Bhakti: a masterpiece of the English composer (born in 1939), for fourteen instruments and quadraphonic tape, at the Maastricht festival of sacred music.

In a certain way, Jonathan Harvey remains our compass point. Nothing in him has grown old. His baroque electronicse, without complex, inspired from the best of Stockhausen; his rhythmic exuberance but without brutality; his elastic, smooth and virtuous harmony, playing with all the ambiguities between chord and sound colour... everything breathes the freshness of inspiration, the rich musical culture, the sensual and demanding ear in quest of an ecstatic experience. It's that Harvey never wanted to separate the spiritual experience from a reflection on writing techniques. Music has the power to produce ambiguity that perforates and dissolves the binary categories: if indeed there is something spiritual in art, it is there, it is only there, in these shifting spaces, these harmonies without sharp contour, these infinite melodies, these superimposed speeds. Depressive religiosity is certainly not his concern, and Harvey willingly repeats the reply of this Stockhausen to a journalist who asked him: "What is spiritual music?" - "Just good music".

Written in 1982, Bhakti (sanskrit word: devotion, love, love of God) puts a simple and finally rarely exploited idea into operation: the quadraphonic band diffuses a kind of instrumental playback which completes the instrumental lines, in a perfect illusion. But without warning, it tips over into the electronic space, projects its chords into the space, reverses the brass attacks, surrealises the sound of the percussions... At any moment, the music can change scale and the ear finds itself overwhelmed.