Throughout his life, Messiaen offered musical praise to the miracle of creation at its grandest, dedicating his art to the dual but related purposes of celebrating religious faith and expressing his intense devotion to nature. L’Ascension is outdoor music. Catalogue d’oiseaux shows off birds in their natural habitat. Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, says Messiaen, ideally should be experienced among high mountains. In Chronochromie huge, stone-hard chords depict rocks and splashy figurations the sound of water cascading in the Alps; while its sixth movement, ‘Epode’, an incredible polyphony of eighteen solo strings, represents the dawn chorus. In the Quatuor pour la fin du temps and Turangalîla-symphonie flowers, gardens, birds and rainbows are drawn into a fantasy of religious and sensual passion. Messiaen relates, in the preface to the Quatuor, how
in my dreams I hear and see classified chords and melodies, known colours and forms; then, after this transitional stage, I pass into the unreal and submit in an ecstasy to a wheeling, a gyrating interpenetration of superhuman colours. These swords of fire, these blue and orange lava flows, these sudden stars: here is the jumble, here the rainbows!
Given such visionary obsessions, it is hardly surprising that Messiaen’s imagination should have been captivated by the canyons of the American West, with their vibrant colours by day and brilliant panoply of stars by night.
When Messiaen accepted the commission from the patroness, Alice Tully, to compose a work for large chamber orchestra in honour of the American Bicentennial, he turned for inspiration to his huge library of geography books, particularly to a favourite series of volumes called Les merveilles du monde. Here he found confirmation of his impression of the Utah canyons as ‘the grandest and most beautiful marvels of the world’ and of Bryce Canyon as supreme. After much deliberation, and toying briefly with an alternative subject suggested by the mountains of Hawaii, Messiaen decided that Bryce Canyon, ‘the most beautiful thing in the United States’, would be central to his theme. And so, in the spring of 1972 (too early in the year to meet many other tourists but an ideal season for notating birdsongs) he set off with his wife to visit Utah, staying for eight days in a ‘little inn’ at the entrance to Bryce Canyon which enabled them to explore at their leisure.
Images of the American canyons must be etched on every mind, although, to comprehend their enormous scale and extraordinary rock formations, you must physically go there, wandering, perhaps for several days, along the upper rims and trekking down, with amazed incredulity, into their deep inner valleys. Although less well known, Bryce Canyon is as astonishing, and its geology as apparently preposterous as that of the Grand Canyon. Compared with the latter’s rugged magnificence, Bryce Canyon has a breathtaking elegance and beauty all its own. Any visitor to Bryce Canyon comes upon a unique world in the middle of an already spectacular country; its pinnacles and spires have an almost Gothic delicacy; it is weird and other-worldly and at the same time an elemental, sculptural part of the Earth. Messiaen realized at once that its natural beauty far surpassed any photograph, ‘so big, immense, a landscape of nothing but cliffs and boulders in fantastic shapes. There are castles, towers, dungeons, there are turrets, bridges, windows, and then, even more beautiful, there are the colours. Everything is red, all sorts of reds’.1
Des canyons aux étoiles … conveys through every gesture the unforgettable impact of seeing the Utah canyons. Although limited to an orchestra less than half the size of that required for the Turangalîla-symphonie, Messiaen’s imagination takes off in astonishing flights of instrumentation, his ardour is infectious, the grandeur of the music’s design is immensely impressive. Des canyons is a tribute to the magnificence of all creation and expresses the contemplation of a unity between heaven and earth. And, since Messiaen sees creation as a manifestation of God, it is a deeply religious work. Few pieces of nature-poetry have attempted to embrace so dazzling and momentous a subject; and even Messiaen, despite a lifelong absorption in nature and birdsong, is not, in his human frailty, entirely equal to the immeasurable scale of the task. His music conveys the magnificence of the scene, the exuberant colours and fantastic shapes, but also risks, at times, the accusation of being too naively symbolic, over-orderly in its symmetries and, perhaps, a shade too routine and medium-scale. Yet Des canyons has great splendours and is one of Messiaen’s most poetic and accessible scores. Being conceived soloistically for an ensemble of forty-four players, a number falling in between the normal resources of chamber and symphony orchestra, it is, unfortunately, only infrequently performed. The size of the ensemble was presumably governed by the capacity of the Alice Tully Hall in New York where the work was premiered on 20 November 1974. However, by including quadruple woodwind, nine brass instruments and a generous helping of percussion, although only thirteen strings, Messiaen was able to re-create at least something of the powerful tuttis he had composed in Chronochromie, and yet imbue the whole work with the intimacy and clarity of chamber music; while the choice of instruments, which includes such curiosities as an eolophone (wind machine) and geophone (sand machine), encouraged him to invent many novel and ingenious timbral combinations.
