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Music of Jonathan Harvey Featured at New England Conservatory

Jun. 04, 2009

The music of Jonathan Harvey is featured this month at New England Conservatory's Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice. As Harvey is recognized as one of the most skilled composers using the electronic medium today, the works on the program are all scored for small ensemble or solo instrument with electronic element, including: Tombeau de Messiaen for piano and tape, Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco for computer manipulated concrete sound, Bhakti for large ensemble and electronics, and At a Cloud Gathering for percussion and electronics. Of his work Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, he writes:

This work is a reflection of my experiences at Winchester Cathedral where my son Dominic was a chorister from 1975-1980. It is based on his voice and that of the great tenor bell. This enormous black bell of superhuman power has inscribed upon it: "horas avolantes numero mortuos plano: vivos ad preces voco" (I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead: I call the living to prayers). This serves as the boy's text. The pitch and time structure of my work is entirely based on the bell's rich, irregular harmonic spectrum, a structure neither tonal nor dodecaphonic nor modal in any western or oriental sense, but unique to itself.

Commissioned by IRCAM on eight separate occasions (ever since his invitation to work there from Pierre Boulez in the early 1980s) Jonathan Harvey was awarded the Giga-Hertz Award for life's work from a jury including Boulez and Wolfgang Rihm. His works in other classical genres are widely performed as well and he has earned a reputation as a sought after choral composer. He is particularly renowned for his choral music and has written many pure choral works including his large-scale cantata for the millennium BBC Proms, Mothers Shall Not Cry, and his church opera Passion and Resurrection, which was the subject of a BBC television film.

Harvey has been featured at many major European music festivals and ensembles including Strasbourg Musica, Ars Musica Brussels, Musica Nova Helsinki, the Acanthes and Agora festivals. He has been Composer-in-Association at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra since 2005 and last year the BBC SO premiered his work Speakings for orchestra and electronics, commissioned by the BBC, IRCAM and Radio France.

Learn more on the life and work of Jonathan Harvey at www.fabermusic.com.

Visit www.sicpp.org for more information on NEC's Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice.

Bhakti (1982)
for chamber ensemble of 15 players and quadraphonic tape (or CD-ROM)
fl(pic).ob(ca).cl(Ebcl).bcl-hn.tpt(ptpt).tbn-2perc-hp-str
50'

Tombeau de Messiaen (1994)
for piano and CD
9'

At a Cloud Gathering (2005)
for percussion & electronics
35'

Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980)
for computer-manipulated concrete sounds (pre-recorded quadraphonic tape)
9'

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