Musical structures and technology as transcendence in...

Musical structures and technology as transcendence in Jonathan Harvey’s music

Bruno Bossis MINT/OMF, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France

bruno.bossis at uhb.fr

Jonathan Harvey Composer, UK

http://www.vivosvoco.com/index.html

Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM08) Thessaloniki, Greece, 3-6 July 2008, http://web.auth.gr/cim08/

Background in musicology. Jonathan Harvey’s music is a very rich field of interest for musicology. Studies by different musicologists (Palmer, 2001; Bossis, 2006b), as well as numerous in-depth writings by Jonathan Harvey himself (Harvey, 1999b) provide a large background for a reflection on interactions between compositional techniques and electronic processes. As Jonathan Harvey's music is often discussed in terms of spirituality and ambiguity, it is important that musicology, and analysis in particular, consider how his music draws on early modernism and technology to convey ideas that, at first glance, seem incompatible with such modes and media of expression

Background in composition. Jonathan Harvey studied with Erwin Stein, Schoenberg’s pupil. Early influences included musical techniques such as serialism (Whittall, 1999) and more generally musical trends involving a high level of interest for musical structures, in addition to contemplative and spiritual interests (Harvey 1999a & c). His music must be placed in relation to other music at the end of the twentieth century and involves various compositional techniques. In the late 1960s, his encounter with Milton Babbitt at Princeton set him on the path to developing an original relationship between musical structures and technology (Bossis, 2007a). The core of Harvey’s compositional language is a transcendence of all these techniques.

Aims. This paper aims to show some of the most important particularities of Harvey’s compositional process. Organization of materials and formal structures will be the center of interest of this study. Modernist influences and electroacoustic techniques are very important, as are the use of symmetrical harmonic fields, melodic transformations or timbral modulation. However, Harvey’s music is by no means a catalogue of musical structures or electronic tools, as demonstrated by examples given here, e.g. from Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (Bossis, 2004; Clarke, 2005), Bhakti (Palmer, 2001) and Wagner Dream (Bossis, 2006b & 2007b; Harvey & Carrière, 2007). For instance, spectralism is more than a structural model or an interface between natural and electronic sounds. Spectra lead toward both style coherence and contemplation.

Main contribution This research is supported by the MINT (Musique, Informatique et Nouvelles Technologies) group with Jonathan Harvey’s help. The research team, based at Paris-Sorbonne University, is dedicated to the field of electroacoustic music studies. New instruments, new musical gestures, pieces analysis and electroacoustic music history, all studied with the methods of musicology (Bossis, 2006a), are the main goals of MINT. The team participates actively in the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network, where it regularly presents its research (EMS06 conference, Beijing; EMS07, Leicester; EMS08, Paris).

Implications In this research, composition, musicology and technology are connected. The composer’s point of view illuminates the musicologist’s one. Thus, Jonathan Harvey and Bruno Bossis have had different collaborations for several years. This paper focuses more precisely on interdisciplinary aspects of the meeting between musical structure and machine in Harvey’s music.

For a very long time, a concept of music as an explanation of the universe dominated. Music is indeed structured by symmetries that seemingly provide a convenient means to model and understand the chaotic nature of the universe, and also offers a way to consider the beauty of the world in its most poetic aspects. The ideas of Kepler and Newton, and that of the most advanced scientific theories of our time, are in search of a higher unity. By

bringing order to the complexity of the world, the general laws of science provide access to universal principles. The search for global models, situated beyond local theories, joins Buddhist thinking. While nature must not be thought of as mere chaos, an idea leading to mysticism and obscurantism, neither should it be considered to be reducible to a formalisation of science. Music is based on rules that are understandable and common, but it is also the vehicle of an artistic

CIM08 - Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology - Proceedings

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expressiveness that remains largely inexplicable and individual. Sound art lies at the confluence of what is calculable and of a freeing transcendence. The music and thought of Jonathan Harvey1 are exemplary of this meeting.

Ontological or epistemological vision?

At first glance, two approaches appear clearly differentiated: the ontological one, on how it is to be, and the epistemological one, the attempt to know. In reality, music reconciles the two viewpoints, ontological and epistemological. The aim of music is “concerned with transcending that dichotomy, with healing Descartes’s ontological separation of self and world and Kant’s epistemological separation of self and certain knowledge, both formative of today’s dominant paradigms (and difficulties).”2 In the art world, building a knowledge (science) and know-how (technique and technology) can be employed for an ontological vision of the universe.