Most of Messiaen’s music contains specific extra-musical ideas: virtually all of it, indeed, had for him unashamedly programmatic origins. Des canyons aux étoiles … is no exception, being arranged as a sequence of twelve vivid and momentous pictures (listed on p. 543). In its different way, each is intriguing. Heard as a whole, the presence of so many different musical portraits raises structural problems – problems not wholly absent, of course, from his other music in which we may also observe Messiaen’s painterly delight in catalogue exhibitions, notably in the keyboard works. From his first published work, Le banquet céleste of 1928, he had spread his music out spaciously. One came to expect from him the slowest tempos, huge and richly coloured tableaux, an expansive vision of humanity, God, nature and eternity. Des canyons, even for Messiaen, is exceptional and is one of only a handful of orchestral works by any Western composer whose performance takes up a whole concert. Messiaen’s longer works, particularly those for organ and piano, require sustained attentiveness from his listeners who, for the most part, are handsomely rewarded. But the great canvas of Des canyons stretches tolerance even of Messiaen’s extended time-scale. Can this monumental cycle of meditations on the majesty of God’s creation really hold our interest over twelve movements and one-and-a-half hours of playing time? What structural coherence does that require, what kind of musical language and resources? Its idiom is not so far removed from that of the Turangalîla-symphonie, but that work is shorter and is spectacularly scored for a huge orchestra whereas Des canyons has, as we have seen, an ensemble less than half that size.
Of similar length to Des canyons is Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ for large orchestra with the additional dimension of chorus and seven instrumental soloists. La Transfiguration may be regarded, perhaps, as the protracted ritual of some vast, imaginary religious ceremony. Des canyons, however, purports to be more of a concert piece.2 Putting aside music involving words, which, in opera and oratorio, usually means narrative, Des canyons has almost no counterpart. Terry Riley’s In C and Steve Reich’s Drumming, both of whose durations may be varied in performance, approach it. Stockhausen’s Sternklang, which uses voices but in an essentially instrumental manner, lasts for some three hours depending on the area of its (ideally, outdoor) performance space. Significantly, the musical processes in these pieces are homogeneous and intentionally elongated, absorbing the listener in the minutiae of extremely gradual change. Messiaen, on the other hand, does not eschew traditional rhetoric, with its implied dramatic contrasts and expectations of variable pacing – here accelerated, there retarded, always eventful.
Our perception of how time passes is inevitably subjective. What transports one listener into a state of entrancement, to another may seem intolerably tedious. Our own mental state as listeners affects our attention-span, and that which the composer contrives to induce in his audience will also influence attitudes to time-scale; whether, for instance, we appear to be hurled along in cloak-and-dagger drama, or soothed into thoughtful contemplation. Messiaen’s manner of handling such long pieces is to juxtapose different states and, thus, to proceed through a series of contrasts. Nevertheless, in Des canyons as in his other music, one has to accept that the nature of his faith reduces the possibilities of dramatic tension. This great hymn to heaven and earth has no darker side. There is no hint, for instance, of the pain of Gerontius’s blinding encounter with the absolute perfection of God, no shadow of concern that the deity should allow agony as well as joy in his creation. Quoting, in the third movement, the prophecy of Daniel, ‘MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN’, Messiaen disregards its awesome promise of divine justice, retaining only ideas of quantity, weight and measurement. He has prefaced the score of ‘Cedar Breaks’, the fifth movement, with a quotation from Ernest Hello’s Paroles de Dieu: ‘To replace fear by awe opens a window for adoration’, and added the comment that ‘in the scale of feelings, the fear of punishment ranks rather low – Awe, which is the reverence of the sacred, of the divine presence, is more noble, and leads to adoration which stands at the very top’. Des canyons, therefore, is a work of ascension, of celebration for the resurrected, of breathtaking adoration rather than of disquieting mystery. Pascal’s eternal silence of infinite space has no terror here.
