Lately I have been running into a few interesting items in the press about music. Today, for example, there is a reprint of a 1953 review of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony when the BBC was bold enough to pay for enough rehearsals and musicians to present it--ten percussionists! Here is the link. And an excerpt:
when after five endless movements heard in the studio, I was told, innocently unprepared as I was, that there were another five to come, I began to realise to the full what the evening’s ordeal meant. Being well seasoned to that sort of thing, I could bear the harsh sounds that must have made many listeners in their homes turn off their sets precipitately; but the “beautiful” passages of a lushness never experienced before outside a cinema during the organ interlude, were not easily endurable.
Heh! What is really interesting is not the complaint about the harsh sounds, but about the lush ones! Boulez famously criticised Messiaen for writing beautiful passages because they were outside the ideology of what was permitted in "serious" music post-WWII. Ironically, I suspect that we will be listening to Messiaen long after we have forgotten just who Pierre Boulez was. Here, have a listen for yourself:
Yes, it is a love song in ten movements for enormous orchestra with a lot of unusual instruments, but it is hard to think of a more aesthetically interesting and challenging 20th century work for orchestra. There are more unpleasant works, certainly, and more dull ones, but none quite as bold as this.
Much of what is written these days by John Luther Adams, or Esa-Pekka Salonen or Thomas Adès is pretty weak tea compared to this piece by Messiaen.
But if you want to really compare past to present--the Turangalîla Symphony dates from 1949--you should watch any of the old William F. Buckley jr. Firing Line episodes, like this interview with Tom Wolfe from 1970 when "Radical Chic" had just been published describing a notorious party thrown by Leonard Bernstein to support the Black Panthers:
Never mind the subject matter, what is interesting is the level of discourse. Would anyone be introduced in those measured periods on television today? Believe me, if this is what was on tv now, I would never have cut my cable! Discussion these days seems more to resemble the howling of dogs and barking of hyenas.
One of the earliest posts on this blog, way back in October, 2011, talked about an art installation that used plants to generate sounds. The post was The Music of Plants and I took the opportunity to make a number of aesthetic points. An anonymous commentator added an excellent argument:
Pick a random Beethoven piano sonata. Then pick another random Beethoven sonata different from the first one. Now play them simultaneously by turning on two CD players at the same time. What you get is NOT another Beethoven sonata: rather, what you get is garbage.
But if you try the same experiment with John Cage, you get another perfectly acceptable John Cage piece. There has to be a music rule against that. Playing in parallel two random works of music should not give you another work of music.
Re. music from nature, Messiaen drew inspiration from birdsong. As country singers did from freight trains. Nature is not art but it is a tremendous source of inspiration.
I'm talking about this because I just ran across an interesting article in the Globe and Mail about a current art installation in Montreal: "A new kind of birdsong: Blending zebra finches with electric guitars." The writer, Robert Everett-Green used to be the Globe's classical music critic, back when they had one, so he makes some good observations:
French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote many birdsongs into his music, including the “optimistic and triumphant” call of the crimson-winged finch. A pet-shop cousin of that bird, the zebra finch, appears in a sound installation at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, not just as a notated presence but as the star performer.
The piece is called from here to ear, and it features more than 70 zebra finches making unpredictable music with 14 Gibson electric guitars. French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot replicated the birds’ sandy grassland habitat in a white cube-like room, and bolted 10 Les Paul Studio guitars and four Thunderbird basses onto waist-high metal stands, string side up. Fourteen amps have been set with enough distortion that just a touch of the strings makes a sound, sometimes a large one. As the birds settle on a string, fidget around, take off and resettle on another string, the room fills with a collage of rock-guitar sound.
So, like all art installations that purport to produce "music" it is a random soundscape of noises. It resembles music the way an actor randomly shouting nonsense syllables at you resembles a Shakespeare play.
Birds themselves, as Messiaen observed, do sing and their songs are organized in interesting ways, so much so that he considered them not only music, but a manifestation of the music inherent in creation. Sadly, this current installation has little interest in the music of the zebra finch:
The one thing you don’t hear much at from here to ear is the song of the zebra finch. It’s less melodic and more percussive than that of Messiaen’s crimson-winged specimen, but like its relative, the male zebra finch will sing all day, in hopes that its flamboyant performance will lead to sex. In rock band terms, it’s a born lead singer. How surprising that Boursier-Mougenot made his birds into low-functioning rhythm guitarists, whose acoustic backup singing is almost completely swamped.
It is also probably the case that these poor zebra finches are being driven mad by the cacophony of all these electric guitars. Can we call PETA at least?
It is a kind of musical dunderheadedness to drown out the actual song of a bird with random electronic sounds and it is certainly not the kind of thing that Messiaen would think was music. What he did was allow himself to be inspired by actual bird song which he incorporated into a lot of his music.