Thus, Jonathan Harvey’s music is based on formalism and technology to express the inexpressible. But these writing systems and devices are not the only working tools used by the composer. To write music as an elaboration of sound with immediate effects on the auditor will result in a purely local coherence. For example, a chaotic music cannot adequately translate the incomprehensible complexity of the world. Musical expressiveness cannot be reduced to an illusion, as claimed Stravinsky: “If… music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which… we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short an aspect unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.”3

In contrast, structures and technologies can raise the musical discourse to the rank of universal. More specifically, this paper will show that the connection of Harvey’s music with spirituality lies not in a vague dilution of the writing constraints, but rather in a strong frame forming the framework of an extremely rich and varied expressiveness. Subjectivity borrows clearly marked channels of objectivity. The dualistic subject/object distinction is inappropriate when dealing with music.

Music is a language with rules and material constraints (instrument-making), and a means of transcendent expression. The composer writes music for voices and instruments; he does not directly assert spirituality. In other words, there is no guarantee of correspondence between the composer's thought and the result, which is dependent on the auditor. A real visualization of the transcendence is impossible. If the codes of emotion were known in previous centuries, i.e. from the Renaissance to Romanticism, it is not the same in the contemporary era. Moreover, technology has made possible a large number of expressive means that were inaccessible with traditional instruments.

Beyond the highly structuring elements of Harvey’s musical writing conceived as a vehicle of a certain transcendence, electronics plays a very particular and probably surprising role: that of revealing a spiritual dimension.

Structures

High Modernism and Late Modernism

According to the musicologist Arnold Whittall, “To a large extent, of course, the story of twentieth-century music after 1960 is that of the erosion of the relatively extreme polarities favoured at the time by much more diverse predispositions and practices. Some commentators see this as the displacement of Modernism by Postmodernism: my own preference is to speak of a move from High Modernism to Late Modernism. By this I mean that the essential technical and aesthetic qualities of modernism have been refined and intensified in music since 1970, rather than replaced by different qualities.”4

Structuralism, as reflected in the works of serial composers has not disappeared in favour of some other characteristics, unknown so far. On the contrary, composers of the last quarter of the twentieth century and of the early twenty-first century have highlighted the value of organization and layout inherited from the past by renewing and expanding their scope. The melodies, timbers, spatial directions, and chords have benefited from the consideration of complex relationships. Moreover, a wide variety of styles in contemporary music can be seen both among the composers and in the musical works themselves.


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The strength of a structure is not confined to an implacable and inflexible syntax. On the contrary, composers, of what Arnold Whittall calls ‘Late Modernism’, implement a musical fabric of great fertility, which relies and thrives on links and inner reactions within a sound organization of great complexity. This complexity arises from different elements: a network of relationships between different musical parameters, sound materials structured by their spectral melodic and harmonic parameters, consistent time structures (rhythms, formal elements), and dynamic space structures. Thus, the structural elements belonging to certain categories or patterns of relationships as instrumental timbres and sets of pitches are both personalized, relaxed and widespread. The strictness of formalism gives way to the invention of a new complexity. As a result, the musicologist is confronted with complex situations, particularly with electronics. As Bruno Bossis wrote in 2006, “The intrinsic characteristics of the electroacoustic parts and their scoring create serious limitations. Furthermore, many sources remain inaccessible or are already lost.”5

Specific examples drawn from the music of Jonathan Harvey will illustrate more clearly some key ideas unfolded within these musical structures.

Some examples

The idea of symmetry. If the first part of the opera Passion and Resurrection6, composed in 1981 by Harvey, and entitled Passion, presents an austere and implacable music, the second part, Resurrection, reveals for the first time in the composer’s music a symmetry axis. The harmony, built on fundamental notes located in the centre, seems to levitate some sound textures as a metaphor of Christian spiritual transcendence, just as Christ’s resurrection reveals human suffering. The writing technique is put at the service of spiritual ideas.

In One Evening for two singers, instruments, electronics, and tape composed in 1993, the first movement is constructed intervallically – on the principle of symmetrical inversion around an axis. Music fleets around a central point clearly enunciated by the singers. The same feeling of floating is heard in Bhakti7, which was commissioned by Ircam in 1982, for 15 instrumentalists. The harmonic symmetry axis is not located in the lowest melodic line, but in the middle of the pitches

scale, creating a sort of suspension and allowing for the free flourishing of the generating idea of the work: devotion8.