This is a view of creation and eternity without evil or sin. Inspired by his visits to Utah, Messiaen’s preoccupation, as one might expect, is with its astonishing physical splendour, as if a symphony of earth, rocks and sky were extolling the wonders of geology and astronomy. To keep vivid the detail of all that he found in Bryce Canyon throughout the subsequent months of composition, Messiaen wrote down copious descriptive notes, his wife took over 200 photographs and, of course, he transcribed birdsong. Birds, which for Messiaen represent ideal behaviour, are the only living dramatis personae to take the stage in Des canyons. Flawed humans are wholly absent. Indeed, apart from the Tristanesque love celebrated in the Turangalîla-Symphonie, Harawi and Cinq rechants, Messiaen’s entire œuvre passes over problems of suffering humanity. Through the externalization of religious faith, his art rises above the subjective and is utterly without self-centredness or nostalgia. It is an essentially childlike delight in the wonder of creation that leads him to derive every note from extra-musical observation and objective symbolism. Indeed, one could claim that illustration, per se, is Messiaen’s main and most essential structural principal, a lifelong dependence upon programmatic guidelines which could hardly have been less fashionable in the mid-twentieth century and was only temporally diverted by the prevailing intellectualism of the post-war years in pioneering experiments like the Quatre études de rythme. If representative symbolism is the music’s primary stimulus, Messiaen’s skill is in the clothing of these pictorial intentions in a systematic technique of exceptional orderliness. And, as with Bach, the paradox of emotional ardour and deep spirituality combined with rigorous discipline is fundamental to the music’s stature. From this arises its radiance, passion and conviction.
Des canyons aux étoiles … has visual, philosophic and emotional sensibility in abundance; but architecturally it is less convincing. Perhaps the methods detailed so precisely in Messiaen’s treatise of 1944, and still the basis of his technique much later, prove less than adequate to serve these bold aspirations? To answer this question, we must examine the structural principles of Des canyons in more detail. After which, to conclude, I want to consider further Messiaen’s role among nature poets.
Symbolism and structure
Messiaen has chosen to divide Des canyons aux étoiles … into three parts, there being five movements in each of Parts 1 and 3, two only in Part 2. As Messiaen says in his Preface, the music begins with an evocation of the desert, ‘symbol for that emptiness of the soul which allows it to perceive the inner conversation of the Spirit’, whose disjointed, astringent character immediately creates a sense of unearthly majesty. Each of the three parts ends with a picture of one of the wonders of Utah, their associations for Messiaen indicated in the titles: ‘Cedar Breaks et le don de crainte’, ‘Brice Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange’, ‘Zion Park et la cité céleste’. The radiant A# major tonality of ‘Zion Park’, the twelfth movement, symbolizes paradise, joyful destination of the whole work. In between are five movements based on birdsongs and three devoted to the stars. Why the stars? Because, as Messiaen observed, from the depths of the canyons one inevitably looks up, ‘one progresses from the deepest bowels of the earth and ascends towards the stars’. In the first part we hear ‘Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles’. The second begins with an ‘Appel interstellaire’ for solo horn, and the third with ‘Les ressuscités et le chant de l’étoile Aldebaran’. Attracted by its ‘charming’ name which, in arabic, means the follower, Messiaen chose Aldebaran to represent himself (as Stockhausen had already identified himself with Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens) because Aldebaran ‘has great velocity, a great light, and because it follows the Pleiades. I found that to be an admirable function of the follower.’3 It is the most blissful movement in Des canyons, a long harmonized melody for strings reminiscent of ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ in the Turangalîla-symphonie.