Let's have a couple of clips. First some of the zebra finch:
And here is the last piece in Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux, Le courlis cendré (curlew):
I haven't quite done with Messiaen and likely won't be for quite a while. Apart from the sheer aesthetic quality and originality of his music, he provokes some interesting philosophical questions. One of these is the relationship between some of his music and the idea of program music.
Program music has been defined by Beardsley as "music with a program" which seems logical enough. He argues for not limiting that definition any further for several good reasons. So, to take an example, is Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux program music? It is not usually considered such but rather as incorporating stylized birdsong into pieces for solo piano. That has a suggestion of musique concrète or iconicity, but little more. Iconicity is a similarity or analogy between a sign and what it represents. In Messiaen's music incorporating birdsong, the assumption is that the music strongly resembles the birdsong. Well, let's have a look, shall we?
Here is a clip of a Calandra Lark singing an extended song: this starts at the 1'19 mark:
I choose this because the shortest piece in the Catalogue d'oiseaux is "L'Alouette calandrelle" which I think is the same bird. Here is another clip of the "Alouette calandre":
Now for the composition by Messiaen, based on this birdsong:
At the beginning you hear two chords interspersed with what sounds like birdsong. I think that comparing those quick, higher-pitched passages with the clips of the birds does show a considerable resemblance. So we have a case of iconicity similar to the passage in Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 where he reproduces the calls of three different birds, labeled in the score.
But now let's look at what Messiaen says about this piece, taken from the liner notes to the Warner Classics box "Messiaen Edition":
Provence in July. The short-toed lark. Two o'clock in the afternoon. Les Baux, les Alpilles. And rocks, broom and cypresses. The monotonous percussion of the cicadas. Staccato alarm of the kestrel. The Route d'Entresson. The crested lark in two-part counterpoint with the short-toed lark. Four o'clock in the afternoon. La Crau. A desert of stones, intense brightness and torrid heat. Alone, the little short phrase of the short-toed lark peoples the silence. About six o'clock in the evening. A skylark soars into the sky and delivers its joyous strophe. Amphimacer of the quail. A reminiscence of the short-toed lark.
The amphimacer is an ancient Greek metrical foot consisting of three syllables: long, short, long.
Based on Messiaen's notes, the piano piece is more than just variations on a stylized birdsong. It is a chronology of part of a day (something that Messiaen does in other pieces in the series) and purports to represent several different places in Provence as well as the songs of five different birds, not to mention the cicada. This begins more and more to resemble a program, though not a traditional narrative. You might call it a characteristic landscape or "soundscape".
The question is, how should we take the composer's notes and how do they affect our reception of the music? Are they a "program" or merely hints as to the mood of the music. Beardsley argues that Beethoven's notes about the Symphony No. 6 are not a program as such, but more metaphorical suggestions to the conductor: "make this passage sound like the running quality of a brook." In order to be genuine program music, the program and the music should fuse together to form one aesthetic object such as Berlioz created with his Symphonie fantastique.
The problems with program music are manifest: if the music itself does not have a real structural coherence, then tacking on a program will not give it one. If the narrative structure of the program and that of the music are both complex, then it will be very difficult, for both composer and listener, to relate the two. If the program is sufficiently vague consisting of little more than a suggestive title such as "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" then it might be able to be dispensed with entirely as it will have little effect on how we hear the music.
So how should we take the "programs" Messiaen has attached to his Catalogue d'oiseax? Can we dispense with them entirely and simply listen to the music as abstract instrumental compositions for piano? Would our aesthetic pleasure be significantly reduced? What if Messiaen had never mentioned that the pieces incorporate birdsong? Would a gifted ornithologist been able to, years later, present the public with his striking theory that Messiaen had used actual (stylized) birdsong in his piano pieces?
I'm not sure where I fall on these questions, but I am more and more interested in engaging with these pieces simply as pieces of music and not as soundscapes or narratives. I want to see how they work if we ignore all the verbiage and just listen. Here is another performance of "L'Alouette calandrelle". What do you think?
The performer offers this guide to the various sections:
0:06 - Short-toed Lark
0:30 - Chorus of Cicadas
0:38 - Lesser Kestrel
0:43 - Quail
1:14 - Crested Lark in counterpoint with the Short-toed Lark.
Blogging will be light for a while, but in the meantime have a listen to this, the first movement of Messiaen's Des canyons aux étoiles... The title is "Le Désert". One of the unusual instruments is the eoliphone or wind machine. Like most pieces by Messiaen, a birdsong is heard, in this case, the hoopoe lark from the Sahara.
The miracle in music like this is however does Messiaen hold it together despite such incredible diversity of materials and means?
