Towards the Symphonic odyssey:Maxwell Davies's Works for Orchestra 1958-73

This essay will provide a detailed synopsis of these orchestral works leading form Prolation, written in 1958, towards the First Symphony via the six orchestral works written in between. It will be argued that despite the diversity of Davies's stylistic development and compositional ideology displayed in these and other works of this period, the orchestral journey, if seen in this broad context, was both consistent in its compositional technique and inevitable in its arrival at the inception of a symphonic odyssey. Whilst the following discourse will be primarily concerned with the orchestral works, I also provide the reader with some kind of theoretical and stylistic framework from which he or she can place these compositions