An organization with series. The idea of series is renewed in two directions: by applying it to the orchestration and to a hierarchical order higher than that of independent heights. In Bhakti, the number of instruments playing for each section follows the Fibonacci series with slight revisions 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 15. The first digit of the series (0) corresponds to playback of the tape alone, with no participation from the musicians. The latter number (15) means the tutti.

Figure 1. Bhakti structure.

The melodic cells, interpreted during the same sections, are chosen in a series of 12 melodic fragments from the same generating melody with 12 notes.

“Stockhausen, in his famous article ‘How Time Passes’ and works such as Gruppen and Inori, applied the principles of serialism to time, relating speeds of frequency (pitches) to speeds of tempo. Pitches and tempi were related to one another, for the first time ever, in an all-pitches-are-equal serial field.”9


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Spectra and intervals. Generally, the spectral domain obeys exactly the same laws as the intervallic domain. The augmentation of the partial frequencies by equal additions sounds like tonic (no addition to the partials), dominant (3/2 of the fundamental is added to each partial), subdominant (4/3 case), and mediant (5/4). “The mathematically related interval system that has dominated world music from at least Pythagoras on has been reborn in completely new terms. Any child can hear it.”10

In Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco11, a piece for tape alone which was completed in 1980 at Ircam, spectral analysis of a bell strike recording gives a few notes that will form a melody at once heard as such and structuring all the sections.

Figure 2. Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, spectral analysis of the bell. Measures realised in 1980 for the composer. Analysis begins 0.5 seconds after the strike on the bell. Names of the notes added by the authors.

The melody is based on the main partials of the bell sound, analyzed shortly after it had been struck. The melody is presented twice during the first section of the piece, with synthetic bell sounds.

Each of the eight sections is announced by a bell strike; in fact, the initial sound recording is transposed on the note that will serve as a background for this section. Each note is borrowed from the melody presented in the first section, but in a slightly different order because the fifth and sixth sections have finally been inverted. Moreover, magnifying these combinatorial processes by extending them to the time parameter, reveals that not only the durations of the notes in the presentations of the melody are inversely

proportional to the value of their fundamental frequencies, but also those of the eight sections are inversely proportional to the pitch of their pivot notes.

Figure 3. Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, generative melody.

Thus, the bell appears to symbolically contain the whole piece, an idea reinforced by the treatment given to the voice of the child who fits in the bell spectrum. The bell made of the child’s voice is also a vocal timbre issued from the spectrum of the bell. The largest portion of the fourth section plays on this ambiguity. Moreover, the synthesized voice and bell, while remaining close to natural sounds, have allowed the composer to more easily manipulate the partials of both sounds and to move imperceptibly from one to another. Far from creating spectacular effects, sound textures reflect the unity and intimate mixing of human beings who are at once physically rooted in a limited temporality and connected to a timeless and impalpable spirituality.

Melodic chains structuring the pitches. As early as From Silence12, a piece performed at MIT in 1988, a cycle of eight primary melodies is exposed by the voice at its entrance. These melodies are then combined to produce a consistency throughout the work. Each melody is strongly characterized, but the different combinations soften the motivic structure, producing a large number of alternatives.

The same year, Ritual Melodies13 was realised wholely with synthesized instrumental models14. A chain with eight generative melodies offers the possibility of a diagonal reading. They create melodic networks and dense homorythmies, cannons, etc.

In the opera entitled Wagner Dream15, a set of clearly identifiable primary melodies has a common but not measured grid time. They are spread over four scalar spaces, which, unlike Messiaen’s modes with limited transpositions by, do not respect the rule of equivalence of octaves. Their ambitus cover over six octaves.


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Figure 4. Wagner Dream, melody chain.

In the instrumental interlude of the fifth scene, the first scalar space fulfills the first 16 measures with melodic fragments, issued from primary melodies, and changing towards their hybridization. The next 16 measures use the second space, involving melodies interwoven by juxtaposition. The following eight measures then make heard separate presentations on the third scalar space. Finally, the four following measures juxtapose melodies in the fourth space pitches.

At the 60+4 measure, during the same scene, fragments from the melodic line are closely entangled.

Figure 5. Wagner Dream, Scene 5, piano reduction.

