Reading the Runes.(deciphering first-draft scores of Peter Maxwell Davies)

RESEARCHERS INTERESTED in the music of Peter Maxwell Davies have long been aware of a problem relating to the interpretation of the precompositional workings and first-draft scores in the available sketch material: the presence of a personal alphabet devised when Davies was in his early teens and used, sporadically, in his compositional workings. It was obvious that some sort of labelling process was being used in the preliminary workings for individual pieces, but its significance was unclear, while longer messages, found throughout the sketch material, were completely unintelligible. Sometimes such messages comprised only a few symbols, whereas in other places there were complete lines of the symbols.

As I have discussed in my article on the sketch material, printed in Tempo 196, (1) Davies kept/keeps a diary in this script and in some cases it is said the content refers directly to specific compositions. He has suggested that these diaries will eventually come into the public domain, but only some years after his demise. Clearly it will be important for this script to be understood for the content to be of some use to scholars in the future. It is obvious to the eye that before the First Symphony (1975-76) the appearance of the script on the first-draft scores was particularly sparse, no doubt reflecting the use of the compositional diary. Subsequent scores have contained more or fewer annotations, possibly reflecting the speed of composition and/or the "status" of a work as a principal or a satellite. (2) It is also possible that Davies has used the "compositional diary" less in recent years than he did earlier. In this regard the works from the period between the First and Second Symphonies (1976-80) ma y be significant, and will be the focus of a later study.

Interpreting the script has been hampered by four particular factors. In the first instance one has to have sufficient material in the script to be able to find different contexts for words where repetition can be observed and for frequency of letters, vowels in particular, to be identified. Secondly, despite consistencies evident in the shape and content of his invented alphabet some specific shapes are simply not found in earlier works suggesting that an evolution of the script has taken place over time. Thirdly, Davies had let it be known that the script included German words with Greek grammar, (3) and it seemed that this fact alone would make identification of words more difficult. Finally, on some of the sketches the composer experimented with different stylized versions of his own, German, Gothic, and Roman script (such as on one folio of the Worldes Blis sketches owned by Karl Renner--copy in the British Library (hereafter BL)) making letter identification more problematic. (4)

Until the sketches became generally available it was just not possible to collect sufficient examples of the script and therefore a variety of different contexts in which to find the letters used. Even then, unless one were to have photocopies made of every example, it was important to make sure that every dot (literally) was accurately transcribed. Only one example of the script has so far appeared in print--a transcription of a sheet from the Third Symphony by Nicholas Jones in his article for Tempo 204. (5) Unfortunately, Jones's transcription was not completely accurate.

In order to obtain a sufficient quantity of script material it was necessary to investigate all those manuscripts for which precompositional material and/or first-draft scores were available. Here the excellent handlist prepared by Arthur Searle proved invaluable (I summarized the relevant material in Tempo 197) ,and as a result I was able to examine all the early workings currently deposited in the British Library as well as taking very full notes (including script transcription) for all the works from 1976 onwards.

Having a large number of transcripts of the script was subsequently to prove crucial. At first, however, it seemed possible that the letter H might refer to "Hauptstimme." This was incorrect although it is not wrong to consider the, usually two, melodic lines which are the basis of many sections in Davies's works as essentially Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme (for example, in Add Ms 71389 f2v of Panopus D8-2 Ms where Davies writes, in script, "use diagonals throughout section for secondary voice"). However, he does not label lines as such. An essential clue to the script lies in Davies's use of four symbols (s(e)t, squ, OT, NT) in labelling set charts, as I will discuss presently.

It was not the material deposited in the British Library which turned out to be most useful in providing the key to Davies's script but the sketches for the Sixth Symphony which had been made available to me by the composer to facilitate the writing of an article on the later symphonies.6 In this symphony the precompositional material is extensive and the labelling on the first-draft score remarkably consistent.