Jonathan Harvey - Composer
Born in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire on 1939, Jonathan Harvey was a chorister at St Michael's College, Tenbury (1948-52), a pupil at Repton (1952-57) and then a major music scholar at St John's College, Cambridge. He gained doctorates from the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and also studied privately (on the advice of Benjamin Britten) with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller, thus gaining an early acquaintance with the school of Schoenberg. Whilst a Harkness Fellow at Princeton (1969-70) he was brought into contact, albeit briefly, with Milton Babbitt. He emerged from his Princeton years seemingly surer of his musical aims with regard to depth of structure, an immediate result of his work in Schenkerian analysis.
An invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s has resulted in four realisations at the Institute to date, including the widely praised tape piece Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco, Bhakti for instrumental ensemble and tape, Ritual Melodies for computer-manipulated sounds, and Advaya for cello and live and pre-recorded sounds. Harvey has also composed for most other genres: orchestra (Madonna of Winter and Spring, Cello and Percussion Concertos, Lightness and Weight. Timepieces and Tranquil Abiding) chamber (three String Quartets, Song Offerings, Tendril, Lotuses, Scena, Soleil Noir/Chitra, Wheel of Emptiness, and, Death of Light, Light of Death, for instance) as well as works for solo instruments. He has produced a large and varied output of choral works, many suited to church performance: the biggest being Passion and Resurrection (1981) which was the subject of a BBC television film, and has subsequently been performed many ten times in various cathedrals and churches. Harvey's opera Inquest of Love, commissioned by the English National Opera was premiered at the Coliseum in June 1993, and repeated at Theatre de la Monnaie, Brussels in January 1994. It was widely praised for its sophisticated and effective use of electronic sounds and their blending with a conventional orchestra and was acclaimed as the outstanding achievement amongst recent ENO opera commissions.
Now in his early sixties, Harvey attracts commissions from a host of international organisations. His music has been extensively played and toured by the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Nouvelle Ensemble Moderne of Montreal, Ictus Ensemble of Brussels and Sinfonia 21. About 50 recordings are available on CDs. He is regularly performed at all the major international contemporary music festivals, and has a reputation as one of the most skilled and imaginative composers working in electronic music. He has honorary doctorates from the universities of Southampton and Bristol, is a Member of Academia Europaea, and in 1993 was awarded the prestigious Britten Award for composition. He published two books in 1999, and Arnold Whittall's study of his music also appeared, published by Faber and Faber in the same year.
Recently he has been made an Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music in London, a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music and an Honorary Doctor of Music at Sussex University. He is currently Visiting Professor of Music at the Imperial College, London (a post which was devised in collaboration with Sinfonia 21 of which he is Composer in Association). He is also Professor at Stanford University, USA, and Honorary Professor at Sussex University.
2003/2004
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