A passing curiosity in two of the movements is Messiaen’s representation of the ‘alphabet’ by specific pitches and durations, using a system he had developed for the organ Méditations in 1969 (see Organ Music II). For that work, pondering the inability of music to communicate precise ideas, and inspired by St Thomas Aquinas’s remarks in the Summa about the language of angels, Messiaen had devised for himself ‘a kind of communicable language’ partly as a game, partly to re-stimulate his own musical thoughts. Beginning with the familiar musical letter names used in German:
EX. 16.1
he extended this sequence to include the five vowels:
EX. 16.2
and, by further subgroups, to take in palatals, dentals, labials, sibilants etc, until he had invented a complete series providing each letter of the alphabet with its own pitch and duration:
EX. 16.3
In Des canyons this ‘communicable language’ occurs in movements 2 and 4. In ‘Cedar Breaks et le don de crainte’ it articulates three Greek invocations: ‘Agios o Theos’ (Saint, o God!), ‘Agios ischyros’ (Saint and powerful!), and ‘Agios athanatos’ (immortal Saint!) But its most impressive use is to spell out the awful words of the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s Feast (in French ‘MENÉ, TEQÉL, PARSIN’) which open and end the third movement. For this monumental passage Messiaen gives each letter not only matching pitch and duration but its own chord and instrumentation, what one might perhaps call Klangfarbenharmonie (See Ex. 16.4).
EX. 16.4 Des canyons aux étoiles … 3 ‘Ce qui est ecrit sur les étoiles’ (opening): pitches representing letters in Messiaen’s musical alphabet are arrowed, and emphasized by his orchestration
These passages of musical alphabet are but brief moments in a mosaic of numerous components. Particularly important, therefore, is Messiaen’s management of such extended montage. With its vast dimensions, Des canyons puts his large-scale architecture to a considerable test. Not only do its twelve movements follow each other as a succession of contrasting blocks, their internal structures are also highly episodic. Of course, most of Messiaen’s music is sectional, which is not to say that it lacks driving forces. His skilful juxtaposition of varied ‘characters’ (personnages, one might say) enables elaborate sectional structures, like that of the Turangalîa-symphonie, to build a cumulative intensity. In Des canyons the faster tempos in ‘Bryce Canyon’, for example, which accelerate the music towards the joyful conclusion of Part 2, are supported by orchestration at its most ebullient and by the arrival on E major, the first definitive and resolutory tonality of the whole work. Here the pacing is admirable. Yet, on the whole, Des canyons has less dynamic thrust than Turangalîla and, because of its length, the cohesion of its sectional edifice is subjected to greater strain. Up to a point its twelve movements proceed progressively, but equally one could argue that their order is as potentially variable as the ways in which a painter might hang pictures of similar subject matter at an exhibition (notwithstanding the palindromic sequence of tutti and solo piano movements by means of which Parts 1 and 3 reflect each other).
To counter this view, one can observe how the cyclic repetitions and verse-refrain formulas of Messiaen’s mature music are animated by many other energy-generating devices. Pitch material may be progressively stretched, so that what began in a restricted register ends with dazzling athletic leaps (as in No. 3, ‘L’échange’ and the last page of No. 14, ‘Regard des anges’ in Vingt regards). His music grows by accretion. Phrases are added, like new tableaux in a pageant, to make the picture more vivid and brilliant. Sections are successively transposed, or elongated so that each reaches a new point of harmonic arrival. A passage may come back spectacularly superimposed upon others or doubled-back on itself, like the impressive return of the orange-red rocks theme in retrograde canon in the second antistrophe of ‘Bryce Canyon’. Particularly thrilling in the orchestral scores, with their huge resources, is the return of those sections in which the composer gradually piles on more and more independent layers in a mesmeric display of asymmetric polyphony. In Des canyons it is the eleventh movement, ‘Omao, leiothrix, elepaio, shama’ (a delightfully animated and vivacious party for Hawaiian birds and friends!) which best demonstrates this exciting process of accumulation. Its structure alternates four refrains and four verses, concluding with a piano cadenza and coda. The simple horn and bassoon melody of the first refrain, on both its second and third returns, gains intriguing new polymetric counterpoints (see Ex. 16.5); while each of the verses is thrillingly elaborated and extended by the arrival of new visitors to the aviary.
