British composer Jonathan Harvey dies at 73

It was there, he added, that he became "hooked on the beauty and strangeness of religion," leading to his eventual embrace of Buddhism.

As an aspiring composer, he was encouraged by Benjamin Britten but Harvey found a bigger inspiration in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

In 1966, Harvey traveled to Germany to meet Stockhausen and was deeply impressed by what he heard.

"This was like another planet. Music was never like this that I had heard before," he said in an interview with English music journalist Bob Shingleton in 2010. "There was a kind of release from conventional time."

Harvey won a fellowship in 1969 to study at Princeton, where he worked with Milton Babbitt. He was professor of music at Sussex University between 1977 and 1993, and held a similar post at Stanford University between 1995 and 2000.

In 2009, Harvey became the first British composer to win the Charles Cros Grand Prix du Président de la République for lifetime achievement, an honor previously bestowed on Boulez, French composer Olivier Messiaen and the American Elliott Carter.

He is survived by his wife and their son and daughter. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.