There are a few works by Messiaen that could be regarded as symphonies, such as L'Ascension, "Quatre Méditations symphoniques pour orchestre" or, if you accept the very unusual orchestration, perhaps even Couleurs de la cité céleste or Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. But the only work that he called a "symphony" right there in the title is the Turangalîla-symphonie composed between 1946 and 48 on a commission from Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The Turangalîla is a symphony like no other, a syncretic work that has so many facets and aspects that it can take a long time to really become comfortable with it. That is to say, it rewards repeated listening! At times it sounds like George Gershwin on a bad acid trip, at other times it sounds like a profound meditation on the depths of human experience: love, hate, life and death. And everything in between. It is a big and very bold piece, about an hour and twenty minutes long for large orchestra of over one hundred players of whom ten or so are percussionists. There are two important soloists, one on piano and one on ondes Martenot, one of the earliest electronic instruments. There are ten movements:
Introduction
Chant d'amour 1 (Song of love)
Turangalîla 1
Chant d'amour 2
Joie du sang des étoiles (Joy of the blood of the stars)
Jardin du sommeil d'amour (Garden of love's sleep)
Turangalîla 2
Développement de l'amour (Development of love)
Turangalîla 3
Final
There is a very fine recording of the new, revised version that Messiaen prepared not long before his death. The conductor is Myung-Whun Chung with the Orchestre de l'Opera Bastille and the two soloists most closely associated with the work, Messiaen's wife, Yvonne Loriod, piano and her sister, Jeanne Loriod, ondes Martenot. The recording was made in 1991, the year before Messiaen's death and under his supervision and comes with extensive notes by the composer:
It is particularly useful that Messiaen provides examples of the four main themes of the work:
It is well worth reading Messiaen's notes though they may not reveal as much as you may hope! For example, apart from mention of many of the techniques we have discussed, such as "non-retrogradable" rhythms, he also mentions something he calls "rhythmic characters" in which there are three elements: one is active, taking the leading role, another is passive, reacting to the first, and the third is apart and remains the same. This technique, which he uses in a number of other pieces as well, is never explained more clearly except to say that one character may augment, the other may diminish and the third stays the same. One can imagine how this might work, but further explication would require close study of the score, which, for now at least, I do not have.
The Turangalîla Symphony is one of Messiaen's most popular works, partly due to the fact that it is one of the few orchestral pieces by him that can fit into a normal orchestral program. It has, over the sixty-seven years since its composition, become one of the classics of 20th century music, a piece that can be listened to and enjoyed for the sheer pleasure of it, and one that is, at the same time, an influence and inspiration to other composers. Esa-Pekka Salonen, as guest artist with the New York Philhamonic this season, has chosen presenting this work as his major project other than conducting his own music.
I said that the orchestra is large: it includes triple winds and a large string body with 16 first and second violins and the other sections to match. The extensive percussion includes glockenspiel, celesta, vibraphone, triangle, temple blocks, Turkish cymbal, normal cymbals, Chinese cymbal, tam-tam, Basque drum, maracas, side drum, Provençal tabor, bass drum and tubular bells. And out front, of course, the solo piano and ondes Martenot. If you hear something that sounds like the sound-track to an old Star Trek episode, that's probably the ondes Martenot.
The title of the work is the combination of two Sanskrit words. Turanga means, loosely, movement and rhythm, while Lîla signifies divine action on the cosmos, creation and destruction and love.
There are very simple and lyrical sections, such as we find in the Garden of love's sleep, and enormously complex sections with many layers of interlocking rhythms; there are chorale-like chants and wild orgiastic dances. It is safe to say, I think, that this work can stand alongside The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky as one of the great works of the century, bold, challenging and ultimately rewarding.
Luckily we have a good version of the complete work on YouTube of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung (even if the camera work may make you a bit dizzy):
I was in a seminar once on American experimental music and one of the participants, a composer, presented a piece in which he analyzed the formants (overtone structures) of various percussion instruments and, using an algorithm, converted them into rhythms that the percussion instruments would then play. Very clever and designed to appeal to theory and composition teachers as it was a novel way of achieving structural unity. After his presentation I asked "that was the syntax, now what is the semantic?" I received no answer. The whole idea of developing new compositional techniques which are then not used for any particular expressive end is one characteristic of modernism. The interesting thing about Messiaen is that he did take the next step and found uses for the techniques he developed whereas most of his colleagues simply stopped with the technique.
A case in point is the piece we are going to look at today, "L'alouette calandrelle" (short-toed lark), one movement from the Catalogue d'oiseaux for piano. This work, a set of thirteen pieces for piano, at nearly three hours in length, is one of the great accomplishments in 20th century piano music. Written between 1956 and 58, they were inspired by his student (and later wife) Yvonne Loriod, an extraordinary pianist. The work is very much more than merely a catalogue of birdsong: each piece is actually a representation of the songs of the main bird, other birds who share the same environment, and the environment itself.