Architecture, intuition and routine
What is crucial, to make such large-scale architecture convincing, is the spontaneity of the ongoing sequence as well as the proportional balance between sections and movements (which are but collections of sections), and the nature of the timbral and temporal contrasts between them. Messiaen thrives on extreme contrasts of mood, colour and tempo. Even within movements of consistent character, whose cyclic repetitions must eventually surrender to the onward thrust of the music, the change of direction, when it comes, is usually masterful; the expressive role of new material is made immediately clear. Concluding sections are given a grandeur or extravagance that makes their finality indisputable. Messiaen seems to have judged such things intuitively; so that, despite his schematic and orderly approach to musical material, the broader disposition of movements in his large-scale works is as much sensed as calculated. At first sight there may seem to be a contrived order, like the palindromic symmetry of the thirteen pieces which make up the Catalogue d’oiseaux, or his adoption, in several works including Des canyons, of the archetypical forms of strophe, antistrophe and epode, borrowed from the choral odes of ancient Greek drama. Such titles have a certain resonance, but their structural implications are only skin deep, since, into the vessels which bear these names, Messiaen poured whatever music he wanted. Whereas he organized the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic processes within his music with, at times, elaborate rigour, its broader formal outlines are dictated mostly by instinct.
EX. 16.5 Des canyons aux étoiles … 11 ‘Omao, leithrix, elepaio, shama’
In Des canyons one feels that Messiaen’s instinct was not infallible. Within individual movements, some sections are arranged very symmetrically. Would not the riotous irregularity of creation have been better represented by less orderly and predictable geometry? The inclusion of three solo pieces among the twelve movements of Des canyons allows tension to sag, and the grandeur and vivid scene-painting of the surrounding orchestral movements momentarily to contract and grow monochrome. Two of these solo movements are for piano and another, the sixth, is for horn. The horn writing is technically spectacular and its character, as always in Messiaen, symbolic: this unaccompanied melody, punctuated by pauses as if seeking a reply, evokes the vastness and emptiness of space in which the horn’s lonely calls go unanswered. The image is certainly poetic. But the very presence of a display by the solo horn, however splendidly executed, at the heart of an orchestral-ensemble work of the grandest aspirations, is curiously unconvincing. Its position here seriously dissipates the energies gathered together in the previous movement at a time when they needed to be held in readiness, as it were, for the seventh – the last of Part 2 and the climactic movement before the interval (if it is taken) – whose subject, Bryce Canyon itself, ‘the greatest wonder of Utah’ as Messiaen observes, is central to the grand vision of the whole work.
Piano solos, in the midst of orchestral compositions, are, of course, what we have come to expect from Messiaen. They were not only set pieces for his wife to perform, but also represented the pirouettes, pas de deux and choreographed ensembles of his beloved birds. The fourth movement of Des canyons, a piano solo depicting the white-browed robin, ‘a wonderful songbird’ from south-east Africa, makes an effective contribution. Messiaen’s keyboard writing is no longer innovatory, but he uses his ‘bird-piano’ colourfully enough to complement the very remarkable timbral spectrum of the other orchestral movements. Moreover, his representation of this one bird’s song, albeit a compilation of different routines, creates a more homogeneous impression than the often fragmented character of the first three movements and so restores, rather than intrudes upon our sense of continuity. The considerably longer piano solo of the ninth movement is more problematic. Here the mockingbird (for whom, as the most famous bird of the United States, Messiaen perhaps felt obliged to provide a part) shares the stage with other feathered accomplices from Australia. The style of the piano writing is flamboyant and contains some novelties, like the clusters played with the palm of the hand and with both arms. But its general character is disturbingly familiar, and it is difficult to see what it adds to our sense of the awesome splendour of the natural world which Des canyons generally conveys. Intimacy, Messiaen might have argued, is as important as immensity in what is as much a work of religious meditation as of praise. Yet the fragmented, seemingly directionless phrases of the mockingbird do somewhat undermine the broader architecture and pacing of the whole work.
