It has been over 200 years since Haydn rep­re­sented chaos in his ora­to­rio Die Schöp­fung via dynam­ics, orches­tra­tion and har­monic motion; com­mon­place ele­ments dur­ing the Clas­si­cal era. It’s now been 100 years since the begin­nings of Mod­ernism in music, and the par­al­lel devel­op­ment of a new vir­tu­os­ity in instru­men­tal play­ing, two lines that are still length­en­ing. With new ideas and new skills come new ways of mak­ing sound, and pre­sent­ing ideas.

British com­poser Jonathan Har­vey, the sub­ject of Thurs­day night’s Com­poser Por­trait at Miller The­atre, expresses ideas in sound in a way that is both old-fashioned and mod­ern, a state­ment easy to accept if your view of Mod­ernism is that its time has passed. It’s a cul­tural idea that, once thought, remains with us, just as the coun­ter­point of the Baroque and the emo­tional truth of Roman­ti­cism are avail­able to all composers.

Har­vey is a pro­po­nent of Mod­ernism freed from strict for­mal and tonal val­ues. His struc­tures are rig­or­ous but organic and serve what is clearly a fer­vent expres­sive idea from moment to moment, sec­tion to sec­tion. His music is var­i­ously tonal, dis­so­nant, micro­tonal and entirely involved with tim­bre. His sound gives us an idea of his think­ing, but its pri­mary focus is on what he’s feeling.

Whether we feel the same thing or not depends on our sym­pa­thies with his peri­patetic spir­i­tu­al­ity. The two works on the pro­gram, per­formed by Ensem­ble Sig­nal and con­duc­tor Bradley Lub­man, explored Chris­t­ian and Hindu mys­ti­cism, seem­ingly dis­parate ideas that had pre­vi­ously been syn­the­sized by Olivier Mes­si­aen, whose influ­ence is clear on Har­vey, just as they had been in more extreme fash­ion by Giac­into Sclesi, who also appears in moments in Harvey’s work.

Death of Light/Light of Death, com­pleted in 1998, is directly inspired by Math­ias Grünewald’s Isen­heim Altar­piece, and it’s five move­ments fol­low fig­ures in the art­work: “Jesus Cru­ci­fied,” “Mary Mag­da­lene,” “Mary, Mother of Jesus,” “John the Apos­tle” and “John The Bap­tist” It’s scored for oboe dou­bling Eng­lish horn, harp, vio­lin, viola and cello, and despite the cham­ber size is suf­fi­ciently com­plex to require a con­duc­tor. It’s ascetic, obses­sive, and demands per­sonal sym­pa­thy. Harvey’s lan­guage and pur­pose is clear, from the abrad­ing strings and oboe multi-phonics and slides in the first move­ment, the grace­ful micro­tonal­ity of the harp in the sec­ond, and the for­mal rep­e­ti­tion in the finale that brings a sense of res­o­lu­tion. The piece is a clear par­al­lel to Hadyn’s Seven Last Words oF Jesus Christ, but directly emo­tional, the sounds stand­ing in for Harvey’s feel­ings. But where Haydn can be admired in the abstract, for how the form and style work together, Har­vey is shar­ing an expe­ri­ence the lis­tener may or may not be sym­pa­thetic to, or, even in as fine a per­for­mance as the musi­cians gave, may not fully con­vey the weight and power of the sub­ject, the sense of mys­tery, as Bruck­ner does in his expan­sive expres­sions of the mys­tery of his faith. Harvey’s inten­sity is hermetic.

The long Bhakti, from 1982, is more extro­verted but still intensely per­sonal, with Harvey’s own notes indi­cat­ing a con­nec­tion to the Rig Veda and thoughts of tran­scen­dence. This is one of the ear­li­est works spawned from IRCAM in Paris, and is writ­ten for a cham­ber orches­tra and accom­pa­ny­ing elec­tronic sounds. It’s very much of its time, with bright and brit­tle FM syn­the­sis scat­tered through­out the audio, a 12-tone (but not atonal) struc­ture, and a sec­tion that is an explicit homage to Mes­si­aen. It’s about an hour long, and is full of col­ors, tex­tures and rhythms, and the acoustic and elec­tronic music is tightly and expres­sively inte­grated, with the musi­cians play­ing off the tape to cre­ate psy­choa­coustic effects. But like the first piece, the response depends on an affin­ity with Harvey’s mys­ti­cism. He puts groups of instru­ments in oppo­si­tion, stretch­ing away from each other around the same pitch, as Scelsi does, but where Scelsi pushes at it until he’s cracked his way into a new dimen­sion, Har­vey is sat­is­fied with cre­at­ing the sound, then mov­ing on to the next idea. The piece is both rest­less and sta­tic, and where Death of Light doesn’t have enough mate­r­ial to fill its dimen­sions, Bhakti is over­flow­ing with ideas, but doesn’t have a clear and orga­nized place to put them all. The pro­gram notes, adapted by Paul Grif­fith from Harvey’s own writ­ing, offered infor­ma­tion with­out illumination.