Program Note
Born in Sutton Coldfield, England, Harvey’s interest in music started early on, and was stimulated by his businessman father, who had surprisingly unorthodox tastes. Harvey became a chorister at St Michael's college in Tenbury, Worcestershire, and it was here, during a concluding organ voluntary after evensong, that he had a life-changing experience.
“Usually these voluntaries were real milk-and-water affairs,” he recalled, “but one day the organist did something really wild, which was thrilling. I knew in that moment that I wanted to be a composer, and do something similar.” The years at Tenbury also gave him an enduring taste for unaccompanied choral music, shown in the modest liturgical works for Anglican liturgy that sit in his work-catalogue alongside big complex works for orchestra and electronics.
Harvey went on to study music at St John’s College, Cambridge, and sent some of his early compositions to Benjamin Britten. On Britten's advice he went on to study privately with two doughty defenders of the European tradition, Erwin Stein and Hans Keller. After imbibing Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-note system of composing, Harvey came under the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen's more heady and liberating concept of musical unity in the 1970s. Stockhausen's message—that melody, rhythm, harmony and tone color were all aspects of vibration—held enormous appeal for him. The idea that a musical discourse could be teased from a sound with complex timbres led Harvey to investigate electronic and digital sound synthesis in a much more thoroughgoing way than any of his contemporaries. He was one of the first composers to make use of the facilities on offer at the Paris-based musical research institute, IRCAM, in the late 70s. Harvey's mature works include three operas, the most striking of which is undoubtedly the last, Wagner Dream (2006), premiered by the Netherlands Opera. It explores Richard Wagner's interest in Buddhism and takes place in the imagined final moments of Wagner's life, in which he has a vision of a Buddhist opera, which he would never compose. As Harvey put it in a lecture in 1992: "It's for music to articulate the true nature of man in his blissful, enlightened form. No less than that should be demanded. It's a way of charm and simplicity which no verbal concepts, least of all mine, can ever encapsulate.
—Ivan Hewett
The composer offers the following note for Chu:
Chu is an homage to the courageous and peaceful spirit of those Tibetan people who are suffering the oppression of their country and rape of their culture, and a memorial to the two million who died. Part of the traditional Praise in Twenty-one Homages to Tara is set, and as coda, a brief poem by Soname Yangchen, the singer who escaped from Tibet in a hazardous journey at night-time over the mountains.The soprano sings in Tibetan: a clarinet and cello are extended into the bass region by firstly a contrabass clarinet and secondly the detuned lower strings of the cello, tuned to low Gs. The rough low sounds correspond to the 'wrathful' aspect of this beloved and beautiful figure of Tara, in which she stamps in her dance on the destructive forces of the universe, as protector of her people.Soname Yangchen's poem take the image of a bird (chu) to articulate an aspiration towards freedom.I am extremely grateful to her for permission to use her text and for help with Tibetan pronunciation.