Jonathan Harvey

The Riot

The Riot is a work in which virtuoso exhilaration is predominant. The game is to throw around themes which retain their identity sufficiently to bounce off each other sharply, even when combined polyphonically or mixed up together in new configurations. Each theme belongs to a distinctive harmonic field characterised by about two intervals, for example the first is based on fourths and whole tones creating also minor sevenths and, as a further development, linear unfoldings in circles of fourths (or fifths). From time to time energy runs out and a mechanical repetition of an element takes over, dying away like an electronic ‘delay’. Such a process in extended form provides the ending. The work was written for HET TRIO and commissioned by Bristol University Music Department, with funds provided in part by South West Arts, especially for the Colston Symposium 1994. Jonathan Harvey