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Books
and articles about J. Harvey's work
Jonathan Harvey’s "Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco": An Interactive Aural Analysis, by Michael Clarke
Published in 'Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music'
editor: Mary Simoni (University of Michigan)
publisher:Taylor and Francis 2005
Aspects
of British Music of the 1990s
Edited
by Peter O'Hagan
Ashgate Press 2003
Cinquante
Ans de la Modernite Musicale: de Darmstadt a l' IRCAM
(chapter 7)
Celestin Deliege
Mardaga Press 2003
Jonathan
Harvey
by
Arnold Whittall (Faber
and Faber, 1999)
Harvey's
Bhakti:
Spirituality,
Serialism and Electronics. By John Palmer (Edwin
Mellen Press, 2001; order from bookshop or www.mellenpress.com)
Precarious
Rapture:
The Recent Music of Jonathan Harvey
The
following excerpt is from "Precarious Rapture", an article
by Julian Johnson, reproduced by kind permission ."British
Music of the 1990s," ed. Peter O'Hagan, forthcoming
October 2001, Ashgate Publishing.
[Of
Harvey's opera, Inquest of Love]
It's concern is the necessity of time for the
revelation of the timeless: in T S Eliot's words: 'only
though time, time is conquered.' The action as such
is relatively simple: John and Ann are to be married
by the Abbot, but the wedding service is interrupted
by the arrival of Ann's sister Elspeth who, in revenge
for some past mistreatment, shoots Ann dead. This event
is re-enacted two more times within the first act; at
its third occurrence Elspeth shoots John before turning
the gun on herself. This overturning of a naturalistic
narrative leads the opera's story away from the concrete
and literal realm in which it began. Between the second
and third occurrence of the shooting incident three
'heavenly' characters make their appearance - guides
for the inward journey that the three human characters
have now to make. Only when Ann and John are able to
forgive Elspeth, through understanding her suffering,
is the frozen situation in which they are all held able
to move forward: with the release that comes with this
forgiveness, new life is made possible. The opera ends
with a fourth (and this time successful) enactment of
the wedding ceremony.
Such
a scenario, concerned with problematising the very nature
of naturalistic linear time and exploring instead a
sense of inward rather than outward unfolding of events,
presents a composer with some very specific problems.
For Harvey, however, these problems lie at the heart
of his compositional quest - to create a musical form
that unfolds through linear time while being contained
within a global or vertical time. Inquest of Love presents
a fragment of literal narrative (the wedding ceremony)
but its treatment of this fragment, through repetition
and a kind of analysis not confined to the chronological,
opens up other temporal strategies: of inward journeys
which also have their events and intensities while,
outwardly, time is suspended. The return to the wedding
ceremony at the end of the opera implies that 'no time
has passed' since the same ceremony began in the first
act; the immense journeys of self-exploration, understanding,
suffering and forgiveness have, as it were, happened
out of ordinary narrative time, yet are made available
to us only through their narration on stage.
This
comes close to the core of Harvey's work, but it is
by no means one confined to the subtleties of the texts
he sets or of his own extra-musical reflections on composition.
It is, rather, something rooted in the compositional
techniques which characterise his musical language.
Perhaps, for some, to speak of angels takes us too close
to the personal symbols and images of the composer himself,
a reproduction of a composer's idiosyncratic field of
reference that critical commentary should avoid. But
it is hard to avoid such terms discussing Harvey's music,
if only because they mark cultural ideas which the music
itself embodies. I do not mean that Harvey's music literally
evokes images or ideas of the angelic (although it is
possible that it might for some listeners); I mean rather
that the idea of the angelic acts as a symbol for the
idea of transcendence, a term which has a direct and
precise value in discussing aspects of the music.
Perhaps
the music of Jonathan Harvey is hardly comprehensible
without recourse to such terms. To place his music in
relation to other music at the end of the twentieth
century requires more than a catalogue of works and
compositional techniques. One can label him in various
ways - as a modernist, as an electro-acoustic composer,
as a spectralist - or one can list salient techniques
- symmetrical harmonic fields, melodic transformations,
timbral modulation. But compositional techniques are
not atomistic, interchangeable ingredients of a composer's
style; they are the tools of a composer's idea, refined
over a lifetime to embody that idea more precisely.
If Jonathan Harvey's music is often discussed in terms
that border on the metaphysical, this is more than a
reporting of the composer's own field of reference.
It points to the fact that his music inherits the central
metaphysical assumptions of early modernism: that art
shapes its materials in order to point beyond them and
to project an order over and against the materials which
it shapes. In this way, all music worth the name is
transcendent - or in Harvey's own words: 'In a metaphysical
sense music never changes: it always portrays the play
of the Relative against the ground of the Absolute.'
