Off-at-a-Tangent: FAREWELL TO STROMNESS

Farewell to Stromness is a piano piece written in 1980 by Peter Maxwell Davies for The Yellow Cake Revue. It was written to oppose the planned uranium mining in the Orkneys. 'Yellow cake' was the term for refined uranium ore. Stromness would have been two miles from the uranium mine's core and the centre most threatened by pollution.

Master of the Queen's Music, he was born in 1934 in Oldham, England. He went on holiday in the Orkneys in 1970 and, by chance, met the writer George Mackay Brown, whose book, An Orkney Tapestry, had captivated him. "I was entranced by the book," says Davies, "this whole feeling of the place being part of a legend - something that is alive in people's minds, is part of a great continuum and ritualises the everyday life of the islands. George loved it all so much and his descriptions of place are so alive."

In his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, Mackay Brown recorded his first impressions of Davies: "The young dark composer - Beethoven in his 20s might have looked like him - told us he was looking for a house to compose in, as far away as possible from London... Did he guess at the loveliness under the wrappings of rain and fog? The boom and hush and echo of the sea were everywhere."

Davies is an intellectual, complete, self-conscious, uncompromising in his rejection of pop and pap. There are two books in the loo: a collected Chaucer and the Oxford History of English Literature (second edition). The shelves in his living room are challenging, varied: Dante's Divine Comedy (a lifelong love), Goethe's Theory of Colours, Edwin Muir's Selected Poems, Birds and Mammals of Orkney, The Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, A Gaelic Grammar. He is an obsessive reader - in German, French and Italian, as well as English.

Painting of the composer which is hanging (on an upper wall) in the very beautiful and well appointed Kirkwall Public Library.

Davies's real battles were at school. "Moorside Council School and Leigh Grammar were awful," he says. "The headmaster at Leigh Grammar was not interested in allowing me to do music. I did it, didn't tell him and got a scholarship [to Manchester]." Davies, who had been playing the piano from the age of five, taught himself A-level music and stunned the examiners by demonstrating that he had memorised not only Beethoven's violin concerto but all the symphonies too.

"Max recognizes that there is a profound spiritual core in music making," says the Scottish Catholic composer James MacMillan.

"When you have a creative urge, you can't stop writing. You don't have to have a reason to write; you just fulfill your own needs. Players seem to enjoy playing the pieces."

I adore this piece. Given to me by my music teacher, it just works. It is often played on Classic FM radio and once when I heard it (painting with Mairi and John late one evening) I commented that whoever was playing it was playing it too slowly. Oops!.... When it was finished the radio announcer said "Farewell to Stromness as played by the composer himself."