Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934–2016) was an English composer and conductor born in Salford, Lancashire. He studied at the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music alongside fellow composers Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr, part of a generation that pushed British music toward modernism. His output spans eight stage works — including the shocking 1969 monodrama “Eight Songs for a Mad King” — and ten symphonies written between 1973 and 2013. He settled for much of his life on the remote Orkney island of Sanday, whose landscape and light influenced many of his later works. He served as Master of the Queen’s Music from 2004 to 2014 and died on Sanday in 2016.

Davies was one of the most significant British composers of his generation, moving from avant-garde experimentation in his early career toward a more accessible, lyrical idiom later in life, much of it inspired by his adopted home in the Orkney Islands. His short, elegiac piano piece “Farewell to Stromness,” written in 1980 as part of a protest against a proposed uranium mine near Stromness, has become one of his most beloved and widely performed works, arranged for numerous instruments including classical guitar.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Maxwell_Davies