Jonathan Harvey, one of Britain’s foremost contemporary composers, is honorary professor of composition at the University of Sussex and composer-in-residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He works on the cutting edge of electronic music and also writes music that is cherished and widely sung by choirs. His compositions evoke both Western and Eastern spirituality and are celebrated for their originality and luminous beauty. The association of Dr. Harvey’s music with ritual (and the many works intended for liturgical use rather than concert performance) has been traced to his early days as a chorister at St. Michael’s College in Tenbury Wells, where his duties included singing two services every day in chapel and where he began piano, organ, and cello lessons. Winning a scholarship to Repton School, he met Benjamin Britten, the English composer. After he went up to Cambridge, where he read music at St. John’s College, it was Britten who suggested he study composition with Erwin Stein, an émigré student of Schonberg’s then living in London. After Stein’s death, he studied composition and analysis with another Viennese musician and critic, Hans Keller, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in music at Glasgow University in 1964. He then joined the music faculty of the University of Southampton as a lecturer. In 1966, Dr. Harvey went to Darmstadt, the German city renowned for its international summer courses in new music, where he was greatly influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer who became the subject of his first book, The Music of Stockhausen (1966). Two major compositions written in 1969, Ludus Amoris, a cantata for choir and orchestra based on the mystical writings of the Spanish Carmelites, and Four Images after Yeats for piano, marked a major turning point in his work, at once serial in technique and suggestive of spiritual questing. He went to Princeton University as a Harkness Fellow to study serialism with the American composer Milton Babbitt in 1969. His compositions in the 1970s, notably two orchestral works, Persephone Dream (1972), a symphonic poem, and Inner Light 3 (1975), a cycle commissioned by the BBC, as well as I Love the Lord (1976), an anthem for a cappella chorus, confirmed his preoccupation with a search for transcendence that draws on Christian and Buddhist texts, Hindu thought, and Sufi as well as English poetry. Dr. Harvey was named professor of music at the Sussex in 1977, and in the early 1980s, at the invitation of Pierre Boulez, he worked at the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, an association that produced eight commissions, including the celebrated tape piece Mortuos plango, vivos voco (1980) and another work for chamber ensemble and electronics, Bhakti (1982), as well as Ritual Melodies (1989-90) for computer-manipulated sounds, Advaya (1994) for cello and electronics, and Speakings (2008) for orchestra. He retired from full-time teaching at Sussex in 1993, and in 1995 he was appointed professor of music at Stanford University, a post he held for five years. He was subsequently a visiting professor of music at Imperial College, London, and accepted his BBC position in 2005. An honorary fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and a member of the Academia Europaea, he is the recipient of the Britten Award for composition and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Southampton, Bristol, Sussex, and Huddersfield. Dr. Harvey is the author of a score of essays for academic journals or volumes of collected works and of two other books, both published in 1999, in addition to his work on Stockhausen, Music and Inspiration (an updating of his Ph.D. thesis on composers’ inspiration edited by Michael Downes) and In Quest of Spirit: The Musical Thought of Jonathan Harvey, which was published by the University of California Press. His latest musical compositions include his third opera, Wagner Dream (2007), based on Richard Wagner’s consuming interest in Buddhist thought. Among forthcoming works are two commissioned for the Rundfunkchor and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Messages and Eine Vision in Musik for Hans Küng’s Global Ethic Foundation.