L'alouette calandrelle, at around 5' in length, is the shortest movement (the longest is thirty minutes long!). Here is Messiaen's description of the movement:
Provence in July. The short-toed lark. Two o'clock in the afternoon. Les Baux, les Alpilles. And rocks, broom and cypresses. The monotonous percussion of the cicadas. Staccato alarm of the kestrel. The Route d'Entresson. The crested lark in two-part counterpoint with the short-toed lark. Four o'clock in the afternoon, La Crau. A desert of stones, intense brightness and torrid heat. Alone, the little, short phrase of the short-toed lark peoples the silence. About six o'clock in the evening. A skylark soars into the sky and delivers its joyous strophe. Amphimacer of the quail. A reminiscence of the short-toed lark.
"Amphimacer" refers to an ancient Greek metrical foot consisting of three syllables: long, short, long. The use of these rhythmic units was part of Messiaen's compositional toolbox.
A few days ago I was looking at IMSLP and saw quite a lot of Messiaen's piano music so I thought that I would be able to find lots of musical examples. But today I see it has all been taken down for copyright violation. So, I'm afraid we will have to get by with just verbal descriptions and YouTube clips!
Getting back to the music: what Messiaen has chosen to do here is remarkable in the extreme. What an amazing vision! I think I have experienced the kinds of things he is trying to capture here--that sense of the whole of a place, sounds, smells, light, air, landscape. It is a kind of reverence for our world that inspires music like this. The place is as important as the birdsong in these pieces. Oh, and the time of day as well, which influences the light, the feel of the landscape and of course the call of the birds. There are layers upon layers here: some things are static, almost mechanical, such as the repetitive sound of the cicadas. Other things develop, musically, such as the strophe of the skylark. There is exposition, development and coda. There is also an underlying, unchanging solidity. In L'alouette calandrelle, it is the pair of repeated chords that capture that static landscape. Alongside are a trio of monotonous sounds: the cicada, and the deadpan calls of the kestrel and quail. Over this soars the lark's song, which contains the only real musical development (which involves that two-part counterpoint with the crested lark).
This is a rather sophisticated and complex idea of musical form, with some elements unchanging and others reshaped and developed. Remarkably, there are no formulas here: each of the thirteen pieces pursues entirely different strategies and structures as it presents a different landscape with a different population of birds.
Let's listen to L'alouette calandrelle and see if we can hear what Messiaen is trying to do. I believe Tomislav Baynov is the pianist:
While we are at it, why don't we listen to another performance of the same piece. This is pianist Håkon Austbø:
My only question, is who goes out and measures lark's toes to see if they are short or not?
No, you didn't miss anything, it is just that my titling is a bit idiosyncratic. I started this series of posts on Messiaen with two introducing his music written by myself, those were parts 1 and 2. Then Ken Fasano contributed three posts on Messiaen's musical language (thanks, Ken!) and those, while labeled 1 - 3 were actually parts 3 - 5. So this is part 6. What I would like to do today is look at Messiaen's techniques from a musicological point of view, that is, considering their historical context.
In Taruskin's marvelous history he links Messiaen with Scriabin as the last of what he describes as "maximalist transcendentalists". These composers (and some other less-known ones) were driven by a spiritual vision within which they subsumed a host of disparate influences. Both Ken and I have mentioned some of these, which include birdsong, Hindu and Greek rhythmic patterns and some medieval structural procedures.
What distinguishes Messiaen from his spiritualist forbears and indeed from his contemporaries and students is his quest for theological truth in his music. Part of this quest involves the use of rigorous compositional procedures, which was the source of his appeal to a whole generation of young composers, such as Boulez and Stockhausen, immediately after the Second World War. Ken has talked about these procedures, but as they are so interesting, I want to revisit them.
One remarkable aspect is that Messiaen takes the same approach to both pitch and rhythm: he sought both symmetry and invariance. How do you do that? Using Messiaen's unique terminology, by means of "non-retrogradable rhythms" and "modes of limited transposition". Both of these techniques lead to a kind of stasis. As you might recall from your counterpoint classes (whaddayamean you never studied counterpoint?), if you play a melody backwards, this is its "retrograde" form. Another word for it is "cancrizans". Follow the link for a full explanation. You can present both the pitches and rhythms backward or forward. This is an old technique and a particularly famous example is by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300 - 1377). This is a rondeau in three parts titled "Ma fin est mon commencement" ("My beginning is my end") and the music exactly reproduces the text! The beginning of the triplum:
is the same as the end of the cantus, but reversed:
Notice that both the notes and the rhythms are reversed. This has been used by quite a number of composers, including myself. The effect of this technique is ... odd. The music is not really going anywhere, it is rather rotating or unfolding and refolding in space. This is why Messiaen liked it.
UPDATE: I didn't quite get to explaining why Messiaen's rhythms were "non-retrogradable". If you compose a sequence of note values that read the same forward and backward, then, of course, this pattern is non-retrogradable, because it reads the same forwards and backwards.
