Jonathan Harvey, who has died at the age of 73, was one of the UK's leading composers of music in all genres, a composer as happy to be sung in a cathedral evensong as to be performed at Pierre Boulez' electro-acoustic research institute IRCAM in Paris. He was quite impossible to pigeon-hole.
Harvey studied composition with Benjamin Britten, Erwin Stein, Hans Keller and Milton Babbitt. He also attended, and was much influenced by, Karlheinz Stockhausen's composition courses at Darmstadt in 1966-7.
Harvey, though eleven years younger than Stockhausen, became his equal as a pioneer in the field of electro-acoustic composition, a field in which he worked more consistently than any other concert composer in Britain. His electronic pieces ranged from Inner Light I for 7 instruments and tape (1973), dedicated to Britten for his 60th birthday, which was made with primitive analogue equipment such as ring modulation and varispeed tape-recorders, right up to Speakings (2008) for orchestra and live electronics, completed a few years ago and using the latest innovative software from IRCAM. Harvey was awarded the Prix de Composition de la Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco for Speakings in 2009. Sadly it turned out to be his last major orchestral work. Harvey's best known electronic piece is also one of the most famous ever composed, Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980, IRCAM). It combined the recorded and resynthesised tenor bell of Winchester Cathedral with the voice of his son Dominic, then in Winchester Cathedral Choir. The euphonious, celebratory result was an immediate hit internationally and has remained a classic of this genre. In all, Harvey composed some ten electronic pieces at IRCAM over the past 30 years, more than any other composer including Boulez himself, and his work there constitutes the backbone of recent electronic repertoire.
Harvey's four string quartets have quickly entered the chamber music repertoire and many have been recorded more than once. A prolific composer, he was active in providing music for all genres, from well-known solo works such as Curve with Plateau for cello, to several full scale operas, of which Wagner Dream (2004) was perhaps the best known. Everything he composed was informed by an intimate knowledge of the potentials of instruments, and he enjoyed many long and successful collaborations with the many of the best performers of the period, such as cellist Francis-Marie Uitti, conductors Pierre Boulez, Sir Simon Rattle and Ilan Volkov, ensembles such as the Arditti String Quartet, the Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble Modern, Ictus, L'Itineraire, and many others. Harvey was a gifted cellist himself, having played in the cello sections of the National Youth Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony, and his music remained deeply routed in performance practice and practicality, however complex the figurations could become.
Harvey also composed numerous much-loved pieces for the many British cathedral choirs. Of these, I love the Lord (1976) and The Angels (1992) have remained the most recorded and performed. Harvey had been a chorister at St. Michael's Tenbury, and this aspect of his output was one he held very dear. Many of these anthems are in the working repertoire of cathedrals throughout Britain.
Otherwise, Harvey's reputation in the UK, whilst always solid, has fluctuated somewhat. On the one hand, since the mid-seventies he was respected here as an innovative and fluent composer who received commissions from most of the major performing groups and concert series – such as the BBC Orchestras, the BBC Proms, the Nash Ensemble, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera and many others. On the other, there are still British orchestras that have never played his music, and some UK commentators could not quite take Harvey's perfectly open commitment to mysticism entirely seriously. Others found the music too eclectic, feeling that at times he perhaps composed too rapidly and was open to diverse influence, whether from Stockhausen, Boulez or from his first mentor Benjamin Britten.
Harvey himself was very aware of these criticisms, but felt sure that he was pulling the various aspects of his creative interests together strongly at a deep level of coherence – 'well, certainly in my better pieces I hope I do!' he would add, with characteristic modesty. There were periods when a reserve in his UK reception was noticeable, made more pointed by the great warmth with which much of his music was received from 1980 onwards in mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Japan and Canada. There it was routine for works such as Song Offerings or Bhakti to be studied as seriously as the music of Boulez or Carter. But mainland Europe showed little understanding of Harvey's cathedral repertoire, and perhaps slotted him a little too readily into the slot of 'leading electro-acoustic composer'. The truth is Harvey's output is quite unlike any other and it is perhaps its very diversity which makes it unique, and uniquely useful to a range of publics and communities, a diversity achieved unlike so many others without compromise, and which one feels Benjamin Britten – who was as happy to turn his hand to occasional fanfares for 3 trumpets as to write grand operas – would certainly have appreciated. Happily in recent years, the UK appreciation for the whole range of Harvey's works has been strong and persistent, and this brought him much joy.
Harvey taught composition for many years at Southampton and Sussex Universities, and also as guest in the US. He was generous and altruistic, always interested in his colleagues' work, humble in his opinions of his own, unpretentious, lively and endlessly inquisitive. Perhaps because he was very sure of what he wanted to do, Harvey was enthusiastically supportive of the work of many UK composers very different from himself, such as Robin Holloway, Gordon Crosse and Brian Ferneyhough (of whom he was perhaps the earliest prominent advocate in the UK – his 1979 article on Ferneyhough in The Musical Times is still perhaps the best on that composer). He was absolutely uncompetitive in his attitude towards his contemporaries and students. In this as in much else, Harvey was a model of how composers should behave.
Harvey's music was celebrated in several recent festivals devoted entirely to his output such as the BBC's Total Immersion in January, and a more recent weekend at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in October. The halls were gratifyingly full for these events, though sadly the composer was already too ill to be present in person. Happily live relays through Skype enabled him to witness these successes in his home in Sussex.
In recent years Harvey had coped very bravely with the encroaching restrictions brought on by Motor Neurone Disease – ironically, the same illness which had killed his revered teacher Hans Keller in the eighties. He continued composing nevertheless, using some manual assistance towards the end as first writing and then typing became impossible. He also retained his sense of humour in the face of this terrible adversity to an astonishing degree, remarking ironically to an interviewer a few weeks ago that one his last works was called 80 Breaths for Tokyo but all he needed now just one long breath. He died peacefully with his family at his side. He is survived by his devoted wide Rosa, his son and his daughter.
Julian Anderson
(from [t]akte 1/2013)