Le 28 juin 2017
de 12h00 à 12h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3204
Séance - Contemporary Musical Horizons (I)
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Candida Felici
The paper aims to analyse the way in which Jonathan Harvey’s compositional language and the use of new technologies interact with extra-musical motivations, essentially tied with a search for transcendence. The analysis will focus on some of Harvey’s instrumental works with or without electronics (Run Before Lightning, Tombeau de Messiaen, Quartet no. 4, Flight Elegy), in order to answer the question: can the interaction of musical structures with spiritual, religious or oneiric implications realize a sort of narrative in music? In his mature works Harvey alternates moments of ecstatic meditation with moments of high vitality, where the contrasting elements and musical objects eventually melt and finally loose their individuality. The concept of ambiguity is central to Harvey’s aesthetics: ambiguity can be found in the difficulty to recognize the sound origin, in timbre transformation, in the blurring of borders between harmony and spectrum, sound and noise, electronically conceived sound and instrumental sound. In Harvey’s thought, musical ambiguity is a way to represent Buddhist emptiness and a way to attain a pure land (as Buddhist term).