He combined this idea with the other one, modes of limited transposition, which has a similar kind of invariance. A mode of limited transposition is a collection of pitches, a scale or mode, as it were, that possesses the property of replicating itself when transposed. For example, the whole-tone scale can only be transposed once before repeating itself:
Another example is the octatonic scale, consisting of a whole-tone followed by a half-step repeated. It can only be transposed twice without repetition:
Messiaen discovered a number of other modes as well with more transpositions, but still limited. The theorist Anthony Pople has created an ingenious chart that shows the modes and their relationships. Mode 1 is the whole-tone scale and mode 2, the octatonic scale:
Have a look at the third of Ken's posts for the same modes presented in a different way.
Messiaen was of course well aware of the historical background to these two ideas--he was a brilliant scholar and analyst. Retrograde melodies and rhythms are very old, but even the modes had precedents. He would have known of Debussy's use of the whole-tone scale, which was also used by Dukas, but he also knew (which few others did at the time) of the use of the octatonic scale by a number of Russian composers including Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin and Stravinsky, but also Ravel. Messiaen used the modes in sometimes bewilderingly complex configurations. Here as an example, is the early organ work "Les eaux de la grâce" from "Les corps glorieux":
What you are hearing are three lines, one for the right hand, one for the left and the bottom for the pedals. Each line is differentiated by mode. The pedal part uses the whole tone scale (mode 1), the right hand, playing the chords, is in mode 2, the octatonic scale. The left hand line is in mode 7. Here are the first eight measures of the score:
I suppose you could call this "polymodality". This kind of very clever complexity is why so many young composers were attracted to his music just after the war. But at the same time this is deeply spiritual and even richly sensual music, which is why it also appeals to many non-musician listeners.
This is the third and last of a series of three posts on Olivier Messiaen contributed by Ken Fasano. Ken has been a frequent commentator on this blog for quite a while and made such incisive comments on a post on Messiaen that I asked him if he would like to contribute. He responded with three posts! Let's let him introduce himself:
Ken Fasano, b. 1958, Long Island, NY. Started composing at age 11, and was largely self-taught. Studied composition during high school with Albert Tepper, professor at Hofstra, then electronic music with Herb Deutsch (co-inventor of the Moog Synthesizer) at Hofstra (B.S. 1980) and Ursula Mamlok at Manhattan School of Music (M.M.A. 1982). Software Developer since 1982. My musical interests have been mostly in music history, especially the 20th and 21st centuries. I haven't composed much in recent years, instead reading a lot of history (not just music). I usually don't have much to say, musically or otherwise. I prefer to point towards others whose accomplishments I admire. I live currently in West Palm Beach with my wife Cheryl.
World music and modernism
Previous use of non-western influences in Western art tended towards orientalism or exoticism: Picasso’s use of African masks, Debussy’s pentatonicism, Stravinsky’s borrowing of Lithuanian folk songs, Ruth St Denis’ dance. The non-western influence was used on purpose for its foreign connotations. Messiaen is one of the first composers to integrate non-western influence into his artistic language – both in his rhythmic language and in his percussion writing, reminiscent of gamelan.
“Messiaen discovered the 120 deçî-tâlas of Śarńgadeva, a thirteenth-century Indian musician, through their reproduction in Lavignac's Encyclopédie de la musique. … Messiaen studied and assimilated these Hindu rhythmic formulas into his musical language. In sum, he interpreted them as arising from the free multiplication of a short note value. Furthermore, Messiaen derived his principles of the added value, inexact augmentation, and non-retrogradable rhythms from his study of deçî-tâlas.” [Symposium – see post 1] - Messiaen by Robert Sherlaw Johnson lists the deci-talas in an appendix.
The term “deci-tala” refers to a Carnatic (south Indian) form of rhythmic theory; there are two primary Indian musical systems – the Hindustani (northern) and the Carnatic (southern). (Ravi Shankar was a practitioner of the Hindustani style).
Messiaen’s use of tala is primarily as rhythmic cells, analogous in a way to the use of pitch cells in the early atonality of Schoenberg and Webern; just as the use of pitch cells coalesced into Schoenberg’s twelve-tone theory, Messiaen’s use of tala-based rhythmic cells coalesced into the rhythmic cells of Boulez’ First Piano Sonata, then into the rhythmic modes of Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, then into total serialism.
Messiaen’s use of modes of limited transposition is well known. The following chart shows the seven modes with their intervals as a numerical array, as well as the number of transpositions and sub-modes in each.
Whole tone = 2; semitone = 1
Mode
Name
Intervals
Transpositions
Modes
1
Whole tone
2,2,2,2,2,2
2
1
2
Octatonic
1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2
3
2
3
2,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1
4
3
4
1,1,3,1,1,1,3,1
6
4
5
1,4,1,1,4,1
6
3
6
2,2,1,1,2,2,1,1
6
4
7
1,1,1,2,1,1,1,1,2,1
6
5
A fruitful 21st century approach to analysis of Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition might be one which incorporates the mathematics of ring or group theory. It seems the entire spectrum of harmonic usage from Renaissance modality, to classical tonality, to 20th century modality (including Messiaen’s) to atonality and serialism, might be subsumed into one theory based on ring or group theory.
