Nature, the Spiritual, and New Technologies in Jonathan Harvey’s Music

In this essay I focus on the relation of Jonathan Harvey’s music with nature. A composer with a strong spiritual orientation all along his life, Harvey also showed a deep interest in new technologies, which he exploited from his early production until later works, involving both electronics and live electronics. Nature and ambiguity are at the core of his poetics, together with the ideas of moving sound, and of silence conceived as a continuum between ambient sound and the musical world, taking on strong “transcendental” implications; nature is always seen through the lens of the spiritual, a view becoming overtly Buddhist in Harvey’s mature years. In order to elucidate these aspects, I refer to works including electronics composed from the 1980s onward. In particular, I delve more deeply into One Evening (1994), for voices, instruments and electronics, where Buddhist vision, technological experimentation and the idea of nature as cosmic unity find a complex yet perfect balance.