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Jonathan Harvey: Song Offerings and White as Jasmine
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).
164 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2009
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October 5, 2020
This book by Michael Downes offers a detailed analysis of two of Jonathan Harvey’s settings of Indian spiritual poetry: Song Offerings for soprano and ensemble on the eponymous collection by Rabindranath Tagore (1984), and White as Jasmine for soprano and large orchestra on the Tamil ascetics Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu (1999).
As the two pieces both foreground the voice and share similar spiritual preoccupations, it makes sense to examine them together. However, they were written over a decade apart in different periods of the composer’s career. Downes helpfully shows how the two pieces feature similar techniques as in other works of the respective period. Thus, Song Offerings plays much with symmetrically, the music radiating outward from a central pitch, i.e. the same “the bass moves into the middle” soundworld which Harvey had introduced in his ensemble piece Bhakti some years before. White as Jasmine, on the other hand, is an extremely complex piece for all that it is only 16 minutes long, and Downes examines the role of electronics, the use of the same additive spectralist technique which Harvey had first employed in Advaya for cello, and the composer’s new interest in expressing transcendent states through various means.
As I write this, each of these two pieces has received only a single commercial recording (Song Offerings on the Nimbus label, White as Jasmine on NMC), and sadly these are rather poor recordings in terms of sound quality. I have tended to discount these two works because of that, but I am happy to have come across Downes’ book. Armed with his detailed investigation of the pieces and suggestions on what to watch out for, I have been able to make the best of an unideal situation and come to enjoy the works, even as I do hope for superior recordings in future.
Bookending the chapters analyzing the two pieces is an introduction that describes Harvey’s career to date and aesthetic and spiritual concerns, and a closing chapter that quickly describes some of Harvey's pieces from the new millennium that take some of the features of White as Jasmine further.
As the two pieces both foreground the voice and share similar spiritual preoccupations, it makes sense to examine them together. However, they were written over a decade apart in different periods of the composer’s career. Downes helpfully shows how the two pieces feature similar techniques as in other works of the respective period. Thus, Song Offerings plays much with symmetrically, the music radiating outward from a central pitch, i.e. the same “the bass moves into the middle” soundworld which Harvey had introduced in his ensemble piece Bhakti some years before. White as Jasmine, on the other hand, is an extremely complex piece for all that it is only 16 minutes long, and Downes examines the role of electronics, the use of the same additive spectralist technique which Harvey had first employed in Advaya for cello, and the composer’s new interest in expressing transcendent states through various means.
As I write this, each of these two pieces has received only a single commercial recording (Song Offerings on the Nimbus label, White as Jasmine on NMC), and sadly these are rather poor recordings in terms of sound quality. I have tended to discount these two works because of that, but I am happy to have come across Downes’ book. Armed with his detailed investigation of the pieces and suggestions on what to watch out for, I have been able to make the best of an unideal situation and come to enjoy the works, even as I do hope for superior recordings in future.
Bookending the chapters analyzing the two pieces is an introduction that describes Harvey’s career to date and aesthetic and spiritual concerns, and a closing chapter that quickly describes some of Harvey's pieces from the new millennium that take some of the features of White as Jasmine further.
Displaying 1 of 1 review