Interview with Jonathan Harvey

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

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text excerpt

My father [Gerald] was a businessman but an amateur musician.  He always regretted that, I think, and would have liked to have been a professional, but the circumstances of his family life would not permit it.  […]  None the less, he would compose in a constant stream throughout most of his life until near the end, and the pieces he wrote were rather short-scale, miniature pieces, often for piano, sometimes for the family or for the circle of musical friends, nearly all amateurs, who would come to visit us for musical evenings.  I played the cello, my brother played the violin and had a beautiful voice, and a few friends would come to join us and we would make quartets and piano quintets and trios and so on.

My father wrote in a kind of English mystical pastoral style, incorporating the chromaticism, the subtlety, the darkly shifting elements of continental chromaticism.  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.  […]

Every evening when he came home from work, he would play us some of these pieces from around the turn of the century, and he would compose and play some of his own pieces.  Sometimes I would follow him, standing by the side of the piano, looking at the music, watching his fingers, even I think from a very early age.

excerpt from 'Interview with Jonathan Harvey' pp. 1–2 (247 words)

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