Education: Maxwell Davies attended Leigh Grammar School, Manchester, the Royal Manchester College of Music and Manchester University. In 1957 he won an Italian government scholarship to study in Rome.

Work: Maxwell Davies was Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School for three years from 1959 to 1962 and in 1962 he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship and went to the Princeton University Graduate Music School. In 1965 he gave a series of lectures in Austria, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand.
Maxwell Davies was composer-in-residence at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in 1966 and in May 1967 he and Harrison Birtwistle formed the Pierrot Players and he was associated with the chamber ensemble "The Fires of London" which he founded in 1970.

In 1979 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by the University of Edinburgh. Composer Laureate 1994.

With two hundred published works in every medium, which are continually performed all over the world, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is universally acknowledged as one of the foremost composers of our time. He lives in a croft, in a remote valley on the island of Hoy, in the Orkneys, off the North coast of Scotland, where he writes most of his music. His major theatrical works include: the operas Taverner, Resurrection, and The Lighthouse (which is one of the most performed twentieth-century operas); the full-length ballets Salome and Caroline Mathilde; and the music-theatre works Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot. His large output of orchestral works includes six symphonies and eleven concertos, as well as the hugely popular An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, which was written as a commission for the Boston Pops Orchestra and seen by millions of people all over the world at the Last Night of the Proms. Maxwell Davies has received numerous honorary doctorates and awards. He has also written a large repertoire of works for performance by non-specialist children, which include the opera Cinderella as well as ten other theatrical pieces.

Maxwell Davies is the Associate Conductor/Composer of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, and Composer Laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, for whom he has written a series of ten Strathclyde Concertos, for its principal players. He has conducted many major orchestras in Europe and North America, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Oslo Philharmonic.
Over ninety of Maxwell Davies's works have been recorded on compact disc, and he has an exclusive recording contract with Collins Classics until the end of the century. Recent projects include series of works for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and for the BBC Philharmonic and the oratorio Job for the Canadia n Broadcasting Corporation in Vancouver. His new opera The Doctor of Myddfai was premiered by the Welsh National Opera in July 1996.
He has also produced a choral work Il rozzo martello, commissioned by BBC Radio 3, which was premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall by the BBC Singers at the 1997 IMS conference; a work for orchestra and chorus The Jacobite Rising, premiered by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in October; and the Piano Concerto which Kathryn Stott premiered with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in November 1997.

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