Jonathan Harvey (composer)


Jonathan Dean Harvey was a British composer. He held teaching positions at universities and music conservatories in Europe and the USA and was frequently invited to teach in summer schools around the world.

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 much 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 possible 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.
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