Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle haven’t yet managed that. You could say they’ve conjured their art from their anger, and yet that quality comes out in very different ways, as two stories about their respective school days shows. The story about Maxwell Davies is one he’s especially proud of, and he tells it with the punctilious flutiness of a vicar insisting he won’t sing trendy new hymns. As a 17-year-old Maxwell Davies found he needed to take music O-level, and knew enough to sail through it with ease. “I was living not so much in school, which I found very boring,” he says, “but in the Swinton and Pendlebury Libraries, and the Henry Watson Music Library, in Manchester.” However his headmaster wouldn’t let him take the exam. So Maxwell Davies simply entered himself, and astonished the examiners by rattling off bits of every Beethoven symphony at the piano. Later the headmaster boasted about the boy’s success. That’s the bit of the story Maxwell Davies likes best.