Jonathan Harvey: Song Offerings and White as Jasmine

Michael Downes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754660224
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351630801
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) was one of Britain's leading composers: his music is frequently performed throughout Europe, the United States (where he lived and worked) and Japan. He is particularly renowned for his electro-acoustic music, an aspect on which most previous writing on his work has focused. The present volume is the first detailed study of music from Harvey's considerable body of work for conventional forces. It focuses on two pieces that span one of the most fertile periods in Harvey's output: Song Offerings (1985; awarded the prestigious Britten Award), and White as Jasmine (1999). The book explores the links between the two works - both set texts by Hindu writers, employ a solo soprano, and adumbrate a spiritual journey - as well as showing how Harvey's musical language has evolved in the period between them. It examines Harvey's techniques of writing for the voice, for small ensemble (Song Offerings), and for large orchestra, subtly and characteristically enhanced with electronic sound (White as Jasmine). It shows how Harvey's music is informed by his profound understanding of Eastern religion, as well as offering a clear and accessible account of his distinctive musical language. Both works use musical processes to dramatic and clearly audible effect, as the book demonstrates with close reference to the accompanying downloadable resources. The book draws on interviews with the composer, and benefits from the author's exclusive access to sketches of the two works. It contextualises the works, showing how they are the product of a diverse series of musical influences and an engagement with ideas from both Eastern and Western religions. It also explores how Harvey continued to develop the musical and spiritual preoccupations revealed in these pieces in his later work, up to and including his third opera, Wagner Dream (2007).

Chapter 1

In Quest: Jonathan Harvey’s Musical Development from the 1950s to the 1980s

I am not a very monolithic composer.¹

¹ Palmer, Interview, 1998.

Viewed from a certain angle, the music of Jonathan Harvey seems to embody a series of paradoxes. His upbringing suggests an archetypal Englishness – educated at public school and Cambridge, the first work by which he was significantly influenced was Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius – and yet he is now perhaps England’s most ‘European’ composer, receiving greater recognition and more performances on the continent than in the UK. He takes inspiration from several different religions in a way perhaps unique among major artists: his increasing immersion in Buddhism has not meant rejection of the Anglican tradition in which he was brought up, or prevented him from writing a piece as steeped in Christian iconography as Death of Light/Light of Death (1998). He is Britain’s foremost composer of electronic music, with eight separate commissions from the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique (IRCAM); yet a high proportion of his works – over 40 per cent – is written for that most traditional of instruments, the human voice. The precise calculations involved in Harvey’s work with harmonic spectra suggest a composer who views music as an essentially abstract art – but he has written three operas (plus one more that he has withdrawn) and many more of his works have narrative implications. Perhaps most centrally, there is an ambiguity in his approach to musical form that he himself identified in conversation with Arnold Whittall: ‘What I seek is music that is as fresh as an improvisation and yet has not a sound out of place.’² Far from being ‘monolithic’, Harvey’s career has been marked by the creative juxtaposition of diverse and apparently contradictory influences and ideas.

² Whittall 1999, p. 32.

The two works on which this book focuses exhibit some of the paradoxical qualities that mark Harvey’s output as a whole. Song Offerings and White as Jasmine each set texts by Hindu writers, but the latter in particular can be interpreted as an example of Harvey’s increasingly Buddhist musical thinking. Each work can be situated within the traditional genre of ‘song cycle’, but the way in which the relationships unfold between text and music, voice and instruments owes nothing to convention. Yet the experience of listening to these works is not one of contradiction or confusion; on the contrary, both convey a sense of unity, of inevitability, of words and notes that could not satisfactorily be organized in any other way – and they do this in a manner that is audible without consulting a score, as I will seek to demonstrate. They typify Harvey’s music in their reconciliation of heterogeneous material to produce a whole that satisfies the listener – aesthetically, emotionally and spiritually.

This opening chapter sets that process in context, charting Harvey’s musical development until the early 1980s, the point at which he composed Song offerings, and showing how his music developed in successive decades under the stimulus of apparently contradictory influences. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Harvey’s thinking was shaped by Erwin Stein and Hans Keller, the two very different teachers recommended by Benjamin Britten, his early mentor. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, impelled to go beyond the essentially classical focus of these teachers’ work, Harvey drew inspiration from two colossal figures in post-war music, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Milton Babbitt. By the early 1980s, meanwhile, Harvey had become a successful and independent composer. In this phase of his development the greatest influences on his music were less other composers than the environments in which he found himself working: most pertinently, the IRCAM studios and Winchester Cathedral. Each of these phases, as we will see, generated works of increasing depth and complexity: the Symphony (1966) and Ludus amoris (1969), the Inner Light trilogy (1973–77) and the first String Quartet (1977), Bhakti (1982) and Passion and Resurrection (1981) may be regarded as staging posts on the journey in which Harvey gained his own compositional voice through the negotiation of divergent influences and preoccupations.

This process was set in motion long before Harvey began his formal studies in composition at the age of 18. As he has movingly recounted to whittall, his ‘favourite composer’ in childhood and beyond was his father, Gerald – an amateur musician, but one who was enormously knowledgeable about contemporary music and awakened his son’s sensitivity to harmony and timbre:

He loved Skriabin and Fauré he loved harmonies which were complex and resonant and ways of writing for the piano which would sometimes blur: complex spectral objets sonores making for what he would call bell effects.³

³ Whittall 1999, p. 1.

This informal immersion in music was complemented from the age of nine by a choral training at St Michael’s College, Tenbury, where Harvey sang two services a day and encountered a wealth of choral repertoire. His most powerful musical recollection of this period, however, centres not on this music but on the playing of the organist:

I used to love his improvisations because I found them more modern – just a hint of chaos – than anything we ever encountered in our singing. And in this particular improvisation … there was a moment of great epiphany and I knew that I would always be a composer.⁴

⁴ Ibid., p. 3.