The great melodic consistency obtained by the processes of scalar space, of chaining and combination, does not involve rigidity of the writing. On the contrary, fragments follow each other freely to provide a climate in

which the poetic flexibility would never join the chaos. Stability based on moving lines produces a feeling of unification between a lively humanity and a Buddhist inner peace. The love of Prakriti and Ananda will be transcended in self-oblivion and withdrawal from the secular world.

Beyond architecture

Apparent contradiction. At first glance, the dialectic between rigour and transcendence reveals a contradiction. It seems difficult to reconcile structuralism and contemplation. The construction of sound textures necessary to musical composition is based on a set of parameters, categories, scales and complex combinations. These firmly built structures are likely to come into conflict with the inability to put spirituality into equations. In this domain, any figuralism is difficult to imagine. Yet in the music of Jonathan Harvey, links exist between constructivist coercion and an immanence that is impossible to define scientifically.

Another dimension. Indeed, the structure should not be regarded as a brake, but must be understood as an opening to another way of thinking. A complex musical architecture is a lever to release the sounds World from simplistic connections with the real or imaginary. If harmonic progressions, melodic thematic elements, easily memorable rhythms belonging to the common basis of our culture can immediately suggest emotions to the listener, these musical figures and their associated sentiments are most often very simple, even trivial. Moreover, these direct and well-known links, rooted in the ancient madrigalism of Marenzio and Monteverdi, are difficult to use in the field of contemporary music. We have shown that music writing, at least among composers such as Jonathan Harvey, no longer refers to the old categories of figurative processes. Moreover, the transmitted emotions are often renewed.

Having discussed a few examples of original musical structures, it is necessary to define more precisely the second term of the dialectic: musical structure / suggested state of mind.

Toward detachment Structural elements have a certain materiality. They apply to notes, timbers and durations. They belong to a composer’s writing, which transmits a message or a part of his intimacy. The evocation of direct


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personal feelings was particularly developed in the romantic artistic production. The musical outer object was the translation of the inner self, i.e. the subject. This link resulted both from the intelligence and the incomprehensible. For Schubert, “Intelligence is nothing else than analyzed faith.”16

For Jonathan Harvey, musical expression exceeds this dichotomy between object and subject. The music is aimed at a ‘beyond’, both embracing this duality object / subject in a higher unity, and content in renunciation and emptiness. Some ideas drawn from the writings of the composer will better clarify this a priori contradictory idea.

Buddhist spirituality teaches this indifference to events and emotions. Voluntary removal aims to bring about an inner peace, which, far from resembling any torpid state, on the contrary, illuminates the inner vision of those who attain a certain appeasement. Emotional detachment leads to serenity. In Buddhism, the idea is primarily to live a certain kind of philosophy that is not based on intellectual thinking, as it is in the Western world: “Eastern philosophy differs from Western in its reliance on experience of states of consciousness: one experiences the philosophy rather than thinks it (though some have argued that this puts it outside the scope of philosophy proper).”17

The principle of renunciation

Immanence. One of the most important concepts in Eastern philosophies is that of immanence. What is immanent remains inside. An immanent process has two qualities: it is not separable from the principle or object on which it operates, and constitutes this principle or object without necessary connection with the outside world. This concept of immanence is different from the transcendence that requires an exceeding beyond the border between inside and outside. Transcendence opens naturally to a principle of exteriority.

Immanence and transcendence come together in the fundamental idea of an utterly stable state, of absolute peace in which all movement tends to disappear.

Stasis. When the music is too slow so that the listener cannot identify a temporal structure, the narrative disappears in a lasting moment. The sound is no longer like a discourse, but like a stable state. In this very special situation, there is a subtle dialectic

between discourse and mind. “In Madonna of Winter and Spring, the winter section comes after a long descent which sinks deeper and deeper into lifelessness, hibernation. Then winter simply stays on two adjacent notes as buried reminders of the thematic discourse stir ever more sluggishly beneath, dying down bit by bit.”18 Madonna moves clearly from discourse to spirit. However, in the end, spirit has to be mediated by sound. Spirit underlies discourse, it contains everything, all discourse. It seems almost empty of content. “It is the Silence out of which every sound is born.”19

In this case, music contains both discourse and its absence. It represents a sort of ambiguous unity, based on a coherent background structure. In Bhakti, too, the approach leading to the still center of the work is permeated with silence. In the ninth movement, three massive Gs are explored spectrally on tape.

