Born in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, in 1939, Jonathan Harvey was a chorister at St. Michael's College in Tenbury (1948-52), a pupil at Repton (1952-57), and then a major music scholar at St. John's College, Cambridge. He earned doctorates from the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and also studied privately (on the advice of Benjamin Britten) with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller, thus gaining an early acquaintance with the school of Schoenberg. In the 1960s, he composed freely and was influenced variously. Whilst a Harkness Fellow at Princeton (1969-70), he was brought into contact, albeit briefly, with Milton Babbit, whose influence was one of great significance to Harvey's later development. He emerged from his Princeton years seemingly surer of his musical aims with regard to form and harmony, an immediate result of his work in Schenkerian analysis.

An invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s resulted in four commissions from them to date, including the widely-praised tape piece, Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco, as well as Bhakti, for instrumental ensemble and tape, Ritual Melodies, for computer-manipulated sounds, and Advaya, for cello and live and pre-recorded sounds. Harvey has also composed for most other genres: large orchestra, (Madonna of Winter and Spring), chamber, (three: String Quartets, Song Offerings, Lotuses, and Scena), as well as works for solo instruments. He has produced a large and varied output of choral works, many suited to church performance; the biggest being Passion and Resurrection (1981), which was the subject of a BBC television film and was subsequently toured on the Contemporary Music Network under Martin Neary in March 1993.

Now in his mid 50s, Harvey attracts commissions from a host of international organizations. His works are regularly performed at all the major international contemporary music festivals, and he has a reputation of being one of the most skilled and imaginative composers working in electronic music. He has honorary doctorates from the Universities of Southampton and Bristol, is a Member of Academia Europaea, and in 1993, he was awarded the prestigious Britten Award for composition. In 1994, he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Music, spent three months at the University of California at Berkeley as Visiting Bloch Professor, and accepted a permanent position as Professor of Composition at Stanford University. In February 1996, Harvey began a new three-year relationship with the chamber orchestra Sinfonia 21, as their Composer in Association.

Harvey's opera, Inquest of Love, was commissioned by English National Opera and premiered at the Coliseum in June 1993. It also staged at Theatre de la Monnaie, Brussels, in January of 1994. Much admired for its sophisticated and effective use of electronic sounds, which are blended with a conventional orchestra, it was acclaimed as the outstanding achievement among recent ENO opera commissions. Works in progress include a percussion concerto for Evelyn Glennie for performance at the 1997 BBC Promenade Concerts.