A Smile!
While in the middle of composing Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà (1988–92) – almost, but not quite, his final statement – Messiaen wrote Un Sourire (1989). Here is the Orchestre de l'Opéra Bastille conducted by Myung Whun Chung:
Un Sourire (A Smile) was Messiaen's last commissioned work and his contribution to the celebrations of Mozart's bicentenary in 1991. Explaining how the work honored Mozart, Messiaen wrote: "Despite bereavements, sufferings, hunger, cold, incomprehension and the proximity of death, Mozart still smiled, his music also. That is why I allowed myself, in all humility, to call my act of homage 'A smile.'"
“I accepted [the commission} because I love and admire Mozart. … I said to myself: Mozart always had many enemies. He was hungry, cold, almost all his children died, his wife was ill, he knew only tragedy … And he always smiled. In his music and in his life. So I too tried to smile, and I composed Un Sourire, a little piece lasting nine minutes, without pretentiousness, which I hope … smiles!”
This is covered in full in Messiaen's Final Works by Christopher Philip Dingle:
How to write music of joy and hope, not music of despair, in a time of despair, while at the same time being fully modern, while at the same time embracing deeply traditional values —this may be Messiaen’s greatest teaching for 21st century composers.
Messiaen utilizes dissonant chromatic harmony with the full spectrum of color, not the gray dullness of most serialism (Moses und Aron comes to mind). It is easy to write dissonant music to remind ourselves how bad things are (although in some ways things have never been so good, at least for those of us who are living above a certain economic level).
It is far more of an achievement to have lived through two world wars in one’s own country and write complex, dissonant music that expresses joy and hope, and to have done it for sixty years.
It is Messiaen’s Catholic faith that leads him in this direction; it is his God-given talents that enable him to do so (program notes about one’s environmental creds are merely facile excuses for non-talent). Could a non-Catholic worldview also lead in the same direction? Of course – a worldview that encourages engagement in the world, but goes beyond the temporal and impermanent, striving to communicate the eternal via the temporal art of music. With all the spiritual technologies available to us in the 21st century (the real ones with a solid foundation, not woo-woo new age nonsense), a Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Native American world view would serve just as well as Messiaen’s Catholicism. The missing ingredient, though, is a talent as great as Messiaen’s, carefully nurtured by an educational system with great teachers such as Dukas, Widor, and Emmanuel. Is that possible anymore? No matter what, WE MUST TRY!
This is the first of a series of three posts on Olivier Messiaen contributed by Ken Fasano. Ken has been a frequent commentator on this blog for quite a while and made such incisive comments on a post on Messiaen that I asked him if he would like to contribute. He responded with three posts! Let's let him introduce himself:
Ken Fasano, b. 1958, Long Island, NY. Started composing at age 11, and was largely self-taught. Studied composition during high school with Albert Tepper, professor at Hofstra, then electronic music with Herb Deutsch (co-inventor of the Moog Synthesizer) at Hofstra (B.S. 1980) and Ursula Mamlok at Manhattan School of Music (M.M.A. 1982). Software Developer since 1982. My musical interests have been mostly in music history, especially the 20th and 21st centuries. I haven't composed much in recent years, instead reading a lot of history (not just music). I usually don't have much to say, musically or otherwise. I prefer to point towards others whose accomplishments I admire. I live currently in West Palm Beach with my wife Cheryl.
Olivier Messiaen was born December 10, 1908, in Avignon, France, and died April 27, 1992, in Clichy, near Paris. (Elliott Carter, by the way, was born one day later, on December 11, 1908) His father was a teacher of English, his mother a poet.
I will attempt to provide an overview of several influences on Messiaen’s musical language. This will be a very simple introduction; it has taken, and will continue to take, many volumes to examine the different aspects of Messiaen’s musical language. The influences here should not be taken separately; they interoperate within Messiaen’s personality and his musical language.
Student
Messiaen entered the Conservatoire in 1919, age 11. He was a Student of the composer Paul Dukas (1865-1935), best known for L'apprenti sorcier (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and the composer/organist Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937), who succeeded César Franck at the Conservatoire. As a teacher, Dukas was conservative but encouraged his students’ individuality. His last major work was completed in 1912. Like Sibelius, Dukas had trouble accepting twentieth century musical language after Debussy. The influence of Franck on Messiaen’s earlier organ music is evident.
Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande, was "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence” on Messiaen. Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps also had a profound impact on Messiaen, both on his rhythmic language and on his use of octatonic scales. I will look at Messiaen’s analysis of the Danse Sacrale using tala rhythms later. The later neo-classicism of Stravinsky after his Octet (1923), as well as his contemporaries had practically no influence on Messiaen.
Messiaen was recognized as an excellent student: second prize in harmony, first prize in piano accompaniment, first prize in fugue, first prize in organ playing and improvisation. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928.
