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Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Maxwell Davies

"The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It's this going for the highest possible factor that I'm very concerned about"

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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.

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APA Style (7th ed.)
Davies, Peter Maxwell. (2026, January 16). The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It's this going for the highest possible factor that I'm very concerned about. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-demands-are-related-to-their-questing-of-the-107275/

Chicago Style
Davies, Peter Maxwell. "The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It's this going for the highest possible factor that I'm very concerned about." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-demands-are-related-to-their-questing-of-the-107275/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It's this going for the highest possible factor that I'm very concerned about." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-demands-are-related-to-their-questing-of-the-107275/. Accessed 8 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Peter Maxwell Davies (September 8, 1934 - March 14, 2016) was a Composer from England.

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