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Jonathan Harvey
Figures majeures de la scène musicale anglaise, Jonathan Harvey, encouragé par Benjamin Britten, formé auprès d'Erwin Stein dans la tradition schoenberguienne, il est également l'héritier d'une histoire proprement britannique : celle des chœurs et de la musique d'église.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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January 28, 2011
Around the turn of the millennium Faber and Faber published several introductions to British composers (others included Benjamin, Turnage and Birtwistle). This volume is dedicated to Jonathan Harvey, whose mature career of some four decades now has been dedicated to a highly individual synthesis of serialism, spectralism, electronics and mysticism. Arnold Whittall carries out an interview with Harvey for the first 35 pages, and then for the remaining 45 pages sketches the course of Harvey's career to the end of the 1990s. The back matter consists of a list of works and a short bibliography.
This book is only 90 pages altogether and one cannot expect much detail. Certainly vaster studies have been published on certain aspects of Harvey's career: Michael Downes on "Song Offerings" and "White as Jasmine", John Palmer on "Bhakti" (monographs) and Michael Clarke's analysis of "Mortuos plango, vivos voco" (in ANALYTICAL METHODS OF ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC ed. Mary Simoni). Still, this little book can at least provide some orientation to the Harvey neophyte, and it covers those pieces of the late 1970s and early 1980s that established him as a major contemporary composer. Even though I've been listening to Harvey's music for a couple of years, I still learned something new from this slim volume, namely the ingenuity of his lesser-known work "Ritual Melodies". Seek this out if you want to get a handle on Harvey's remarkable body of work.
This book is only 90 pages altogether and one cannot expect much detail. Certainly vaster studies have been published on certain aspects of Harvey's career: Michael Downes on "Song Offerings" and "White as Jasmine", John Palmer on "Bhakti" (monographs) and Michael Clarke's analysis of "Mortuos plango, vivos voco" (in ANALYTICAL METHODS OF ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC ed. Mary Simoni). Still, this little book can at least provide some orientation to the Harvey neophyte, and it covers those pieces of the late 1970s and early 1980s that established him as a major contemporary composer. Even though I've been listening to Harvey's music for a couple of years, I still learned something new from this slim volume, namely the ingenuity of his lesser-known work "Ritual Melodies". Seek this out if you want to get a handle on Harvey's remarkable body of work.
Displaying 1 of 1 review