JONATHAN HARVEY’S STRING TRIO: THE RUSTIC AND THE SACRED

Laura Emmery

doi:10.5937/newso2260149E

Laura Emmery Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University, Department of Music

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5937/newso2260149E

Keywords: Jonathan Harvey, String Trio, spectralism, music and spiritualisms, twentieth-century music

Abstract

In his Program Note for the String Trio (2004), Jonathan Harvey noted that this work features “two main (and contrasting) types of music––the rustic and the sacred.” Harvey defines his “rustic” style as folkloristic, while the “sacred” is based on his liturgical drama, Passion and Resurrection. In this article, I examine Harvey’s use of both conventional and experimental techniques and distinct gestures to examine the two contrasting worlds of the worldly and the ethereal, which ultimately fuse through Harvey’s musical and spiritual journey in this work.

Author Biography

Laura Emmery, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University, Department of Music

Laura Emmery, PhD, is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Emory University. Her primary areas of research are post-1945 music analysis and Cold War music studies. Emmery is the author of a monograph, Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets: A Study in Sketches (Routledge, 2020) and a critical edition, Elliott Carter Speaks: Unpublished Lectures (University of Illinois Press, 2022). Her works appears in journals, including The Musical Quarterly, Twentieth-Century Music, Music Theory Online, and Contemporary Music Review.