Interview with Jonathan Harvey

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

16–17

text excerpt

After my son Dominic went to be a chorister at Winchester, my wife Rosa and I used to go there very regularly and immerse ourselves in that wonderful building, often in the darkness of a winter’s evening, and hear one of the great choirs (a boys’ choir with lay clerks) of England, conducted by Martin Neary, who is a fantastic musician.  And also Martin would encourage me to write for the choir […] I enjoyed writing for that mysterious acoustic where everything is blended over about two or three seconds, so any changes of chord run into each other; and it was fascinating to explore the extraordinary Romanesque and Gothic spaces with these sounds and hear them hit the surfaces and bounce back as if the whole place is coming alive.  When one was listening to simple chanting of prayers, perhaps on one or two notes, one would hear very strongly a halo of harmonics ringing out.  Some harmonics were particularly resonant in the higher region and this seemed to give something beyond the merely individual voice, as if the building itself were singing, or contributing.

excerpt from 'Interview with Jonathan Harvey' pp. 16–17 (186 words)

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1546611235196