Harvey’s sense of vocation survived the competing attractions of other interests at Repton, the loss of his Christian faith during the same period and some uninspiring composition teaching in his first year at Cambridge. By his own admission, his technical abilities as a composer were limited when he began lessons with Stein in 1957. But if his early musical experiences had brought little composerly discipline, they had nonetheless awakened his understanding of the interlocking attractions of tradition and chaos, of structure and improvisation – a dichotomy crucial to his development in the ensuing decades.

Stein and Keller

Erwin Stein had studied with Schoenberg before World War I, and had also worked professionally as a conductor; but by the time Britten introduced him to Harvey he was known principally as a writer and editor. Helped by Ralph Hawkes to escape from Nazi-controlled Vienna, where the Jewish Stein worked for Universal Edition, by the 1950s he had become the ‘musical authority’ of Boosey and Hawkes.⁵ Form and Performance exemplifies Stein’s rigorous approach to ‘matters of form and proportions’, which he believed should inform all musical decisions: he criticizes performers who sacrifice ‘formal proportions’ to satisfy the public’s craving for ‘fullness of tone’,⁶ and argues (with particular reference to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony) for organization of tempi ‘which at once preserves the unity of the entire form and does justice to every detail’.⁷ This overriding concern with structure resulted in composition lessons that emphasized ‘disciplines of eight-bar structures, sentences and periods’, demanding greater depth of thought about phrase structure than Harvey had previously been used to.⁸ Stein’s teaching naturally reflected his own studies with Schoenberg, who remained his supreme musical exemplar until the end of his life, though not principally because of his twelve-tone music: Orpheus in New Guises argues that Schoenberg’s compositions in particular keys are almost as numerous, and just as challenging, as those written using the twelve-tone method.⁹

⁵ Helen Wallace (2007), Boosey & Hawkes: The Publishing Story (London: Boosey & Hawkes), p. 19. ⁶ Erwin Stein (1962), Form and Performance (London: Faber and Faber), p. 13. ⁷ Erwin Stein (1953), Orpheus in New Guises, trans. Hans Keller (London: Rockliff), p. 19. ⁸ Whittall 1999, p. 5. ⁹ Stein 1953, p. 19.

The rigour of Stein’s teaching did not, however, prevent Harvey from exploring a wide range of styles: ‘Stein allowed me to compose in any style I liked, and I tried all sorts of different harmonic languages, but always with a very clear eight- or other bar structure.’¹⁰ This reflects the catholicity of Stein’s tastes: Form and Performance includes examples from Verdi, Berlioz and Bartós well as the Viennese classics, arguing that transmitting structure is equally important to the performer whatever the repertoire concerned. Stein’s close involvement with Britten – ‘not a musical thinker like Schoenberg or a poet like Mahler, but … a professional musician and craftsman-composer, whose archetype and ideal is Mozart’¹¹ – surely developed his sense that the Schoenberg method was not the only valid approach for modern music. Stein also shows a keen interest in opera and in the linking of music and text, and Orpheus in New Guises concludes with the intriguing suggestion that ‘English composers could contribute more to the world of music than they have done so far. The musical qualities of the language hold out promises whose fulfilment has only begun.’¹²

¹⁰ Whittall 1999, p. 5. ¹¹ Stein 1953, p. 150. ¹² Ibid., pp. 162–3.

If Stein’s concern was primarily with the internal functioning of the musical object itself – he disliked what he called the ‘bird’s-eye’ view of the historical and sociological approaches, arguing that ‘art is foremost a personal affair’¹³ – then the interests of Hans Keller, with whom Harvey began to study in 1958 after Stein’s untimely death, were more wide-ranging. Keller, like Stein, experienced a Viennese upbringing – both men emigrated to London in 1938 – but had taken from it not only a veneration for Schoenberg but also a fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis and its relationship to music. He believed that psychoanalysis contained the promise of ‘shedding light on the psychology, not only of the composing process, but of the actual elements of musical structure and texture’, and that the only reason this was not widely recognized was because ‘most of the more original and capable psychoanalysts have so far been largely or wholly unmusical … Freud being himself on top of the list of musical ignoramuses.’¹⁴ This interest coloured Keller’s teaching: Harvey recalls that ‘in those often hilarious sessions he would psychoanalyse my score, and me too’.¹⁵

¹³ Ibid., p. 5. ¹⁴ Hans Keller (2003), Music and Psychology: From Vienna to London, 1939–52, ed. Christopher Wintle (London: Plumbago Books), p. xiv. ¹⁵ Whittall 1999, p. 6.

Like Stein, Keller was far from being an obvious recommendation for Britten to make: he was even less a professional composer than Stein, and teaching, meanwhile, was included in his famous list of ‘phoney professions’: ‘I have become the most passionate anti-teacher teacher that has ever walked the earth . I have seen the depersonalizing effects of “great” teaching.’¹⁶ The negative effects of Schoenberg’s teaching on Webern and particularly Berg are a frequent theme of his writing. The latter, he believed, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Music Examples
• General Editor’s Preface
• Note on Abbreviations and Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 In Quest: Jonathan Harvey’s Musical Development from the 1950s to the 1980s
• 2 The Approach to the Absolute: Metaphysical Preoccupations in Harvey’s Music
• 3 Song Offerings (1985)
• 4 White as Jasmine (1999)
• 5 Towards Pure Lands: Harvey’s Music in the Twenty-First Century
• Works by Jonathan Harvey
• Select Bibliography
• Discography
• CD Track List
• Index