You can walk from Skara Brae to Stromness along the coastal path, hugging the coast, shadowing the uranium belt as it snakes down from the headlands of Yesnaby to the north end of the harbour, not far from the Stromness Hotel.
Yesnaby is notable for its wild beauty and the particularity of its coastal geology, its steeply raked and very fine stratification which mirrors on a grand scale, and may very well have dictated, the layering of courses of stone in the Neolithic houses and tombs hereabouts.
For the magician-architects of the Neolithic, the stone of the land was a source of power. They were not wrong. In the early 1970s, a band of uranium-bearing minerals was identified under Yesnaby, and various feasibility studies were carried out. The Scottish Energy Board bought up rights to drill experimentally on farmland along the coast (apparently without sufficiently explaining to the farmers what was going on) and a cold-war government in London got interested.
In 1979 the Orkney Island Council, acting on near-unanimous local opposition, tried to ban uranium mining in perpetuity, a move rejected by the Secretary for Scotland, George Younger.
It was in response to George Younger’s ruling that Peter Maxwell Davies wrote his Yellow Cake Revue, first performed at the Stromness hotel in June 1980 by the composer and the actress Eleanor Bron. The Revue, a sequence of satires and ballads and odd numbers named for a slang term for uranium ore, while largely forgotten, includes his most famous composition, the brief, elegiac Farewell to Stromness, music born on the one hand of fissile materials and politics, and on the other out of Peter Maxwell Davies’s own fissile, stylistically-disparate musical world; but, like all music, working to a sort of fusion of social and emotional energy.
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Peter Maxwell Davies was not a native of Orkney. He was an incomer. He had been born in Manchester in 1934, had studied music there, and elsewhere; and only came to Orkney for the first time in 1970, when he was 36, already a well-known composer.
Within a year he was living in a ramshackle restored croft in the remote valley of Rackwick on the island of Hoy, to the south of Scapa Flow and Mainland.
Orkney was a peculiar choice. Peter Maxwell Davies was an urbane young composer of difficult, sometimes shockingly dissonant and unapproachable music, and London was the centre of his musical world. He had been at Darmstadt, has studied with Petrassi in Rome in the last 1950s and at Princeton for three years in the early 60s.
Perhaps the move to Orkney, then, was an act of minor rebellion. Rackwick is the most remote corner of Hoy, and Hoy the wildest of the islands. Here he grappled gleefully with the difficulties of his new situation, collecting water, chopping wood, withstanding foul weather and isolation; and here he took to composing what he considered to be his best music—a result, he felt, of the concentration that his solitude imposed, and to the profound intersection of the music with place, soundscape, and community.
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I think you’ll be an incomer for the rest of your life here. It’s not that people are unwelcoming, not at all, and they make you very, very at home; they are very kind and very warm. But you’re not an Orcadian and there’s no point in pretending that you are.
Peter Maxwell Davies
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The composer met the poet George Mackay Brown on his first day on Hoy. Davies was on holiday, and was taking a trip over to Hoy on the boat; he was spotted reading George Mackay Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry by a man called Kulgin Duval, a friend of Brown who happened to know that the poet was just now on Hoy, in Rackwick Valley, staying with friends. Duval struck up a conversation, and suggested that Davies come over and meet Brown. Brown described what followed in his memoir:
In 1970, while I was staying with Archie and Elizabeth Bevan in another restored cottage at the shore, Mucklehouse, above the shallow sea cliff, a young man named Peter Maxwell Davies called. It was one of those miserable afternoons of cold drifting sea-haar, when even the lovely encircling hills of Rackwick look like a group of old hags keening. On such a day the spell touched the composer…The valley – much restored since – was scattered with ruins of old abandoned crofts twenty-odd years ago… . No one could wish to live in such a morass, seeing it for the first time.
Peter Maxwell Davies did so wish. He returned that winter, and then permanently a year or two later, to take up residence in the most remote of the valley’s crofts, Bunertoon (‘above the township’).