Even the division of Des canyons into three parts appears arbitrary, particularly since a division into two would have better suited normal concert conditions. Each part ends with its most brilliant and spectacular movement. And, on the face of it, the two outer groups, each of five movements, balance each other around the central pair. In performance, one is hardly aware of such equivalence since the sequence of movements sounds more random. On the other hand, while the ordering of the twelve movements is, to a degree, arbitrary, their internal structures, as I have observed, are often elaborately symmetrical.
A harmonious equilibrium – the music of the spheres – has long been regarded as a facet of creation. And verses are the stuff of hymnody, which is basic to much of Messiaen’s work. Yet, cumulatively, one is nagged by the feeling that the frequent alternation and repetition of sections and phrases becomes too orderly and inevitable. After all, neither the amazing rock formations of Utah nor the constellations of the night sky are so regular. Messiaen’s more intricate rhythmic material, particularly of course that derived from birdsong, is always internally elastic, but he is inclined to repeat what in themselves are asymmetric phrases in predictable cycles of insistent regularity, the music for ‘Bryce Canyon’ being a case in point. Much earlier in his life, Messiaen had espoused rhythmic music as a ‘music which eschews repetition, bar-lines, and equal divisions, which ultimately takes its inspiration from the movements of nature, movements which are free and unequal in length’.4 So it is curious that he often does not apply this credo to the very music which purports to represent nature at its most extraordinary and fantastic.
Not that classic principals of proportion are to be wholly despised. For Messiaen, such perfection is symbolic. Among the stars he finds an exquisite symmetry. The Book of Job, he reminds us in his introduction to the eighth movement, ‘Les ressuscités et le chant de l’étoile Aldebaran’, talks about the ‘happy concert of morning stars’. Certainly these well-drilled choristers perform faultlessly,5 so that this movement has as poised and perfect a structure as any. The strings play twenty-four phrases grouped in four stanzas, the third and fourth being varied recapitulations or extensions of the first and second. Matched dynamics reinforce the impression of orderly behaviour which the presence of several birds in counterpoint above the strings, dutifully following regular cues, does nothing to dispel. But Messiaen avoids too frequent multiples of four beats in the lengths of phrases and the total effect is most graciously choreographed.
The fourth stanza’s extended phrases, and their increased number, are characteristic of Messiaen’s technique. By adding weight to the final section of the movement the expressive vision is intensified. Luminous and serene, the homogeneity of this movement is affectingly beautiful. The glissando harmonics of the violins, high-pitched indeterminate col legno of the solo double bass and rustling wind chimes of the percussion, which trail silken wisps through each of the four cadences ending each stanza, are moments of delicate and charming coloration. This is a beatific vision of the resurrected among the stars. Not for Messiaen the unfathomable mysteries of Gustav Holst’s Planets or the icy impersonality of the star Betelgeuse (Aldebaran’s near neighbour6) which Holst evokes so numbingly in the haunting last song of his Humbert Wolfe cycle.