Renunciation of desire. This state of complete stability with its own inner life, not visible from the outside, implies an absence of contrasting moments. In ancient music, particularly in a romantic expression, periods of tension and relaxation succeeded one another to create more or less violent emotions in the listener. At the opera, romantic heroes very often experience the torments of a more or less impossible love.

In Wagner Dream, if Prakriti and Ananda live a thwarted love, they do not fulfill romantic expectations about the consequences of this love. Here, there is no murder or suicide. It was a history, as presented in Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism by Eugène Burnouf, that gave Richard Wagner the idea of a Buddhist opera. The synopsis, drafted during the summer of 1855 at Seelisberg and entitled Die Sieger (the winners) shortly thereafter, will never be written as an opera. Prakriti, a young Indian girl of the lowest extraction, burns with an impossible love for Ananda, a relative of Buddha. She will not live with her lover but rather enters his religious order and makes a vow of chastity. Here, renunciation of the world is redemption. The story of Prakriti and Ananda is also a metaphor of the inequality between men and women. “The whole opera turns on the theme of desire – the very theme of Prakriti and Ananda. There exists a well-established convention for translating into music the renunciation of desire (desire being not an absence but a presence here).”20


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Dissolution

Death as a process. In Wagner Dream, the redemption of the young couple does not involve the death of one of the two protagonists. However, the whole Buddhist history is taught in the moment of Wagner’s death. The scene is thus divided into two parts: the palace of Venice where Wagner died, and ancient India where the love story between the two young people takes place. The death of the German composer allows him to attend the opera he was never able to write, and presents the dissolution and transformation of earthly love into a higher degree of wisdom.

A few years before composing Wagner Dream, Jonathan Harvey spoke about his death in his book Music and Inspiration: “One of my favourite Buddhist meditations involves imagining one’s death as a process of dissolving the outer world in light, then incorporation that light (just one’s body alone in empty space), melting the body to the size of a small Sanskrit letter in the heart region, and dissolving that letter in seven stages, while visualizing different textures and colours said to occur during the dying process, until all has gone.”21

And to suggest this process of dissolution, a simple musical texture without outer movement may be sufficient. Just as Stockhausen and Giacinto Scels were spiritual in their own way, Jonathan Harvey is openly spiritual in both thought and works, and expresses this through the single note, the inner sound.

Statement and ambiguity. This does not mean that music must remain vague and minimalist. On the contrary, some structural elements, when clearly affirmed, can only strengthen the expressive possibilities. Between the boring and the chaotic, between clear statement ideas and intriguing dissolution, the right balance must be found. In Buddhism, there are two types of reality. The first is conventional, trivial, and only affects the surface of things. The second, ultimate reality, is manifested by ambiguity, by the undecidability of the transmitted message and how it is conveyed. In his paper “Buddhism and the Undecidability of Music”, in Circles of Silence, The Cahiers Series, Jonathan Harvey claims that “Interesting music is […] undecidable music.”22

Musical language offers many opportunities for ambiguity, through simultaneity or

merging for instance. As early as the 70s, Harvey seeks to introduce a certain ambiguity in his musical language, including harmonic and electroacoustic processes. A flexibility of the writing allows the composer to never blindly follow constraints, rules, or predetermined structures.

Inner Light, a trilogy composed between 1973 and 1977 on texts in part from works by Steiner, is still highly structured by recognizable processes of writing, but is already evolving towards a much more contemplative music. In the following works, the teleological obviousness of musical gestures deeply rooted in time gives way to spiritual illumination, as seen in light, timeless melodies that do not conform to any strictly measured musical time, and in more ecstatic (non-functional) harmonies.

Emptiness

How to represent the absolute. Music cannot be regarded only as a signifying language of some sort . It is also an illusion detached from trivial reality, a 'form of emptiness’. Far from any figuralism or codes establishing connections between structures and musical expressivity of feelings, it is an art of suggestion sometimes up to an indirect representation of absence or nothingness. It is of course impossible to highlight a codification of what cannot be said. However, for the listeners, music can awaken something that is impalpable. In this case, the sounds represent nothing; they merely heighten the receptivity of the audience to a certain idea.

For example, the music by Wagner is absent from Wagner's Dream. It is never actually mentioned. However, it is present as a shadow, mainly in the Venetian scenes during which we witness Wagner’s agony from inside his mind. The orchestra seems to radiate what Wagner is feeling.

