches - and he had a large ammonite fossil on his desk. I have used a Faroese Sunset and a Pelican's Foot in my poem, famous shells to be found there, as their names are so evocative. Their structure is also an example of the Fibonacci series that fascinated Max and which he saw throughout nature, using it as a model for the relationships in his own music.
Here is the poem:
Sanday
(i.m. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies,
1934-2016.)
where the
haar, drifting over the fields,
is pierced
by the sun at mid-day;
where a
shipwreck may bring good fortune:
a mahogany
panel for a bed-head;
where
gales uncover secrets:
a sunken
forest, a ship of the dead;
where he
exalted in tangles, wrack
and the
clarity of solitary sands,
walking inside
his score, the shore,
to the
counterpoint of gulls and the sea;
where he
delighted in the spirals of shells -
a Pelican’s
Foot, a Faroese Sunset -
whirling
mallis and the breaking wave
like the
architecture of a great cathedral.
Notes: Haar: (Scots) sea-mist; Tangles: (Orkney dialect) kelp; Mallis or Mallimacks (Orkney dialect) fulmars.
For more on the Festival musical programme and background, see
St Magnus Festival 40th Anniversary
