Olivier Messiaen, the French composer and organist, in a convivial moment at Westminster Cathedral in London.
Olivier Messiaen was one of the most important and individual composers of the 20th century. His works are instantly recognisable yet his output covers an extremely wide range of expression. All aspects of his music such as harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation were carefully worked out according to his own methods, incorporating techniques such as Greek and Hindu rhythms, birdsong, and SERIALISM.
Messiaen was born on December 10, 1908, in Avignon, France. His father was a teacher of English and translated the complete works of Shakespeare. His mother, Cecile Sauvage, was a poet. Messiaen began composing at the age of seven and entered the Paris Conservatory at 11. He studied there until 1930,winning first prizes in harmony, counterpoint and fugue, piano accompaniment, history of music, and composition. Upon graduation, he became the principal organist at La Trinité in Paris. He kept this post for over 40 years.
His first major works include the Quatuor pour la fin du temps written in a German prison camp in 1940 where he was detained during the war. In 1943, he wrote Visions de Vamen for two pianos and the Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus for solo piano. In 1944, he published Technique de mon langage musical, a theoretical explanation of his musical language at that time. Messiaen’s recognition grew during the 1940s and 1950s due to his tireless teaching as much as his own compositions.
After the war, he became professor of harmony at the conservatory and later professor of analysis. In his famous analysis classes, he drew on examples as diverse as STRAVINSKY’S Rite of Spring, Beethoven’s string quartets, and Greek poetic meters. Students of this class included Pierre BOULEZ and the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who later became Messiaen’s wife.
Messiaen also taught classes at Darmstadt, Germany and at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts. He kept in touch with a younger generation of composers through his teaching and later with the Domaine Musical series of concerts founded by Boulez in 1954 as a showcase for contemporary composition. Some of Messiaen’s own works were given a first performance there, including the Catalogue d’oiseaux on the composer’s 50th birthday.
Olivier Messiaen, the French composer and organist, in a convivial moment at Westminster Cathedral in London.
Messiaen had a strong interest in birdsong since his youth and in the early 1950s began incorporating it into his works. Examples include Réveil des oiseaux (1953) for piano and orchestra and the Oiseaux exotiques (1956) for piano, wind, and percussion. He continued using birdsong throughout his career. The Catalogue d’oiseaux for piano includes the songs of birds from all over France, whereas the Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum includes the exotic Amazon uirapuru. An example of a large-scale use of it is in the orchestral work Chronochromie of 1960, especially in the section for 18 strings entitled “Epode,” where each player has a different birdsong. Most of the birdsong he used he collected himself by spending days in the countryside writing them down, without a tape recorder. He was also a member of several ornithological societies.
Another fundamental influence on Messiaen’s work was his Catholic faith. He is one of the very few modern composers to compose a large body of organ works and to be a working organist all his life. He composed many religious works, in extended meditations on the great Christian themes of the resurrection and the Apocalypse. Three examples of these include Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, Eclairs sur l’au-delà… and La ville d’en haut.
Messiaen’s originality extends to all the elements of composition, but probably the most distinctive features are his harmonic and rhythmic language. One device of his harmony is his “modes of limited transposition.” These are idiosyncratic scales—one example is the “octatonic” scale that alternates the intervals of a minor and major second—which he used to give structure to his pieces. The term “limited transposition” means that, if they are transposed more than a semitone, the original pitches will reappear, only higher. This use of modes led naturally to serialism, which Messiaen also used, but unlike many other composers who abandoned all their previous techniques on discovery of this method, Messiaen incorporated it into his own language. One example of a fully integrated serial work, in which even the dynamics and rhythmic durations are serialised, is his Quatre études de rythme for solo piano (1949).
The rhythmical side of Messiaen’s music is very complex and stems from four main sources: Greek meters from classical poetry, sacred Hindu rhythms used in Indian classical music, birdsong, and Western classical music, especially the rhythmic devices found in the music of DEBUSSY and Stravinsky. He was particularly interested in assymetrical rhythms, such as using units of five beats, but in all his experiments it was the possible distortions of the original patterns that interested him. For example, much of his rhythm uses the technique of “added value,” where a semiquaver may be added to or subtracted from each element of a rhythm, making very complex rhythms from a very simple basis. Other techniques included overlapping rhythmic patterns and Messiaen often left out barlines in his music altogether so that no strong “beat” is found at the beginning of each bar. However, to the listener, the effect is relieved by the use of calm cyclic repetition of particular chords or chord progressions, and by simple slow regular pulse, giving relief to sections using more complex rhythms. These techniques give a broad ritualistic sound to many of his works. This can be heard in his last work Eclairs sur l’au-delà… for large orchestra (1978).
Messiaen also heard sounds inextricably linked to colours and often described pages of pieces of music in particular colours. This is perhaps not communicable to the listener except as a heightened emphasis on tone-colours. This has derived to considerable extent from his experience of playing the organ where huge shimmering blocks of sound can be built up using the pitches of the harmonic series. He also used a variety of percussion instruments, including xylophones and glockenspiels, and was one of several French composers to adopt the ondes martenot, invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot, and which was effectively a precursor of the synthesizer. Messiaen used the ondes martenot in the Turangalîla-symphonie, where it produces an unearthly vocal timbre, and scored the Fête des belles eaux for six of these instruments.
Messiaen died in 1992, leaving a body of work incomparable in individuality, depth of spirituality, and the extent of its influence on the next generation of composers. While taking technical skills from the great composers of the past, he combined these with immensely diverse influences from various sources to produce a music that in many cases does sound as if it is “from beyond,” both in its complex perfection and simplicity of message.
David Braid
SEE ALSO:
CHAMBER MUSIC; DARMSTADT SCHOOL; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.
Bruhn, Siglind. Images and Ideas on Modern French Piano Music: The Extra-musical Subtext in Piano Works by Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997)..
Hill, Peter, ed. The Messiaen Companion (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1995)..
Sherlaw Johnson, Robert. Messiaen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
L’Ascension; Catalogue d’oiseaux; Eclairs sur l’au-delà…;
Quatuor pour la fin du temps; Turangalîla-symphonie; Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus.