Parenting & Family Quote by Peter Maxwell Davies

There is a quiet flex hiding inside the modesty. Peter Maxwell Davies insists he is "not actually teaching" anymore, then immediately shows how porous that boundary is: he is still shaping young musicians, just without the classroom’s bureaucracy. The line reads like a composer’s version of early retirement, where the pension is paid in influence.

Davies was never simply a lofty modernist writing for other specialists. As Master of the Queen's Music and a longtime cultural institution-builder in Orkney, he treated music as civic infrastructure. That context matters: writing "pieces for schools" isn’t charity, it’s strategy. If the concert hall audience is shrinking or aging, you don’t lecture people into loving new music; you plant it earlier, where curiosity still outpaces cynicism.

The phrasing does a lot of work. "Actually teaching" signals the parts of education he’s stepping away from: schedules, grading, committees, the grind of pedagogy. "Writing pieces" reframes teaching as composition itself. The lesson is embedded in the material: playable parts, imaginative sounds, a challenge calibrated to young hands and attention spans. It’s a practical aesthetic, not a watered-down one.

The final kicker, "and for kids", widens the lens from institutions to individuals. He’s not composing down to them; he’s composing toward them, treating children as a real public with real tastes. Subtext: the future of serious music isn’t preserved by gatekeeping but by authorship that meets learners where they are and still expects them to grow.