Symphony No. 8 (Davies)
symphony by Peter Maxwell Davies
The Symphony No. 8 (also called the Antarctic Symphony) is an orchestral composition by Peter Maxwell Davies, completed on 15 December 2001.
History
Davies had announced prior to its premiere that his Seventh Symphony was to be his last work in the form. Less than six months later, Davies amended his statement to say that it was only the last of a seven-symphony cycle: "No. 8, next year, will be a musical account of my visit to Antarctica, with very different aims and preoccupations." Advance publicity for the Eighth proved to be more than that for the other seven symphonies put together.
Three years earlier the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which was seeking to promote the region's significance, had asked the Philharmonia Orchestra to recommend a composer for the commission of an orchestral work intended to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams's score for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic and the Seventh Symphony (Sinfonia antartica) which he fashioned out of that film score. Davies, as a committed environmentalist, was chosen. Terms of the commission required the composer to visit Antarctica, which he did for three weeks from late December 1997 to January 1998. The composer published his diary of the trip as an illustrated book, Notes from a Cold Climate. The composer also revealed that the symphony reflects his experience of having heard Vaughan Williams's Seventh at its first performance in Manchester in 1953.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Symphony No. 8 (Davies)” as symphony by Peter Maxwell Davies. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as symphony by Peter Maxwell Davies. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7661616. VIAF identifies the subject as 174426115. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 1948, 1997 and 1998.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Symphony No. 8 (Davies)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.