Emmanuel (1862 - 1938) was the primary influence on Messiaen’s interest in ancient Greek and Indian rhythms and exotic modes – although Debussy and others had already explored the use of modal harmony. Emmanuel's wrote a treatise in 1895 on the music of Ancient Greece.
Messiaen’s stylistic proclivities were already evident at age twenty. His Préludes (1928) already exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and non-retrogradable rhythms, but one can clearly spot the influence of Debussy (and Scriabin). Remember that Messiaen was twenty when he composed this – for the majority of composers, to have this much control is difficult at any age – and then to present such an original voice that will be recognized for the rest of one’s career as “Messiaen”, that is exceptional.
YouTube will not allow me to embed that clip, so you can either follow the link or listen to this performance:
Messiaen remained a student all his life, and though the teacher of many great composers, he was also their student, always interested in the work of his students and the additional possibilities it gave him.
Teacher
Messiaen taught for thirty-seven years (1941-78) at the Paris Conservatoire. He was appointed professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire soon after his release from imprisonment in a German prison camp in 1941, later professor of composition in 1966, positions he held until his retirement in 1978. Among his students: Pierre Boulez (b. 1925), Karel Goeyvaerts (1923-1993), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) and Yvonne Loriod (1924-2010), who became his second wife; Quincy Jones (b. 1933), Tristan Murail (b. 1947); Gérard Grisey (1946-1998), and George Benjamin (b. 1960).
Goeyvaerts was friends with Stockhausen, both excited, having heard Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, about the possibilities of serialism, both interested in the prospects of electronic music composition with sine waves. Stockhausen had gone to Paris in 1952 to study with Messiaen as well as Musique Concrète at the Radiodiffusion Français, where he composed his Konkrete Etüde (his opus “⅕”). Messiaen’s analysis emphasized Mozart (to Stockhausen’s avant garde chagrin); Stockhausen wrote a paper, Kadenzrhythmik im Werk Mozarts, published in his Texte, vol II. We will see later the influence of music concrete on Messiaen.
Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951, after being rejected by Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger. Messiaen recounts: “I did something horrible which I should do with no other student, for I think one should study harmony and counterpoint. But this was a man so much out of the ordinary that I said... No, you are almost thirty, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and having studied special mathematics. Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis]
His later students Murail and Grisey were the founders of Spectral music – “a compositional technique developed in the 1970s, using computer analysis of the quality of timbre in acoustic music or artificial timbres derived from synthesis.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_music ] Spectralism flows out of Messiaen’s concerns with harmony/color/resonance (which in turn arises from his synaesthesia!).
His pedagogy, while firmly grounded in the classical music tradition (Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Debussy), was inclusive of the most modern developments (unlike Messiaen’s teacher Dukas):
“The range of topics covered during the 1968-69 academic year: besides the critiquing of student works, Messiaen covered Greek meters, arsis and thesis in melody, Hindu rhythms, irrational rhythms, I-Ching, Renaissance vocal music, fugue, the oratorio, stochastic music, serial music as well as works by composers such as Claude Le Jeune, Chopin, Wagner, Berg, Varèse, Schaeffer, Xenakis, Boulez, Stockhausen, Penderecki, and Ligeti.” [Symposium]
I know that my titling is going to be idiosyncratic for this series on the composer Olivier Messiaen, but try and bear with me. Also, for the first time, we will have some guest posts from someone I will introduce later.
Today will be a bit of a miscellanea of thoughts about Messiaen that I hope will help to introduce him to you. One book that is proving useful is The Messiaen Companion, issued just a couple of years after he passed away, so the first to be able to give a perspective on Messiaen's whole life and career.
Much of the music of the 20th century is challenging in various ways. All too often it seems to smack of sterile experimentation, or descend into the expression of agony and despair (not too surprising, considering 20th century history), or simply bully the listener. It is very rare indeed to listen to 20th century music with the kind of unalloyed pleasure that we find in the music of Haydn or Mozart. Every time I put on a piece by Haydn I catch myself breaking into a smile! I was surprised to find myself doing the same listening to Messiaen. Peter Hill, in the book I linked above, referred to Messiaen as an optimist and so he seems to be. Despite his bold approach to composition, he possessed many very traditional virtues, which included his firm Catholic faith and his innate curiosity. The shelves of his study contained volumes of Shakespeare (translated by his father Pierre), works of theology, books on birds, and musical scores.
It might seem anomalous that someone whose life was essentially simple, with the lucidity of a medieval craftsman, would also be a hugely influential teacher in the post-World War II musical avant-garde--impervious to dogma in a particularly dogmatic era! At a time when abstraction in music reigned supreme, he believed in music's power to describe and symbolize as a moment's glance at almost any of his scores reveals.
