IN JULY 1970, Peter Maxwell Davies found himself in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, literally and figuratively. He later wrote about this trip:

The Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown describes the very same day as ‘one of those miserable afternoons of cold-drifting see-haar, when even the lovely encircling hills of Rackwick look like a group of old hags keening’. Brown observed the islands’ thrall over Davies: ‘On such a day the spell touched the composer.’ If it did not feel like home to Davies yet, after returning in November to compose the film score for Ken Russell's The Devils, it did. The month of isolation he experienced, free from all of the ostensible comforts of metropolitan city life, led him to write:

Taken thoroughly with the experience and intent on escaping the perpetual interruptions he associated with life in London, Davies made plans for a January 1971 move to Hoy, the second largest island of the Orcadian archipelago. In the seclusion and calmness of Orkney, the very anagnorisis of Davies's future compositional voice was revealed to him: the sea. Since then, Davies has infused his surroundings into one-third of his more than three hundred and thirty official opuses: cosmopolitan noise replaced with the stimulating echoes and sonorities of the Pentland Firth, the North Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.