Judith Weir her appointment as the Master of the Queen's Music, succeeding Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (whose term of office expired in March 2014), would be announced; this was officially confirmed on 21 July. In May 2015, Weir won The Ivors Classical Music Award at the Ivor Novello Awards. Weir is a member of the Incorporated Society of Musicians. In 2018 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Weir's musical language is fairly conservative, with a "knack of making simple musical ideas appear freshly mysterious." Her first stage work, "The Black Spider", was a one-act opera which
Master of the Queen's Music rather than for life, with the aim of making the post more attractive to composers. Maxwell Davies' work as Master included a Christmas carol for the Queen which was recorded by the Chapels Royal, and a work to accompany a poem by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, to mark the Queen's eightieth birthday in 2006. He played a key role in the creation of the Queen's Medal for Music. After the end of Maxwell Davies's term, Judith Weir was appointed in 2014, for a ten-year term. Reporting the appointment, "The Guardian" said that rather than writing pieces for royal occasions,