It’s been a busy year for Peter Maxwell Davies, the septuagenarian Scottish composer named earlier this year as Master of the Queen’s Music. At an age when many composers are content to bask in their legacy, Maxwell Davies is composing ten string quartets, keeping up his lifelong interest in left-wing politics, and writing children’s music for a festival he helped to found. “Davies himself sees no problems in fecundity. He has always been that sort of composer, and age has not slowed him. Indeed, like Mozart before him, he could almost be described as accelerating towards oblivion.”
Tag: 06.23.04
Going National (And Political?)
“The New York Historical Society, with a newly hired president and a conservative financier emerging as a board power, is shifting its focus from the city to more national concerns, stirring the objections of some historians and staff members… This shift in emphasis appears to signal the ascendance on the society’s board of Richard Gilder, a stockbroker and a leading fund-raiser for Republican and conservative causes, who became a trustee a year ago. It also seems to close off all possibility of the society’s merger with the Museum of the City of New York.”
The Bigger They Are, The Faster They’re Canceled
The Lollapalooza concert tour, long one of the big events of the summer mega-concert season in the U.S., has been canceled due to poor ticket sales. It’s only the latest blow for promoters in a summer which has seen slow sales for many large touring shows, and comes only days after pop’s reigning mega-princess, Britney Spears, had to pull out of her nationwide tour following a knee injury.
Bad Time To Be A Politician
Scottish composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has blasted the Scottish Executive for its treatment of Scottish Opera, calling the politicians responsible “a disgrace,” and accusing them of deliberately “wrecking the country’s artistic heritage… Scotland is not philistine, but it is being rendered philistine through the lack of vision of those in charge.”