Stepping out: Maxwell Davies’s ‘Salome’ as a transitional work

There have always been elements of ambivalence in Peter Maxwell Davies’s music. It is possible to perceive a tension between freedom and order in works as early as Alma Redemptoris Mater of 1957, though there the ‘freedom’ was heavily circumscribed within the musical texture. In that work the melismas, deriving from medieval models, decorate the controlling cantus line. Indeed melismatic lines which appear in various works of this early period are strictly controlled by the pitch organization despite being temporally free. An extension of this organizational idea can even be seen in the early children’s works, where freedom versus order is key to the musical argument, allied to the concern not to compromise the compositional technique despite writing for less accomplished players.