Symmetry is also the hallmark of the third movement ‘Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles’, with its carefully balanced ternary grouping of fifteen alternating sections. Sections 1 to 4 (up to fig. 8) and 12 to 15 (from fig. 28) on the outsides mirror each other palindromically and are strongly contrasted. Sections 5 to 11 (figs 8–28) are also symmetrically arranged; although Messiaen’s ever-inventive treatment of the birdsong delivers continuously new variants, giving this central group a more volatile and developmental character and more forward energy. If a harmonious symmetry is written in the stars, what of the earthly scenes? In that ‘Cedar Breaks’ and ‘Bryce Canyon’ both use the same formula of strophe, antistrophe I, antistrophe II, epode and coda, they exhibit similar disciplines. Their threefold cyclic repetitions, comprising each movement’s strophes and its two antistrophes, would seem to derive more from liturgical convention (the threefold Kyrie?) than from natural spontaneity. But the bizarre and strange musical ideas they contain complement this structural routine with material that sounds more mercurial. One thinks of Birtwistle’s advocacy of both order and capriciousness as essential simultaneous attributes of great music.
I have already instanced the multilayered ternary form of ‘Les orioles’ as an example of cyclic structure that is more passive and statuesque, and, in general, the many sectional repetitions in Des canyons are subjected to less creative renewal than in Messiaen’s earlier works. The cumulative effect of so many episodic and cyclic structures inevitably impedes the development of a broader directional energy sufficient to sustain dynamic impetus across the whole work. The listener gets disorientated, as he might equally lose his sense of direction in the bewildering inner labyrinth of Bryce Canyon itself.
Subtleties of coloration
The absence of dramatic opposition and the multisectional geometry of Des canyons means that, overall, the work lacks focus and thrust. Its totality is less than the sum of its parts. Its formulas are routine. What repeatedly saves Des canyons from sounding predictable is their extraordinary variety of musical character, and the inspired ingenuity with which Messiaen employs his medium-sized orchestra. As we have seen, not all sections repeat exactly. For instance, in the verse-refrain exchanges of the eleventh movement, Messiaen adds always sparkling new contrapuntal layers to each successive appearance of the refrain. This and the previous movement, ‘La grive des bois’, with their eerie string effects produced by playing both sides of the bridge, are among the most colourful pieces in Des canyons, and there are many other examples throughout the work of strange and lovely subtleties of orchestration, inspired, perhaps, by the widespread pursuit of extended playing techniques which characterized the decade of the 1960s just before Des canyons was written. For instance, avant-garde practices may have encouraged Messiaen to employ such ‘experimental’ techniques as that in No. 6 where the horn is directed to play high oscillations with valves pressed only half-way down (see Ex. 16.6).
EX. 16.6 Des canyons aux étoiles … 6 ‘Appel interstellaire’
EX. 16.7 Des canyons aux étoiles … 11 ‘Omao, leiothrix, elepaio, shama’
The indeterminate pitches in the piccolo part in No. 11 are another currently fashionable device employed for convincingly expressive ends (Ex. 16.7).
One could find many such instances: the strangely disembodied melody shared between bowed crotales, piccolo and solo violin harmonics, to the accompaniment of high double bass tremolos played with the metal nut of the bow while damping the lower pitches with the left hand, plus flutes playing ‘quasi pizzicato’ in the first movement can be cited as one of the most ingenious (see Ex. 16.8).
Perhaps the most memorable aspect of Des canyons is the degree to which Messiaen’s refined technique of overtone and timbral coloration, combined with a lifelong desire to turn natural into notated sounds, leads him into these extraordinary sound combinations. It is not only in the use of the wind machine, and the somewhat naive whistling produced by blowing through a trumpet mouthpiece detached from its instrument, that the border between musical sounds and noise are blurred, an artificial distinction in any case already rendered obsolete by John Cage. ‘Cedar Breaks’, for example, contains quite remarkable aural images. Its ingenuities of orchestration and unconventional instrumental techniques are exceptional, even for Messiaen. In this movement, Messiaen comes closest to discovering in nature a wild anarchy, an Ivesian unity in diversity. Daring both technically and expressively, the piece is unique in Messiaen’s œuvre. Here birdsong is metamorphosed into an abstract power, primeval, hallucinatory and cataclysmic: witness the monumental treatment accorded the red-shifted flicker and blue grouse in the opening tutti. In such passages Messiaen’s music becomes less harmonic than sculpted, hewn from elemental sonic matter like the music of Varèse.
