ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the subject of case study: Jonathan Harvey's The Riot for flute, bass clarinet and piano. It was commissioned for Het Trio of Amsterdam a noted ensemble which not unnaturally specialises in the performance of new music, by the 1994 Colston Symposium of Bristol University which was devoted to 'The Intention, Reception and Understanding of Musical Composition'. The new work was not only to be heard for the first time at a concert given during the symposium but was to be the subject of a formal discussion scheduled within its proceedings. Harvey called his piece The Riot, a title which would arouse quite different expectations if it were applied to a choral work or an orchestral symphonic poem. In those circumstances it would surely suggest some sort of revolution or at least the kind of lively 'demonstration' that the same composer conjured up in his Ludus Amoris some twenty-five years earlier.
