Jonathan Harvey Harvey, Jonathan

Jonathan Harvey (1939–2012) was a renowned British composer who devoted much of his career to electronic music. He graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge, where he also earned his doctorate. His early style was influenced by A. Schönberg, A. Berg, O. Messiaen, and B. Britten; while studying at the University of Glasgow he became interested in the music of the German modernist K. Stockhausen. In 1969 he went on to Princeton University, where he completed his first electronic work, Timepieces, and came to know the composer M. Babbitt, whose influence on his musical style was profound. For five years from 1975, Harvey often accompanied his son, a chorister at Winchester Cathedral in England, to rehearsals; deeply moved by the choir and the cathedral’s architecture, he wrote a number of choral works.

In the early 1980s, at the invitation of P. Boulez, Harvey began working at IRCAM in Paris, the institute for acoustic and musical research renowned for its speech analysis. There he discovered a deep passion for electronic music and produced many remarkable works. In Speakings, for large orchestra and electronics, Harvey set out to “make the orchestra speak,” applying speech analysis to orchestral writing and using complex computation to bind the two together. His works skillfully combine electronics with live instruments or voices, creating rich and highly imaginative experiences for eye and ear. After he began teaching at the University of Sussex, he encountered Buddhism and other Eastern religions, and his works often carry a deep spiritual dimension. Harvey died of illness in December 2012, leaving contemporary music many classic choral, instrumental, and electronic works, as well as three important books: The Music of Stockhausen, Music and Inspiration, and In Quest of Spirit.