Almost uniquely amoung contemporary composers, Jonathan Harvey strives to make music of a consciously spiritual nature without rejecting the methods and strategies of modernism. While his contemporaries Arvo Part & John Tavener - inspired by the simple harmonies of pre-Renaissance polyphony - have sought the numinous by paring down their musical language, Harvey embraces complexity, revelling in the infinite sonic possibilities afforded by modern electronics. One of his most celebrated works,
Mortuos Plango, vivos voco (1980), mixes the sounds of his young son's treble voice with the tolling of the great bell of Winchester Cathedral. The result is both poignant and reassuring in the way recognizable sounds art atomized via electronics into something timeless and ethereal.
Born in Sutton Coldfield in England, Harvey began his musical career as a chorister at St. Michael's, Tenbury. While at Cambridge University he had private lessons in composition with Erwin Stein and in analysis with Hans Keller. His early works reveal the influence of Britten as well as an interest in Schoenbergian serialism and the modalism of Messiaen. In 1969 a scholarship to Princeton brought him briefly within the orbit of Milton Babbitt, whose total serialism taught him the value of disciplined structural procedures. A more liberating influence was Stockhausen (the subject of a book by Harvey), whose experiments in rhythmic duration, the use of silence and the division of the orchestra into separate groups helped Harvey to develop a more personal and individual musical voice. Stockhausen's interest in Eastern ideas - both musical and mystical - has clear parallels with Harvey's own spiritual preoccupations.
Harvey's Christianity, which is coloured by both Buddhism and the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, is at the heart of his music. Much of what he writes for the voice - be it liturgical music or opera - is deeply contemplative and informed by a strong sense of ritual. But in all his music there is an extraordinarily ecstatic quality, a sensual enjoyment of the purely physical qualities of the sounds, sometimes violent, that he conjures up. This quality, or the way, as Harvey puts it, "music perpetually plays between physical sound and our subjectivisation of it", is graphically realized in
Bhakti (1982) - the most thrilling and visionary of all his works to date.
BHAKTIIn the early 1980s, at the invitation of Pierre Boulez, Harvey worked at IRCAM, where he created
Bhakti, a work for chamber orchestra and quadrophonic tape.
Bhakti, a Sanskrit word meaning "to revere", is a Hindu movement emphasizing deep devotion to an individual god. Each of the work's twelve movements has a quotation from one of the ancient
Rig Veda hymns, which encompass a range of moods, feelings and images and act as a stimulus to the musical ideas.
Bhakti begins with a powerful representation of nothingness and the first stirrings of thought: it focuses on a single note, played by different instruments, which quietly builds and expands before a sudden flurry of more complex musical material. The tape (which is mostly composed of the electronically transformed sounds of the ensemble) acts as a contrasting voice in a dialogue with the acoustic material, and as means of conveying a tangible sensation of space, both outer and inner.
In the first half of the work a sense of restless and questing energy predominates, then from section seven - brimming with bells and bell-like sounds - a more celebratory mood begins to take over. The last section, which manages to be both clamorous and serene, almost fulfils Harvey's desire to reach "beyond the instrumental scale to a more universal dimension".
This second recording of Bhakti illustrates how a "difficult" contemporary can become clearer and more coherent the more often it is performed. There is a stronger sense of the development of ideas in this performance, as if the performers were thinking in terms of the journey - spiritual or otherwise. It's a quality enhanced by the stunning sound, wonderfully atmospheric in both depth and detail.
MUSIC FOR CELLOHarvey was a professional cellist for a brief time and the cello is the instrument with which he has made some of his most personal utterances. He regards it as the most human of instruments, "...it speaks with every aspect of the human voice, masculine, feminine, powerful, tender, poetic, exclamatory, dreamy". The 1990
Cello Concerto was inspired, like
Bhakti, by a Hindu text (a quotation from
The Mahabharata) and it too unfolds as a journey - in this case the individual's journey towards a state of bliss. The soloist is, for the most part, surrounded by a web of bright percussive sounds (vibraphone, celeste, glockenspiel) which suggests an aura of protective light carrying it across the more earthbound sounds of the rest of the orchestra. The concerto was created in collaboration with its first performer, Frances-Marie Uitti, with whom Harvey has developed several subsequent pieces. In 1995 the pair spent two days improvising in Harvey's studio - Uitti exploring the full gamut of her avant-garde technique, Harvey responding on two synthesizers programmed with the same sound sources that were used in his opera
Inquest of Love. The resulting CD,
Imaginings, ranges from the rhapsodic to the explosive and possesses a directness and a spontaneity which are all too rare in contemporary classical music.
This disc generates a remarkable sensation of spaciousness and grandeur with the soloist, at times, an extremely vulnerable presence. Frances Marie Uitti seems able to respond with ease to all the technical difficulties Harvey throws at her and the result is an aural experience quite unlike any other.
On the whole it is Uitti who occupies the driving seat, generating melodic ideas which Harvey helps develop discreetly and sensitively. The predominant mood is one of contemplation, but this is not New Age background music, and the shifts and feints of the performers are, for the most part, unpredictable.