This
is not hard to demonstrate. Consider, for example, Advaya
(1994) for solo cello and electronics. The title means
literally 'not-two' - about as succinct a statement
of Harvey's aesthetic as one could hope to find. It
is not called 'One' because Harvey's music is a long
way from a kind of new-age ambience. It is concerned
rather with the point or moment of transcendence, the
borderlands in which individual elements (a single note,
a motif) partake of two intersecting identities (a linear,
intervallic one, and a vertical, timbral-harmonic one).
The music dwells on the ambiguity of these two identities
- the fact that the same element coexists in the two
dimensions simultaneously. In dialogue with the electronics
the solo cello quite literally transcends itself through
the use of virtuosic extended techniques (or 'transcendental
technique' as Liszt might have said). But as the electronics
literally 'go beyond' the cello's sound - into realms
which a 'live' cello could not go - it does so not by
doing something wholly different but by a transformation
of the cello's own sound. Indeed, the entire piece is
derived from a spectral analysis of the cello's open
A string, its essential 'nature' if you like. But while
the acoustic cello pushes the limits of what it can
produce from that A string, the electronic transformations
project sounds derived entirely from the same source,
but beyond the reach of the 'live' performer.
Transcendence
here is not some 'extra' interpretative gloss of the
composer - it is as precise as any other analytical
category in denoting the structural relationship in
Advaya between the acoustic cello and the electronics.
In its temporal unfolding the piece quite literally
enacts transcendence. At times the cello celebrates
its own materiality as a sound-producing object - at
one point the body of the instrument (whose resemblance
to the human body has often been noted) is used as a
drum. In concert with the electronics it produces a
tabla-like sound which forms the basis of a more corporeal
dance section. But at other times a combination of extended
techniques and electronic transformations produces a
radically desubstantialised sound which has no immediate
relation to any concrete sound-producing object (such
as the rapid sweeping gestures towards the end of the
piece which recall Harvey's discussion of the ending
to Valley of Aosta).
For
Harvey himself, of course, this technical capacity for
transcendence has a more than musical or sonic aspect.
In his recent book, In Quest of Spirit, he suggested
that whereas electronic music was the single most important
technical breakthrough in music of the twentieth century,
spectralism was a breakthrough of spiritual significance.
While he admits that this may be a partial view, it
points nevertheless to the capacity of spectralism to
deal more directly with the physical nature of musical
sound, and thus of our understanding of time and space,
than was hitherto possible. It has clearly been a dominant
concern of his in the 1990s, and he touches on it several
times in recent writings. With hindsight he refers back
to a number of 'proto-spectralists' (including not only
Messiaen but also the composer of Parsifal!) but in
his own work at least it was the tape piece Mortuos
plango, vivos voco, produced at IRCAM in 1980, that
first brought this approach to the foreground. This
way of thinking about sound, based on the computer analysis
of the harmonic spectra of single sounds, was developed
principally at IRCAM and associated with figures such
as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. It is perhaps Jonathan
Harvey's exposure to this way of thinking - and enthusiasm
for it - that distinguishes him most obviously from
other English composers of his generation. It has shaped
not only his music for tape and live electronics, but
also the way in which he has come to write for acoustic
instruments - as is amply demonstrated both by works
which include electronics, such as Advaya, and those
which do not, such as the String Quartet, no.3.
The
individuality of Harvey's approach to spectralism lies
perhaps in his interest in exploring the interface not
just between acoustic and electronic sound, but between
the global dimension of harmonic spectra and their specific
exploration in the unfolding of individual pieces. There
is a potential for stasis in the contemplation of spectra
which certainly informs Harvey's music, but it is more
often placed alongside music of great energy and dynamism.
And it is precisely this interpenetration of two dimensions,
of the vertical and the horizontal, the global and the
linear, which seems to fascinate him as a composer.
For him, the vertical proportions of a sound, as laid
out in its harmonic spectrum, may also be unfolded horizontally.
'The fascination of spectral thinking is that it, too,
can easily shift into the realm of linear time, into
melodic thinking: there is a large borderland of ambiguity
to exploit....Intervallicism can shade into and out
of spectralism, and it is in this ambiguity that much
of the richness in the approach lies'.
It
is for this reason that a confirmed spectralist such
as Harvey can also write an opera. What distinguishes
Harvey's music is that it brings the insights of abstract
computer research into play with formal concerns that
retain their links to some age-old narrative paradigms.
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