In Thursday’s (12/6) Guardian (London), Imogen Tilden writes, “British composer Jonathan Harvey has died aged 73, it was announced today. His publisher, Faber Music, confirmed that Harvey, who had been suffering from motor neurone disease for some time, died peacefully in a hospice in Sussex on Tuesday evening. Harvey has been composing since the 1960s, during which period he was a prominent disciple of Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose experimentalism and use of electronic instrumentation influenced Harvey’s early works. But from the 1970s he began to establish his own distinctive voice, drawing on an abiding interest in spirituality and world religions. Using the cutting-edge digital technology developed at Pierre Boulez’s Paris research centre Ircam he wrote a number of pieces, the best known of which is Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, which uses the sounds of the bell of Winchester Cathedral and the treble voice of Harvey’s son—a chorister there at the time. … In January the BBC dedicated one of its Total Immersion days to his music, while the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra performed his Weltethos in June as part of the Cultural Olympiad; the work was premiered in 2011 by the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle.”
Posted December 6, 2012
