Hermione Harvestman (1930 -2012)

 

This Soundcloud page (click above image) is devoted to the work of outsider minimalist / experimental electronic composer & improviser Hermione Harvestman (1930 - 2012).  As prolific as she was (wilfully) obscure, her music resides in its meticulously archived abundance, unheard by all but a few close friends and members of the congregation of a small Roman Catholic church in rural Durham where she played the organ between 1967 and 1995, regularly featuring one of her sacred 'Concrete Psalm Tones' in lieu of organ music during Holy Communion or The Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday.  She also composed music for several amatuer theatrical productions - the best of which being the starkly evocative & exquisite medieval miniatures she produced for 'The Durham Pilgrims' in 1972 which takes its cue from Chaucer.  A devout Roman Catholic all of her life (up until her illness and death), Hermione nevertheless incorporated elements of Folklore, Medievalism, Paganism, Astrology, Earth Mysteries and Cosmology into her world view, viewing her compositions in terms of personal devotions to the various aspects of her life, the vast majority of which were never meant for public consumption.  In her own words: 

'It may sound conceited, but no other music appeals to me as much as the music I make on my own. Therefore I do not seek an audience for it, nor do I do it purely for pleasure.  Music is a necessity I face on a daily basis - I think of it mostly as a curse - it haunts my dreams, and insists on being made corporeal.  The only way I can get it out, is to record it.  Recording is part of the musical process.  Recording is an exorcism.  Recording is the containment of demons so I might keep them like imps in jars and revisit them, at a distance, once the trauma of their creation has passed.

'It would, I feel, be supremely arrogant to expect anyone else to listen to my music when I have so effectively rejected the music of others.  I have listened to medieval music, folk music, classical music, popular music. experimental music - but only in passing, as part of the general ambience of the culture in which I find myself.  I have studied music in theory and practise and upon graduation I rejected it wholesale as being of no interest or relevance to me whatsoever, and yet its influence and inspiration persists in my life to such an extent I can't help but respond to it.  In my life I have haunted folk clubs and libraries of both Folk Song and the sacred and secular music of the middle ages, always seeking the pure heart of the thing, as might the Theologian, digging as deep as one can to touch the very bedrock of this thing we call music.'

A classically trained concert pianist from the age of four, she abandoned the piano at 26, when, in 1956, she was introduced to the Clavivox - an early sequencer-cum-synthesiser keyboard invented by Raymond Scott.

'This was my epiphany - it one stroke it solved all my problems with regard to Western Tonality.  Increasingly, I was drawn to monophonic music and modality, but I was ill prepared to join the elite who called themselves Folk Musicians or Early Musicians; bourgeois sub-sects striving for an authenticity so enamoured of a certain mindset which I'd never been able to relate to.  Neither was I too enamoured of Atonal Experimentalism.  The music I heard in my heard was far richer than that, somehow - at least it was to me.  I dreamed of hurdy-gurdies - of drones and monophonic keyboards playing parallel 3rds, 4ths and 5ths.  In reality, hurdy-gurdies sounded ghastly (with significant exception).  On hearing the Clavivox I heard the music that dreamed of astrological continuities between ancient music and future possibilities; it touched the essence of what music was at its most primal - that of both the planets of the Pyramids; that of the stars and Stonehenge.'

In her home (a remote small-holding in rural County Durham which she shared with several dogs, cats, pigs, geese and goats) she set up an ever evolving studio which would be regularly upgraded as new technologies came along.  In the last decade of her life, much of her time was devoted to the transfer of analogue tape-stock to the digital mediums she embraced wholeheartedly.

'I feel like Alfred Wainwright - we are both solitary ramblers - he made his books so he could look at them when he was no longer physically capable of rambling his beloved Lakeland Fells.  In a similar way I have made my music as the accompaniment of my dotage - my declining years when I'm no longer inclined to compose, but to listen - as I do - endlessly - surrounding myself with my compositions in an atmosphere of smiling pride.  Did I really do that?  My goodness - the gift becomes all the more precious as I have gifted it to myself.  So transferring all these old tapes and cassettes and copying them onto CD-R, MP3 and i-Pod has become a revelation - but only unto myself and maybe one or two others, but no more.'

Two things about Hermione's music are worth pointing out here.  The first is that, although immersed into various new technologies (in which she viewed redundancy with wry delight), she completely eschewed the idea of multi-tracking.  The second thing is that all of her music is completely improvised.

The music starts with silence, it comes from nothing, I might begin by establishing a drone, or an ostinato, for this I employ a sequencer, tape loops together with various echo, delay and reverb units to effect the landscapes of a particular piece.  The process is as simple and intuitive as it is completely organic.  In this intuitive landscape melody is introduced on the synthesiser.  I might reference melodies from medieval music and folk song, but always intuitively.  I work with monophonic modes, mostly using only the white notes, often using parallel 4ths and 5ths by way of an entirely improvised organum.  I have tried multi-tracking but it lacks the immediate energy for me.  I think of it as Temporal Spontaneity where all things exist in their own space and time.  It's a sort of purity, a way of simplifying music process which to me can sound overly prescriptive, over-wrought and quite terrifyingly bland.  The bland does terrify me - from the machined landscapes of our once beautiful countryside to the culture of reductive normalcy which has reduced us to a nation of cretins.
        

I first met Hermione in 2003 following the minor stroke that landed her in the nursing home where by chance I was doing a short residency in my guise as Storyteller.  It was here, over the space of five days, she slowly opened up to me, letting me in on the secrets of her hermetic world view and the music that was so much a part of that.  I assisted her with the daunting task of digitising her analogue archive for easier access, but she resisted by suggestions of seeking a wider audience for her work for several years until after a second, more serious stroke after which she agreed to permit some of her music to be made available following her death.  To this end she selected 12 albums worth of material edited from her wider archive, from which she edited two hours to be uploaded onto Soundcloud the year after her funeral.

Hermione Harvestman passed away on the last day of May 2012; her funeral was held on the 7th of June.  This page, and its accompanying blog, was begun exactly a year later.  There are no photographs of the reclusive Hermione, though she was a keen photographer, surrounding herself with indistinct images of trees, landscapes, rivers and medieval carvings along with countless postcards gathered from museums and galleries over the years, all of which she used as a visual inspiration for her music.  All the images here are taken from this visual archives.

I hope you find something in this music which, I feel, is as familiar as it is utterly strange; the work of an eccentric, for sure, but such idiosyncrasy is worthy of our enduring attention and, indeed, affection.

Sedayne. June 2013.