I empathize with Messiaen's fascination with and love of birdsong: in my early youth we moved to a homestead in the Canadian north and I spent many hours wandering in the woods trying to imitate the calls of the birds. It was a kind of ear-training. For Messiaen it was much more, of course, as he regarded birdsong as a kind of music and incorporated symbolic birdsong in a host of compositions, most of all the very large collection of piano pieces I included in my post on Sunday, the Catalogue d'oiseaux.
He also found stained glass inspiring which might offer a clue as to his striking and bold orchestrations which dazzle the listener.
Messiaen was a brilliant analyst, able to sort out the, at the time, esoteric compositions of Stravinsky, Berg and Schoenberg and explain them to a new generation of young composers that included Pierre Boulez. This was a kind of bound or turning point for Messiaen for the sessions of ideological disputation he ultimately found unsatisfying and he turned away from musical abstraction and spent a decade in which he became intensely engaged with birdsong in his composition. The first of these was a piece written as a test piece for flutists at the Conservatoire titled Le merle noir ("The Blackbird") composed in 1952. This gives us a good envoi for today. Here are Kenneth Smith, flute and Matthew Schellhorn, piano:
I am ashamed to admit that, until recently, I had only the vaguest knowledge of the music of Olivier Messiaen (1908 - 1992). I have known about him for a long time as one of the first things I did when discovering classical music was read all the books I could find and the first library I went to, a tiny municipal one, had a couple of histories of music in the 20th century. Messiaen, of course, figured prominently. But for some reason, I never heard much of his music apart from a couple of the piano pieces and the Quartet for the End of Time, which has to be one of the greatest titles ever for a piece of music. But I am not alone, of course, performances of Messiaen are not thick on the ground here in North America. I was talking yesterday to a violinist friend of mine about perhaps Messiaen's greatest work, the Turangalîla-Symphonie and, though she has played in symphony orchestras for nearly fifty years, she has not only never been part of a performance, she has never even heard the piece!
So, as part of my own self-education project in Olivier Messiaen, I am going to do a few posts on him and his music as it is my feeling that Messiaen, along with Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, is emerging as one of the great composers of the 20th century. Let's start with a photo. This is Messiaen reviewing a score alongside his erstwhile piano student, later second wife and long time interpreter, Yvonne Loriod:
My own encounter with Messiaen starts in the easternmost town of Germany, Görlitz, right on the border with Poland. By sheer accident one day while visiting with my ex-wife's family, who live near Dresden, I failed to get off the train when I should have and ended up in Görlitz, at that time a dreary industrial town--considerably prettier now. During the Second World War, just to the south of Görlitz (and not mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the town) was the site of Stalag VIII-A, a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp whose most famous prisoner was Olivier Messiaen, captured, along with many other Frenchmen, during the Battle of France in 1940. While there Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time. It was written for the odd combination of clarinet, violin, cello and piano simply because these were the only instruments (and players) available. The piece was actually premiered in the camp on January 15, 1941. Outdoors, in the rain, to an audience of 400 prisoners and guards.
Messiaen, as we learn from the magisterial work by Richard Taruskin, the Oxford History of Western Music, was a remarkably unusual figure. He is almost the only composer in recent centuries to have been a full-time church musician. For more than forty years he was the regular Sunday organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, one of the largest churches in Paris. Probably the last important composer previously to be a working church musician was J. S. Bach. Messiaen was also a brilliant theorist and teacher. Unlike many composers he wrote in great detail about exactly how he composed his music (as opposed to, for example, Stravinsky who tended to lie about how he worked and Shostakovich who never discussed it at all). Every artist chooses his predecessors and the ones that influenced Messiaen were first of all the Russians, particularly the maximalizing and spiritual influence of Scriabin. This also revealed itself in the use of the octatonic scale, a typical Russian mode. I will be devoting a separate post to the theoretical structure of Messiaen's music.
Two other important influences in terms not of aspiration but of technique were Indian music, specifically the rhythmic modes, and Medieval music. Messiaen seems to have re-invented the isorhythmic motet without realizing it. Taruskin calls Messiaen, not a mystic, despite the deep religious nature of his music, but a scholastic because, like Thomas Aquinas, Messiaen strove to demonstrate revealed truths in rational discourse. While achieving great ambiguity through complexity, Messiaen's music is precisely and intricately constructed as I think we will see later on.
One final influence or perhaps inspiration, was birdsong. The Wikipedia article refers to Messiaen as a "French composer, organist and ornithologist" and, like his teacher Dukas, he was fascinated with the song of birds who are often portrayed in European myths and legends as prophetic creatures. Many pieces by Messiaen contain stylized birdsong and he wrote one, the gargantuan Catalogue d'oiseaux, two and a half hours of music for solo piano in seven books, entirely devoted to birdsong. That gives you a bit of an introduction to Messiaen, not only a very important composer, but also one of the most significant teachers of composition in the 20th century. Let's end with the Catalogue d'oiseaux performed by Yvonne Loriod, probably the piece they are perusing in the above photo.