Silence. Apart from the well-known experiments by Cage, silence is not enough to give birth to music only by itself. On the contrary, it is easy to demonstrate that silence is the background to all noise, just as emptiness is the ground to all objects. Thus, a sound with a long duration, with no momentum creating a tension toward the future, creates at the beginning of From Silence (1988) an invocation to emptiness. Unlike many musical introductions, the goal is not to arouse an excitement of the senses, but to place the listener in conditions of a


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particular kind of listening, one that is subtler and recalls a state of enlightenment characteristic of Vedic philosophy.

More generally, there is another way to listen to music, to be led by the sounds. It is no longer with a matter of dealing with the way sounds sound but with the way sounds feel. Thus, “music constantly appears and dissolves; each idea becomes strong before being dispersed into a thousand different patterns of the same notes, just a few notes but always changing and dissolving. Such is the Buddhist view of Emptiness, by which everything is impermanent, changing, strong, and emotional but ultimately fluid, floating, and forever in a state of flux.”23

Transcendence

What is meant by ‘transcendence’? The term transcendence (from Latin transcendens; transcendere, to pass, to surpass) is always associated with the idea of overtaking or passing. Transcendence may connote the rise to a certain excellence and may be associated with metaphysical abstraction as well. This second definition is closer to the transcendence that involves what is beyond the experience and reason. This transcendence is what cannot be experienced. The idea is closer to Eastern philosophies than to experimental science or to the reason put forward by the Enlightenment. Unlike the philosophers of the Enlightenment, eastern philosophers claim to have had mystical experiences.

While staying very still with techniques of meditation, the mind ceases its restless activity and plunges in emptiness. Fully awake, but in a different state from the normal idea of knowledge, the mind is very still and conscious of nothing. This in-between state of mind come in touch with the source of imagination and creativity. In Japanese culture, there is a fairly close idea in the Ma. This state of thinking is particularly intense, but nothing is expressed. For Takemitsu, the Ma is “the unsounded part of this experience”

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Music and Inspiration. For Jonathan Harvey, inspiration is one of these states of emptiness, of healing. A mysterious and unconscious state of mind. An inspired thought is one that arises mysteriously, rather than being produced by a logical process. The composer has to deal with the unpredictability of unconscious inspiration.

Schoenberg is sometimes caricatured as a cool-headed, cerebral composer. Yet he wrote in his Style and Idea in 1951:

“Only one thing is certain… without inspiration neither could be accomplished. There are times when I am unable to write a single example of simple counterpoint in two voices, such as I ask sophomores to do in my classes. And, in order to write a good example of this sort, I must receive the co-operation of inspiration.”25

As Maurice Ravel wrote in the journal Revue SIM in 1912, “In art, craftsmanship in the absolute sense of the word cannot exist. In the harmonious proportions of a work, in the elegance of its unfolding, inspiration plays an almost unlimited role.”26

Beyond the complexity of the musical writing, an overwhelming unity seems to be something prior to language, a sort of preverbal statement. This idea is close to that of psycholinguistics, from Lacan to Kristeva. The concept is close to the Lankavatara Sutra and other ancient Buddhist texts as well. Preverbal existence is empty… and full of richness.

Technology vs transcendence

Timber and electronics

At first glance, one might think that the technology used in the art of music reinforces the cold and implacable nature of structuralism in musical writing. Indeed, electronics participates in the development of sound materials, organization and formal structures. In addition, the devices used by contemporary composers come from fundamental and applied scientific researches that, a priori, are far from a certain spirituality.

We will take the example of the work on timber, which is a very important dimension for contemporary music, especially significant for electronic composers who work with spectrum concepts. Spectralism has shaken up the design of music, and is symbiotically allied to electronic music. Moreover, it has renewed the idea of musical instruments and has revolutionized the perception of the sound world. With electronics, any sound can be synthesized or transformed, any instrument can be morphed into any other instrument through manipulation of the spectrum.


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The spectral manipulation is also an open window to contemplation. To directly organize inside the sounds, it is necessary to compose outside and inside of any music. Acting both on the verticality of the frequencies of the partials and on the horizontality of the sounds’ temporal morphology, the spectral work using electronics involves a principle of unity. The spectral manipulation also questioned the ambiguity between a chord or a cluster of notes and a unique sound including partials. Intervallicism can shade into and out of spectralism, and it is in this ambiguity that much of the richness in this approach lies.

