Cognitive Information Processing

Contains research objectives and reports on two research projects.Joint Services Electronics Program by the U. S. Army Research Office, Durham, under Contract DA 36-039-AMC-03200(E)National Science Foundation (Grant GP-2495)National Institutes of Health (Grant MH-04737-05)National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NsG-496

Plasma Magnetohydrodynamics and Energy Conversion

Contains research objectives and reports on six research projects.U. S. Air Force (Aeronautical Systems Division) under Contract AF33 (615)-1083Air Force Aero Propulsion Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OhioNational Science Foundation (Grant G-24073)National Institutes of Health (Grant No. 5 TI HE 5550-02

Maxwell Davies's Symphony—an introduction

Even given that the birth of a first full-fledged symphony must be a symbolic moment in the life of any composer, Peter Maxwell Davies has approached the word ‘symphony’ with an impressive caution not unreminiscent of his illustrious predecessor Johannes Brahms. The fact that few composers are writing symphonies these days does not in itself explain his delay in using the term, since he has given us numerous works of symphonic weight and proportions. Nor is it simply a case of taking a ‘trial run’. It is one thing to have tested the water with the Second Taverner Fantasia but quite another to have tested it with the Fantasia and then Worldes Blis, St. Thomas Wake and Stone Litany. Since the Second Taverner Fantasia is a symphony in everything but the name, we are left with a double question: why is the new symphony called a symphony and why is the Second Taverner Fantasia not called one?</jats:p

Returns and Departures: recent Maxwell Davies

It is interesting to consider Maxwell Davies's three ‘Taverner’ fantasias in relation to the three Leonora overtures of Beethoven. Of course, it is extremely easy to challenge this analogy: the Leonoras were written to be performed with Fidelio, whereas the ‘Taverner’ fantasias were never intended for operatic use. Furthermore, the symphonic proportions, particularly of Leonoras 2 and 3, were completely at variance with Beethoven's need for concision, and led him to reject them in favour of the Fidelio overture, whereas Maxwell Davies has explicitly stated that he felt there were ideas within Taverner which positively demanded further symphonic comment.</jats:p

‘One if by Land, Two if by Sea’ Maxwell Davies the Symphonist

‘One if by Land, Two if by Sea’… so ran the pre-arranged signals for Paul Revere's famous midnight ride. But what if three beacons had shone from the belfry? Confusing to history's nocturnal horseman, perhaps, but not to Peter Maxwell Davies, for whom landscape, seascape, and Renaissance church architecture have furnished the poetics of the first three works in what Paul Griffiths has called ‘the most important symphonic cycle since that of Shostakovitch’.</jats:p

The Triangular Space: Peter Maxwell Davies's ‘Ave Maris Stella’

If one were seeking a metaphor for Ave Mavis Stella from among one's familiar musical experience, all the signs would point to a late Beethoven quartet. Of course the analogy between a string quartet and a sextet of mixed timbre is not literal, while the comparison of a work not yet two years old with some of the most visionary pieces ever written could be misconstrued, even if one swore it was only for analytical purposes as one was dragged screaming away to serve a five-year term for pretentiousness. But fortunately real affinity among composers and between pieces of music is not a function of our historical neuroses, and there are encouraging signs that sensitive and aware listeners can hear that it is not. One such friend of mine, having just heard Ave Maris for the second time, remarked that the first hearing some months earlier had thrown him into a kind of ‘2001’ outer space, while at the second hearing he realized he was listening to an absolutely classical piece of chamber music. In fact, as we will see, his two statements are very far from antithetical. At any rate, there is every reason to hope that such a listener, given a finite number of further hearings, would himself make the jump from ‘an absolutely classical piece of chamber music’ to ‘a late Beethoven quartet’ without any difficulty.</jats:p

Maxwell Davies's Second Taverner Fantasia

The relationship between the musical thinking of Gustav Mahler and Peter Maxwell Davies becomes ever more apparent, and in the ‘Second Fantasia on John Taverner's In Nomine’ it takes on crucial importance.The connection manifests itself immediately in the two composers' attitudes towards ‘surface’. A musical image is an abstraction of psychic content and must be given corporeal identity before it is communicable. Musical composition is the crystallization of the image into specific note-configurations of pitch, rhythm, timbre, register, etc. which taken together comprise the surface of a work. The act of listening then reverses the process by going from the surface back to the image. Composition is translation and listening is retranslation.</jats:p