Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Maxwell Davies

A composer’s version of tough love, this is really an argument about ethics disguised as rehearsal talk. Peter Maxwell Davies frames “demands” not as ego or punishment but as a kind of moral obligation: the work asks for the “best possible” from the people making it, and the artist’s job is to insist on that standard without apology. The phrasing matters. “Questing” turns discipline into a search, something restless and ongoing rather than a fixed benchmark. It’s not “perfection,” which sounds sterile; it’s pursuit, which sounds human, fallible, and relentless.

The second sentence tilts the quote into anxiety: “the highest possible factor” reads like someone pushing back against complacency and also against the modern temptation to treat art-making as lifestyle content. Davies, steeped in postwar modernism and long associated with rigorous institutions (and later the isolation of Orkney), is talking from a world where difficulty isn’t ornamental; it’s the point. Complex music requires performers who will expand their capacities, and it requires a culture that doesn’t flinch at the labor involved.

Subtext: he’s defending demandingness against the suspicion that it’s elitist. He’s saying high standards are not a social flex; they’re a vote of confidence in collaborators. To demand more is to assume more is possible, and to refuse that assumption is, quietly, to shrink the horizon of what a group can become.