Jonathan Harvey's Electric Dreams

Jonathan Harvey has fused electronics with orchestras more sensually, and spiritually, than any other British composer. But he has a challenge to his fellow musicians: why doesn't more contemporary music take advantage of the new worlds of sound that electronics offer?

As you'll read and hear if you follow the links in my interview with Jonathan Harvey, you'll discover how he fuses electronics with acoustic instruments more seamlessly and sensuously than pretty well any other composer around. As I say in the piece, he uses electronics not to find new realms of abstraction, but to realise the other realms, the visions of the beyond he wants to conjure. But when I spoke to him, as serene and tranquil as he was, he had strong words for his fellow composers. The surprise, he says, is that "so few composers have used electronics. They are still hardly there in orchestral culture" - three decades after Harvey first used computers to amplify the sonic resources of acoustic instruments. "For me, it's a development of colour, of possibility," Harvey says.

Previous centuries saw the progressive refinement of string instruments, the increasing accuracy and power of wind and brass instruments, with chromatic horns and chromatic trumpets, and then, in the last years of the 20th and 21st centuries - nothing. Well, not in terms of the institutions of the orchestra. It's no longer the case that the technology is expensive or unwieldy - and after all, all of the halls that our orchestras play in regularly put on gigs that use technology and amplification - it's just that outside new music ensembles such as the London Sinfonietta, or adventurous groups like the Aurora Orchestra, orchestral culture has remained largely untouched by the possibilities that today's exponentially enhanced electronics have to offer.

Who's to blame? The orchestras for their creative laziness or the composers for not taking advantage of the sonic possibilities of today's world? Harvey's words are a challenge to both. And for proof of what's possible, listen to the music you'll hear at the Barbican in London this weekend in the BBC's Total Immersion in Harvey's music, or on Radio 3.