Thus began a lifelong friendship, although the poet and the composer were hardly alike. Brown was taciturn, Catholic, profoundly sedentary. Maxwell Davies was garrulous, intellectual, a product (partly) of the Darmstadt summer school, the engine of postwar European serialism and the musical avant-garde.
If Brown was ensconced in the centre of his world, reluctant to risk leaving, then Davies was out at the uttermost edge of his. In exiling himself to the wild Atlantic margin, he had lighted on a way of being both sedentary and unsettled, at once isolated, removed, contemplative; and toiling, fretful, political.
There they were though, this mismatched pair, Orcadian and incomer, poet and musician, Catholic and revolutionary: kindred souls, notwithstanding, each engaged in a lifelong project of writing their world into a workable stability.
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He [George Mackay Brown] doesn’t say much and if you’re talking with him you’re inclined to talk about the quality of the home-brew or the whisky or to discuss things which might not seem very profound. But you know that there’s a very tough intellect there, a first-class mind and a first- class poet.
Peter Maxwell Davies
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“I find it impossible,” wrote George Mackay Brown, just a few years after the Yellow Cake Revue, “to write about the Orkney of oil and uranium deposits.”
Orcadians, perhaps, have an instinctive sense of the slow, deep time which surrounds them; Catholics, moreover, might be endowed with a different sort of patience. But Davies, incomer and atheist, was sharply, impatiently, political. “As creative musicians, we must be engaged in politics, religion, education, sciences, the arts,” he said, “so that we are not just a passenger in our cultural life, reflecting these fields in our work, but a very driving force.” In later life he was actively involved in protests against, for example, the Iraq war of 2003, and leant his voice and occasionally his person to campaigns for social justice, the environment, and generally against what he saw as the machines and institutions of settled, inimical power.
If Orkney was marginal for Peter Maxwell Davies, offering solitude and wildness, the islands were also strongly communal. His politics was national, and global, but rooted in his local community. Perhaps this is the difference between the native and the incomer: for the one, the local community is very nearly everything, always there, indistinct; for the other, it is something that needs to be defined, examined, brought into being.
It is also the difference between the poet and the composer. A poet can sit in his chair and dream of St. Magnus, but a composer is a working musician, and music, unlike for the most part poetry, is a strongly communal activity. If you work as a composer, you must work with groups of performers (if you are not also one yourself); you must work to have your music performed, in front of audiences.
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The post-Schoenbergian world of ultimate serialism and ultra-aleatoric musical composition, as experienced in extremis at the Darmstadt Summer School in the 1950s or in New York in the 1960s, was put into a healthy perspective during my short period teaching music at Cirencester Grammar School, Gloucestershire, from 1959 to 1962.
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Davies’s mature work was never wholly or strictly (or even, depending on his mood, remotely) tonal; nor was it strictly aleatory, serial; or for that matter strictly anything. He thought of tonal passages as objects which could be transformed by “deeper motions, life-forms, slowly breathing way below, and determining the active surface”. Of the sixth symphony, completed on the day George Mackay Brown died and dedicated to the poet, he noted “the gradual dredging to the surface of these slow-moving depths, with disruptive interaction at surface level.”
He had long since come to feel that all music—fugue, sonata form, serialism, aboriginal song, whatever—is development, transformation. And he was careful to distinguish transformation as he understood it from change, or from the developmental processes of classical sonata form with its departures and homecomings.
A transformed object, in his view, was one that retained an essential unity. Its identity before and after the transformation was the same. A changed object was one which had been sundered from its prior state. Transformation is the defining natural process shaping a landscape, a geology, a settlement, a community; death is not its opposite, only one of its modes. Tonal centres, in such a context, can be simultaneously points of departure and return, voe or ness depending on context.
Change, on the other hand, is what happens when you dig uranium from under Stromness in order to be able to bomb the Russians.
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...this related to my perception of gradual transformation in time and space of landscape: the extremely slow movement of tectonic plates relating to and resulting in extremely quick land movement in earthquake and volcano, and the movement and curving of wave-shapes in sea-water, relating to the longer rhythmic movements of tides—which I fear might sound like a much too grandiose inspiration for my resultant tentative musical accommodations.
