Peter Maxwell Davies

The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn’t make a profit, it’s invalid, and art doesn’t make a profit in that sense.

You can’t pander to your audience. You might in the short term, but ultimately you can’t hoodwink them, either.

But you can’t really know your audiences so well.

At the moment, in Britain we’re facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.

I’m obviously very keen on the theater and I think it’s inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it’s not in my mind at the time.

I know what I want at least, and the older I get I think I’m better at getting it out of players and singers.

An audience shouldn’t listen with complacency.

The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It’s this going for the highest possible factor that I’m very concerned about.

If you don’t get feedback from your performers and your audience, you’re going to be working in a vacuum.

I’m very interested, for instance, in music in education – getting young people not only to listen to, but participate in the music that I write. I consider this one of the most vital aspects of my work.

I don’t see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it’s unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it’s as well a composed piece as I’ve ever done for any other medium or occasion.

What they can expect always is that they’re going to be made to think.

If you’re writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you’re writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it’s towards another point. I won’t make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.

You don’t underestimate either players or audience in any circumstances.

I’m not actually teaching any more, but I am writing pieces for schools all the time, and for kids.

But when you get a bit older, and I hate to use the word, quite a bit more established, people take more notice and conducting becomes a great deal easier. You don’t have battles like you had before.

If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you’re going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

The present government is very insistent that business sponsorship should replace government sponsorship of the arts. Business sponsorship won’t happen unless you make tax concessions, which they won’t.

Recently I’ve been participating in radio and television talk programs doing broadcasts and conferences, and shooting my mouth off and really going to town.