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AguidetoJonathanHarvey'smusic|Music|TheGuardian

A guide to Jonathan Harvey's music

This week, Tom Service looks at a composer whose mind is always on higher matters
Tom Service
Monday 17 September 2012 16.15BST

It's not every composer whose music is guaranteed to uplift and revivify you, which
makes you feel a sense of essential positivity about the world and our place within it.
British composer Jonathan Harvey belongs in that special category, and he does it not
through creating a trivial sense of comforting musical escapism but by confronting,
describing, and transcending the world and its pains, joys and sufferings. Stick this piece
on right now if you've never encountered his music before, one of the genuine
masterpieces of electronic music, Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco ("I lament the dead, I call
the living"). It's music that electronically etherealises the recorded sounds of the largest
bell of Winchester Cathedral, in which is inscribed that wonderful Latin epithet, and the
voice of Harvey's son, who was then a chorister in Winchester's Choir.
Mortuos Plango was composed at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM in Paris in 1980. It crystallises
some of the fundamental achievements of the music Harvey has been writing for a half
century now: a searching use of technology, a fusion of acoustic and electronic sounds, a
desire to make music at the borders of consciousness and existential knowledge, to use
the power of music to explore the spiritual. Mortuos Plango's composition also says
something for the internationalism of Harvey's music, and the fact that we still need to
hear more of it in programmes in this country.
At the core of so much of Harvey's music is a seeking out of a Buddhist-inspired
spirituality. The dangers with that idea are obvious: a lesser composer could easily aspire
to the condition of meditative transcendence yet only create music of one-dimensional
banality. But Harvey's music does not succumb to that temptation. Have a think about
his most recent full-length opera, Wagner Dream, performed at the Barbican earlier this
year. It's a piece that puts together two of Harvey's most abiding influences and
passions, the teachings of the Buddha and the worldly, sensual, death-haunted lateromanticism of Wagner. On the face of it, you'd be hard-pressed to think of two more
essentially opposed phenomena: on one hand, the lesson of mindful egolessness, on the
other, maybe the most self-obsessed amplification of an individual ego in Western
creativity. But Wagner was in fact thinking about an opera on the life of the Buddha at
the time of his death in 1883; Harvey's piece is both an imagined vision of what that
piece could have been and a dramatised encounter between Wagner's egomania and the
Buddhist myth of the love of Prakriti for Buddhist monk Ananda.
For Harvey, both Wagner and Buddhism are routes to the beyond. What he heard in
Wagner's music that so inspired him as a young musician was precisely its evocation of a
sense of heightened reality, a realm of pure feeling that has its Buddhist analogy in states
of heightened awareness. And that's what you hear in Harvey's score, a heady mix of
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East and West in music and drama that sounds out the borderland between
consciousness and unconsciousness.
There's another apparently paradoxical fusion that Harvey's music embodies. For some
composers, technology and electronics are means to explore new worlds of sound for
their own sake, to find new materials to make part of their technical arsenal. For Harvey,
it's just the opposite: technology is a way of extending the reach of acoustic instruments
into other realms of space and time, to literally and metaphorically go beyond physical
boundaries. That's what you hear happening as early as Bhakti, Harvey's 50-minute 1982
piece for ensemble and tape; as technology has developed, so too has Harvey's
imagination, so that he can manipulate the live sounds of the string quartet in his Fourth
Quartet, creating a sonic halo around the players and the audience, or turning a solo
piano and ensemble into a colloquy of birds in his Bird Concerto with Pianosong.
Harvey is unafraid to go where other composers fear to tread in order to illustrate what
he sees as the essential unity of the world around us. Weltethos is a gargantuan, 80minute piece for choir and orchestra, originally written for the Berlin Philharmonic and
first heard in this country in Birmingham last June, which sets texts that attempt to
reveal the oneness behind all of the world's major religions. Andrew Clements found
that the naivety of the work's subject-matter couldn't sustain the imagination of
Harvey's music; but the attempt to find a music for the whole world reveals what Harvey
wants his work to do, how he wants it to be useful and the messages he wants it to
convey. (In fact, there's another recent piece called Messages, a choral and orchestral
setting of meditative splendour consisting entirely of the incantation and evocation of
the names of Persian and Judaic angels.)
There are no such problems, however, in his smaller scale but no less ambitious recent
orchestral works, especially the pieces he composed for the BBC Scottish Symphony
Orchestra when he was composer in residence there between 2005 and 2008. Body
Mandala is a coruscating, violent transliteration of the ritualistic power of Tibetan brass
instruments for the Western orchestra, whereas Towards A Pure Land is yet another
irresistible essay in how the orchestra can take you on a journey to a different
consciousness. Another work, Speakings, is even more far-reaching. Thanks again to
help from IRCAM, the music turns the orchestra into would-be vocalists, exploring a
region where the sounds of the orchestra cross a border from dumb instrumental
scratchings and blowings into linguistic phonemes.
Exploring Harvey's music is one of the most rewarding journeys you can take as a
listener to contemporary music. All of it - from his chamber works to his orchestral
pieces, his song cycles to his operas, tape pieces to pieces for solo instrument - is a
corrective to the cynicism of so much of today's musical world, an essential lesson in
how it's possible to be at once vividly contemporary and timeless, to speak
simultaneously of the outer world and inner spiritual experience. We need his music
now more than ever.

Five key links

Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco
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Bhakti
Madonna of Winter and Spring
Speakings
Body Mandala
Jonathan Harvey day is at the Southbank Centre on 7 October.
Next week: Wolfgang Rihm
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