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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Ever since Michael Chanan's 1969 Tempo article connected Peter Maxwell Davies with the philosophical tradition of speculative dialectics, this connexion has been virtually the mainstay of Davies's critical reception. If we accept the popular model of dialectics as the resolution (synthesis) of two opposing terms (thesis-antithesis), then we can easily identify a dialectical critique underpinning, for instance, Paul Griffiths's monograph written 13 years later. In discussing Davies's parody technique, Griffiths begins by highlighting those processes which result in the ‘distortion’ or ‘corruption’ of sources, leading to situations of ‘ambiguity’ or ‘contradiction’. Such an account is no doubt authorized by the composer's own terminology of ‘distortion’, ‘ambiguity’, ‘dissolution’ and ‘fragmentation’, which is found particularly in the sleeve-notes to Vesalii Icones (1969).
1 Davies, Peter Maxwell, sleeve-notes to Vesalii Icones (Unicorn-Kanchana, 1984)Google Scholar. Translated there as: ‘Faith is a means by which those things that are not seen may be believed; and we may believe whatever it signifies to us, not troubling as to how true such things might be’. The recording (with these notes) has recently been reissued on CD (UKCR 2068).
2 Nietzsche, Fnedrich, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 115 Google Scholar.
3 ‘Dialectics in the Music of Peter Maxwell Davies’, Tempo No. 90 (1969), pp. 12–22 Google Scholar. Significantly, though, Chanan has recently associated both Davies and Kagel with ‘aesthetic disunity’ and ‘the deconstruction of dominant ideological discourses’, although he fails to provide a full delineation of these assertions, and makes the mistaken assumption that deconstruction and postmodernism are cognate terms. Cf. Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 277–8Google Scholar.
4 Griffiths, Paul, Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Robson, 1982)Google Scholar, passim.
5 Griffiths, , op.cit., p.64.Google Scholar
6 Davies, , op.cit.Google Scholar
7 ‘The Bottom Line: Arnold Whittall goes in search of the “great mystery” of Peter Maxwell Davies’, in The Musical Times, Sept. 1994, p.545 (emphasis added).
8 ‘Davies Peter Maxwell’, New Grove, vol. 5, p. 277.
9 Davies, op.cit.
10 Davies, op.cit.
11 Davies, op.cit.
12 Ostensibly transforming the Ecce Menus material into an analysis of the Scherzos of Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth – ‘related but false image[s]’.
13 Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1979)Google Scholar.
14 With the exceptions of nos.7 and 9, where the bells are replaced by ‘jingles’.
15 Popular nomenclature is used here since we are dealing with a foxtrot parody.
16 Davies, op.cit.
17 Musically, the effectiveness of this ‘irreverence’ is guaranteed by what Davies sees as the spiritual falsity of popular music, as represented by the foxtrot genre. Of course, this relies on a specifically classical view of the popular, and Davies's statements on popular music are revealing. For instance, in the Vesalii Icones notes alone, the Victorian drawing-room style is described as ‘the ultimate blasphemy’, while the popular harmonic structures which underpin the parodies considered above are labelled ‘the basest currency of added sixths and dominant sevenths’. This moral attitude of Davies's towards popular music assigns a specific function to his parodies, one which is hard to accept if one has experienced the emergent field of Popular Music Studies as represented by such texts as Middleton's, Richard Studying Popular Music (Buckingham: Open University, 1990)Google Scholar, Scott's, Derek The Singing Bourgeois (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1989)Google Scholar, or the author's own article, ‘Trivial Pursuits? – Taking Popular Music Seriously’, The Musical Times, April 1994, pp. 216–9.
18 Whittall, , op.cit., p. 545 Google Scholar.
19 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overimerpretation (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1992). p.66 Google Scholar.
20 Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1976)Google Scholar, Writing and Difference (London: R.K.P., 1978)Google Scholar, Dissemination (London: Athlone, 1981)Google ScholarPubMed, Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester, 1982)Google ScholarPubMed.
21 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone, 1994)Google Scholar.
22 For fuller accounts of deconstruction in a musical context, c(. the author's articles: ‘Music & Deconstruction: Some Notes on the Usage of a Term’, Critical Musicology Newsletter no. 1, 12 1993 Google Scholar; ‘Speaking Without Tongues: Deconstruction for Musicians’, The Musical Times, February 1995; and his Ph.D. thesis: The Sonorous Body – Music, Enlightenment & Deconstruction, Edinburgh University, 1994 Google Scholar.
23 Nietzsche, , op.cit., p. 125 Google Scholar.
24 This pseudo-model of deconstruction more-or-less accords with that given by Derrida, in Positions (London: Athlone, 1987), pp. 39–96 Google Scholar.
25 Programme note to the 1973 Fires of London concert, ‘The Triumph of Antichrist’, quoted in Griffiths, , op.cit., p. 56 Google Scholar.
26 Griffiths, , op.cit., p. 55 Google Scholar.
27 Derrida, , Margins, p. 17 Google Scholar.
28 Derrida, , Writing and Difference, p.282 Google Scholar.
29 Derrida, , Positions (London: Athlone, 1987), p.101 Google Scholar.
30 Davies, op.cit.