Another conception of technology

Technology and pure energy. In music, the universe of notes played by voices or instruments and located on pitch and temporal scales is highly defined. In the musical styles of past centuries, the categories of timbre, pitch and duration allowed the auditor to identify musical elements relatively easily. Contemporary composers have shaken this ancient universe, solidly anchored on systems based on a stable typology. Complexity and ambiguity often sought from the last century have voluntarily destabilized this perception by turning these clearly ordered notes into a flow of energy. Through electronics, the notes are unnecessary, music becomes pure energy.

Electronic music makes available holistic and transcendent qualities.

While the march of technology would seem to reinforce the belief in a progression of factual accuracy, of cold and calculated sound texture, it creates some sounds of mysterious provenance. With spatialization, sounds seem to come from nowhere and float invisibly around the audience.

Technology and ambiguity. Several examples drawn from works by Jonathan Harvey will show how technology can be put in the service of ambiguity. In the second section of Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, a synthesized bell, processed by the Music V software, is mixed with the natural transposed bell and the voice so as to highlight beats due to the phase difference between signals. A reverb and a variable speed playback of the sound files generate a sonic texture close to a moving flow. The voice continues on an Eb4 then on a G4 contained in the bell spectrum. A high-pitched bell transposed on Bb complete the chord at

19”. The desire to merge the two sounds in the spectrum of the bell is evident here. At 23” (2'03" from the beginning of the work), an episode of gradual transformation from the natural voice (on 'Pre') to the synthesis bell allows the auditor to listen to another way of merging voice and bell: a sort of morphing sound. The sound personality changes little by little. The principle of this transformation lies in the mapping of the partials of the two sounds. The largest portion of the fourth section also plays on the ambiguity of timbers. The voice and synthesized bell, while remaining close to natural sounds, allows the composer to more easily manipulate the partials and make the border between them indistinct. The composer wrote on a draft: ‘Bell of boys, boy of bells’. The bell seems to be made of the boy’s voice and the timbral material of the voice seems to come from the bell.

In the opera Inquest of Love, the synthesizers, tapes, and live electronic treatments of the orchestra, and to a lesser extent the singers, weave in and out of the electronic and instrumental worlds, with the border between them completely blurred. “The point is to show the unity of normal reality and a spiritual world, of life and death, of physics and metaphysics. To perceive this connection is to be aware in the world; it is also the nature of art.”27

In the same way, in Wagner Dream, when electronics are performed in real time like instruments and combined with instruments, the two worlds merge in an ambiguous one of transformations28. No one listening knows exactly what is instrumental and what is electronic anymore.

The essence of the world Musical writing, like the use of electronics, reveals a mysterious in-between that derives from hybridization, ambiguity, and renunciation of all statement, until silence. This does not mean that all the works mentioned here present a writing that is outside any possible understanding. The reality is subtler, and the state of calm is vibrant rather than empty. For Jonathan Harvey, “Wagner Dream is composed between musics – music which sounds objective and music which sounds subjective.”29

Moreover, both realities, normal and spiritual, are enigmatic. And music can help to feel the incomprehensible. Music is tied to meditation.


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Music does not evoke an object but rather wisdom, emptiness, i.e. something that can exist only in the mind.

In 1989, Stockhausen wrote in Towards a Cosmic Music: “I even said that we should become the sound. If the sound moves upwards I also move upward; if it moves downwards, I go down too. If it becomes quieter, so do I. If the sound divides itself into two, I follow suit, and meet myself again when the sound reunites, etc. This means that one is completely swallowed up in the process of listening…”30 We have to be conscious, not of the music (dualistic concept), but to be conscious as the music (non-dualistic). In other words, we are the music, we live music as a spiritual experience of unity. Years before, in Style and Idea, Schoenberg, quoting Schopenhauer, said: “The composer reveals the inmost essence of the world and utters the most profound wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand.”31

References

Bossis, B. (2004). Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco de Jonathan Harvey ou le miroir de la spiritualité. Musurgia, XI(1-2), 119-144.

Bossis, B. (2006a). The Analysis of Electroacoustic Music: from sources to invariants. Organised Sound, 11(2), 101-112.

Bossis, B. (2006b). Wagner Dream ou le temps immobile d’un dernier soupir. L’étincelle, journal de la création de l’Ircam, 1, 16-17.

