The English composer Jonathan Harvey has died, aged seventy-three. Harvey, born near Birmingham in 1939, had suffered from a motor-neurone disease.

Andrew Porter, writing in the Times Literary Supplement once said, that Harvey’s music was ‘ecstatic, inspired, filled now with contemplative rapture, then suddenly with exuberant, joyful dance, and always beautiful’.

Harvey was a chorister at St Michael’s College, Tenbury, and later studied at St John’s College, Cambridge and in Glasgow. He studied privately with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller and was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton in 1969/1970.

Harvey has written widely for orchestra, chamber groups, solo instruments and unaccompanied choir — as well as electronic music (he was invited to IRCAM in Paris by Pierre Boulez in the early 1980s and often returned to the institute). Harvey’s work also includes his cantata for the BBC Proms Millennium, Mothers Shall Not Cry, and the operas Passion and Resurrection (described as a church opera), Inquest of Love and Wagner Dream.

Major works in recent years include Messages, for the Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Berlin Philharmoniker, and both Body Mandala and Speakings, for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Harvey also wrote a number of books, including one on Karlheinz Stockhausen, and books about his own work. There are three books written about Harvey by others, including Michael Downes’s Jonathan Harvey: Song Offerings and White as Jasmine, published in 2009.

In a 2010 article about spirituality in music (Harvey was influenced in particular by Buddhist thinking), Harvey wrote:

…most of my works, are attempts to (dis)locate the spirituality of music, which, as Marcel Corbussen has written, ‘means to leave places, infinitely exploring (inter)territories, always dynamic, always on the move. Therefore spirituality has to be found between places, in the ‘in between’. Like the nomad.

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