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On the day I visit Rackwick, the valley is a continuum of Biblical waters: of rain, of sea and sea mists; of the deep green soak of vegetation everywhere; of the damp inner core of our humid many-layered clothes. Stand still long enough, you feel, and spores will alight on you, sprout on your epiphytic frame; you will soon find yourself mossy, sluggish, reclaimed.
In such a place, you have to stir yourself to keep moving. But it is a slow-going, underwater sort of place.
To arrive at the valley you must take the solitary little shuttle bus, a juddering taxi, from the little jetty at Linksness, over the great cloud-shrouded hump of the island. The aged driver drops you in the valley and arranges a time to suit everyone, to come back and collect you. You have a few hours to walk to the overlook of the Old Man of Hoy, and nose around the valley.
The shuttle costs five pounds, which is not much; but I do not have five pounds. Not in cash. I have come unprepared. The unsmiling driver, who is canny enough to require payment on the return journey only, does not take a card. Everyone else seems to have five pounds. My brother has five pounds, exactly. I have to admit, standing there in front of everybody, that I have no money. There is a minor standoff. The driver is polite, apologetic, shy; but he has me trapped, and proves himself as gently unyielding as the great hump of Hoy itself. It looks like I will be walking back over the back of the wet island, several miles. Perhaps I will miss the last boat. The moss will claim me by morning.
But one of the other passengers steps forward and pays for me. It is a delightful, if humiliating, moment. Later, at the little cafe near the jetty, I am able to buy him and his wife soup and a sandwich. It costs me more than five pounds, but that is the welcome price of my shame.
We sit in the murmurous cafe, with our sandwiches and soup and coffee, drying out slowly, like deep sea divers returned from the slowly metamorphosing wrecks and coral of the seabed.
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There was abundant life in Rackwick once; the life ebbed out rapidly through some flaw; the place is full of the ghosts of centuries.
George Mackay Brown, An Orkney Tapestry
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In the end, the mining of Yesnaby did not go ahead, not because of Max Davies’s satire or the public opposition, but because the deposits were not likely to be profitable. The Secretary of State for Scotland acknowledged that the search for and possible exploitation of uranium was in abeyance, but left open the possibility of its resumption. That possibility still exists today.
The episode was a sign of a permanent change in the material base of the islands, long grounded on fishing, whaling, or dairy farming, but now near the centre of a North Sea oil industry, and a magnet, because of its Neolithic heritage, for the great cruise liners.
Farewell to Stromness, with its graceful slow ambulatory pedal, imagines the residents walking away from the town, which will perhaps be given over to incomers, miners, its dredged harbour to great mineral ships. A frontier town of a different stamp.
Transformation, after all, must include abandonment, a place becoming uninhabitable, or differently inhabited. Davies's imagined Stromness would not be the first empty, abandoned place on Orkney, which is an archipelago of abandonment, from Skara Brae to the lonely tumbledown crofts that dot the islands. It is in the nature of settlement, written into the terms of its contract, that it should end.
Either way, it is a farewell. Stromness was always a town of farewell—a place of departure for the whaling grounds, the fishing banks, the endless expanses of the north. At some point the town will go too, and at some point it will be forgotten. Buried, perhaps, in sand, or under a thousand-year peat bog.
Or under the waves. Towards the end of his life, Peter Maxwell Davies retired to Sanday, a more liveable island to the north of the archipelago, but one so low-lying it is at risk from any rise in sea level. His own shoreline house, he observed smiling, would be the first to go.
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It was on Sanday that he died. He requested that his burial be a simple trip down the road to (the soon-to-be submerged) Burness cemetery. He wanted no funeral service, no rituals and mummery. His coffined body was transported on a tractor-drawn trailer. People popped champagne corks around his grave as he was lowered down. And someone played Farewell to Stromness on the violin.
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I have no illusions about being ‘important’ as composer or person: I am pleased to have the opportunity to write and that the music is played; and I should be happy to be remembered by two tunes and a dictionary footnote.
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