Bossis, B. (2007a). Parcours de l’œuvre de Jonathan Harvey, In Brahms, Base de documentation sur la musique contemporaine. Paris: Ircam-Centre Pompidou, 2007, http://brahms.ircam.fr/index.php?id=18554.

Bossis, B. (2007b). Wagner Dream ou l’opéra révélé, In Utopia Exotica, Wagner Dream. French premiere program at Nanterre, Théâtre des Amandiers, Festival Agora de l’Ircam, 13-17.

Clarke, M. (2005). Jonathan Harvey’s "Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco": An Interactive Aural Analysis. In Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music. Ed. Mary Simoni, London:Taylor and Francis.

Harvey, J. (1987). The Mirror of Ambiguity. In The Language of Electro-Acoustic Music. Ed. Simon Emmerson, London: Macmillan.

Harvey, J. (1999a). In quest of spirit, thoughts on music. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Uiversity of California Press.

Harvey, J. (1999b). Music and inspiration. London, New York: Faber and Faber.

Harvey, J. (1999c). The Metaphysics of Live Electronic Music. Contemporary Music Review, 18(3), 79-82.

Harvey, J., Carrière J.-C. (2007). Circles of silence. Coll. The Cahiers Series. Lewes (UK): Sylph editions, Center for writers & translators – The Arts Arena.

Palmer, J. (2001). Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti for Chamber Ensemble et Electronics, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press.

Ravel, M. (1912), Revue SIM, Paris, 15 March 1912, quoted in Jonathan Harvey (1999d), Music and Inspiration, London: Faber and Faber, p. 14.

Schoenberg, A. (1951), Style and Idea, New York, trans. D. Newlin, London: Williams and Norgate. Ed. Leonard Stein (1975), trans. Leo Black, London: Faber.

Schubert, F., in Otto Deutsch (1946), Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Erich Blom, London: J. M. Dent.

Stockhausen, K. (1989), Towards a Cosmic Music, ed. and trans. Tim Nevill, Longmead, Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element Books.

Stravinsky, I. (1975). An Autobiography, London: Calder & Boyars.

Takemitsu, T. (1995), Confronting Silence: Selected Writings, trans. and ed. Yoshiko kakudo and Glenn Glasow, Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press.

Whittall, A. (1999). Jonathan Harvey. London: Faber and Faber.

Whittall, A. (2007). “Death of Light/Light of Death: Jonathan Harvey and 20th century modernism”, in Le Modèle vocal, la musique, la voix, la langue, ed. Bruno Bossis, Marie-Noëlle Masson et Jean-Paul Olive, Actes du colloque Le Modèle vocal, 10-11 décembre 2004, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, p. 17-22.

1 See different studies by musicologists (Palmer, 2001; Bossis, 2006b) and the numerous and extensive writings by Jonathan Harvey himself (Harvey, 1999b).

2 Harvey (1999a), p. 1.


11

3 Stravinsky (1975), p. 53.

4 Whittall (2007), p. 17-18.

5 Bossis (2006a), p 101.

6 Church opera in twelve scenes, for soloists, chorus, brass, percussion, strings and organ with optional audience participation.

7 For 15 instrumentalists and tape (realised at Ircam with the help of Stanley Haynes, Denis Lorrain and Jean-Baptiste Barrière.

8 See Palmer (2001).

9 Harvey (1999a), p. 45.

10 Harvey (1999a), p. 44-45.

11 See detailed analysis carried out by Bruno Bossis for Ircam (Bossis, 2004) and the study by Michael Clarke (Clarke, 2005).

12 For soprano, violin, viola, percussion and live electronics.

13 For 4 tracks magnetic tape.

14 Jan Vandenheede was Jonathan Harvey’s assistant at Ircam.

15 See Bossis (2006b & 2007b) and Harvey & Carrière (2007).

16 Schubert, in Otto Deutsch (1946), p. 337.

17 Harvey (1999a), p. 48.

18 Harvey (1999a), p. 77.

19 Harvey (1999a), p. 37.

20 Harvey & Carrière (2007), p. 18.

21 Harvey (1999b), p. 165.



24 Takemitsu (1995), p. 52.

25 Schoenberg (1951), p. 166.

26 Ravel, quoted by Harvey (1999), p. 14.

27 Harvey (1999a), p. 63-64.

28 On the topic of the ‘metaphysics of live electronics’, see Harvey (1999c).


30 Stockhausen (1989), p. 67.

31 Schoenberg (1951), trans. (1975), p. 142.

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