Organ Voluntaries (3), for organ solo, J. 138

Peter Maxwell Davies' sense of history is frequently and calculatedly skewed, often invoking styles from the past to create a kind of dark nostalgia or acidic caricature -- take for example, the blasphemously distorted Handelian episodes in Eight Songs for a Mad King or the artfully awkward stylistic shifts in Caroline Mathilde or the St. Thomas Wake. Certainly one senses an air of irreverence throughout his oeuvre. In his Three Organ Voluntaries from 1976, we find Davies again mining the musical past and emerging with borrowed bits, but rendering them with a kind of delicate care and solemnity that might be surprising to listeners familiar only with his most popular and most extroverted works.
The voluntaries are arrangements for solo organ of a trio of sixteenth-century Scottish church pieces. All three of the tunes, gathered from {-Kenneth Elliot's Early Scottish Music, 1500-1750}, are drawn from sixteenth-century sources and are rendered with careful touches of Davies' modern and characteristically jagged harmonic style. The first, based on David Peebles' Psalm 124, invokes its namesake in straightforward triadic harmony. Davies' most apparent contribution is the haunting obbligato line, which, upon its entrance several bars into the piece, traces an angularly meandering path through the stratosphere of the organs range, its absentminded rhythms intermittently aligning to create colorfully dissonant clashes with Peebles' tune. In the second tune the obbligato is given over to the left hand and the pedals, which busily underscore with repeated descending scalar figures an otherwise straightforward monodic rendition of John Fethy's motet O God Abufe (O God Above). In All Sons of Adam, a tune of anonymous provenance, the traditional music is overlaid with Davies' harmonic filter, which highlights stinging tritones and close dissonances. It moves with a solemn gait, the careful voice leading carrying the dissonant progressions along with a kind of dark and dreamy viscosity. ~ Jeremy Grimshaw, All Music Guide