Lighthouses at Dartington

Peter Maxwell Davies, one of Britain’s greatest living composers, was once the Director of the Dartington International Summer School. After a long absence of more than 25 years, this year he returned. He gave master classes in composing and the musicians present played many of his pieces in the Great Hall, which, notwithstanding its name, high windows and vaulted ceiling, is a surprisingly intimate place to listen to music. If you sit in the front row, you can almost touch the musician.

Maxwell Davies' music is not simple or romantic; harmony and melody are hard to get hold of and there is no soothing flow in which to get lost. Instead the music is abstract, mathematical and sometimes atonal. His music, some might say, is ‘difficult’. His explanations of his music, which precursed each piece played at Dartington, are, on the other hand, not difficult at all. They are simple, clear and almost always point to Orkney, a place, at least in his descriptions, which is so profoundly connected to the sea that the relentless sea makes sure the place never changes.

From his front window on Orkney Maxwell Davies can, he told us, see four lighthouses. That seemed an amazing fact in itself. Imagine living in a place so surrounded by and exposed to the sea and its dangers that four lighthouses are needed to protect boats from going to close to the rocks. The light from each lighthouse has a different pulse, as every lighthouse everywhere in the world does, making their lights instantly recognisable to the knowledgeable seaman. And so each instrument in his string quartet represented the pulse of one of these four lighthouses. One day he had imagined he had seen a mirage, a kind of vision: a fifth lighthouse had appeared in the bay outside his house, but this one was upside down, with its pulsing light at sea level. And that impossibility was at the heart of this piece of music.

At the climax, the music is shocking, convulsive and loud, like the vision of the upside down lighthouse. Having heard that explanation the music became straightforward, logical, easy to follow, evocative of a place the listener had never been, but now felt some intimate understanding of. Above all, the music seemed to suggest that lighthouses might appear for a moment upside down in the sea. Everything’s possible in music.