Jonathan Harvey

Biography

Jonathan Dean Harvey (3 May 1939 – 4 December 2012) was a British composer. He held teaching positions at universities and music conservatories in Europe and the United States.

Life

Harvey was born in Sutton Coldfield, and studied at St John's College, Cambridge, eventually obtaining a PhD. He also took private lessons with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller on the advice of Benjamin Britten. In 1969, he took up a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University. In the 1980s, Harvey produced music at IRCAM after receiving an invitation from Pierre Boulez to work there.
At IRCAM, Harvey produced works such as Speakings, a composition for large orchestra and electronics, in collaboration with sound artist and composer Gilbert Nouno and researchers Arshia Cont and Grégoire Carpentier. The concept of the piece was to "make an orchestra speak". IRCAM is known for speech analysis and in this piece, special technology was developed to allow the analysis of speech to be realized in an orchestral context, using complex algorithms which can process multiple combinations possible in an orchestra setting. The program Orchidée computed such analyses and provided orchestrations for the composer.
From 2005 to 2008, Harvey held the post of Composer in Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
In 2009, he was Composer in Residence at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. He died, aged 73, in Lewes, from motor neuron disease.
Speakings received six votes in a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000. In 2019, writers for The Guardian ranked Harvey's String Quartet No. 4 the eighth greatest work of classical music in the same period.

Writings

1975. The Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02311-0.
1976. "Inner Light (3)". The Musical Times 117, no. 1596 (February): 125–127.
1981. Ferneyhough. London: Edition Peters. (on Brian Ferneyhough)
1983. "New Directions: A Manifesto". Soundings: A Music Journal 11 (Winter): 2–13.
1999a. Music and Inspiration, edited by Michael Downes. London and New York: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-20025-7.
1999b. In Quest of Spirit: Thoughts on Music. The Bloch Lectures. With compact disc sound recording. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21392-0. French edition, as Pensées sur la musique: la quête de l'esprit, translated by Mireille Tansman Zanuttini in collaboration with and with an introduction by Danielle Cohen-Levinas. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2007. ISBN 2-296-03753-4. Spanish edition, as Música e inspiración, translated by Carme Castells. Barcelona: Global Rhythm Press, 2008; ISBN 978-84-96879-31-7.
2007, with Jean-Claude Carrière. Circles of Silence. The Cahiers Series no. 3. [Paris]: Center for Writers & Translators, The Arts Arena, American University of Paris; Lewes [England]: Sylph Editions. ISBN 0-9552963-3-1. (on the opera Wagner Dream)