Notes on the realization ofBhakti

Abstract

In 1980 at the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Jonathan Harvey completed a short work for eight-channel tape, entitled Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, with the assistance of Stanley Haynes and Xavier Rodet (Harvey 1981). In this piece, concr&te sounds of a boy's voice and a bell were manipulated by Music V and CHANT, and mixed with similar computersynthesized sounds. In 1982, Harvey received another commission to return to IRCAM and expand those techniques into a larger work: Bhakti-for 15 instruments of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and quadraphonic tape, lasting some 55 min, this time with the assistance of Denis Lorrain, Stanley Haynes, and JeanBaptiste Barriere. Having only two months in which to realize the tape, Jonathan Harvey had in substance composed the piece before arriving at IRCAM. Therefore he did not set out to pursue a lengthy research program but asked himself in what way a could have the most profound relationship with instruments. His answer seemed surprisingly simple. Because a playing back and instruments playing are so fundamentally different from an aesthetic, social, and spiritual point of view, this difference should be contradicted by having the two as similar as possible in terms of sound and structure: the same sounds and structures from an opposing aesthetic, social, and spiritual sphere. For the composer some of the best moments of Bhakti are when the instruments double the tape, playing almost exactly the same sounds. This simplicity may seem at first sight like a lack of adventurousness or a failure to exploit the vast resources of synthesized sound. But the established relationships were found to be strong and rich, as long as they were kept near the borderline of recognizable instrumental sounds. In the part, the innumerable little sonic departures from what it is actually possible for a instrument to play, all stand out because of the clarity of the base from which they are derived and because the actual moment when they become recognizably tape rather than live is constantly blurred. The cultural charge of a recognizable instrument timbre (stretching back to Bach and beyond) defines identity far more richly than the contrasts-however great-within an unknown world of new electronic sounds. Inevitably, there is a struggle to avoid one-dimensionality in which all the sounds belong, in a rather flat way, to one electronicsounding family. (The composer has composed such works too.)