EX. 16.8 Des canyons aux étoiles … 1 ‘Le désert’
EX. 16.9
Dissonance and resolution
As to the broader harmonic structure of Des canyons, basically it may be heard as a prolonged resolution of multifarious harmonic and intervallic colours into the secure and serene radiance of major triads. In the course of its twelve movements, Messiaen runs the gamut from extreme chromatic ambiguity to lustrous diatonic stability. But even when, as in the first movement, the harmony is consistently ambiguous and astringent, there is a tendency towards triadic resolution, here from D major down to D♭ major, both as second inversion chords contained within a more complex chromatic bitonality (see Ex. 16.9). The ‘stress-release’ characteristic of this semitonal slide is significant. It is typical of Messiaen’s music that the ends of phrases sink, subsiding into chords of resolution, as in the second movement with its arched melodies and piano birdcalls that repeatedly cadence through an octave drop on to a reposeful G major added-sixth chord (see Ex. 16.10).
EX. 16.10 Des canyons aux étoiles … 2 ‘Les orioles’
Messiaen’s association of harmony with visible colour is well known, so one might reasonably expect the extravagant hues which are part of the splendour of the Utah canyons to have inspired from him a matching exuberance of coloured harmony no less fantastic. In the notes he made while visiting the canyons, Messiaen lists ‘red-violet, a red-orange, rose, dark red carmine, scarlet red, all possible varieties of red, an extraordinary beauty’.7 To represent these predominant shades of red, should not also the harmonic character of Des canyons have a unique pigmentation among Messiaen’s works? Alas, despite the wonders of orchestration in Des canyons, the listener will probably conclude, with some disappointment, that the composer’s harmonic palette here is indistinguishable from that of his other music. Nevertheless, there are some striking, if familiar, juxtapositions. One such contrast occurs between the glowing E major tonality of the seventh movement, representing the flamboyant oranges and reds of Bryce Canyon, and the bitter-sweet of the clusterous chords which paint the prevailing ‘blue sky’ A major, already alluded to, of No. 8, ‘Les ressuscités et le chant de l’étoile Aldebaran’.
The unique sonic fantasy of ‘Cedar Breaks’ and the extent to which, despite its typically symmetrical sectional structure, it sounds erratic makes it, for me, the most interesting movement in Des canyons. After it, the following movements tend towards more conventional chordal harmony and structural formulas. Indeed, overall, the harmonic language of Des canyons harks back to the period of Turangalîla, and is far more consonant and diatonic than the intervening works, Chronochromie and Sept haïkaï. As tonalities assert themselves, they are invariably major. Indeed, the last five movements of Des canyons are all governed by major keys, centred successively on E, A, C, E and A, and unassailed by modulations or any real tonal dialectic. The frequent episodes of more elusive tonality are exactly that – episodic. Messiaen does not, in any sense, treat them as tonally confrontational, preferring his music to be without conflict. The sumptuous A major of ‘Zion Park et la cité céleste’ is in no sense the victor, bruised but triumphant, of an earlier tonal struggle. Only in that A major arrives like the high priest or celebrant in a colourful procession, does the music of this final movement achieve its glorious conclusion. Such is the composer’s right. Fancifully, we might have wished that the wandering, nineteenth-century American pioneers, the Mormons (who, when they ‘discovered the pink, white, mauve, red, black walls, the green trees and the limpid river of Zion Park, looked at it as a symbol of Paradise’,8 had been assigned parts in Des canyons as care-laden pilgrims, who could have trudged through the pages of the score like Childe Harold through Berlioz’s Italian landscape, or crossed over the river of death, like Mr Valiant-for-Truth, to be greeted by a hard-won A major as ‘all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side’. Nothing could have been further from Messiaen’s creative mind. A narrative of human drama would have interfered distractingly in this theocentric song of praise.
A lineage of nature-poets
If the human dimension of Romanticism is generally absent from Messiaen’s music, nevertheless, his leading position among nature-poets interestingly associates him with earlier composers, not only with Debussy and Ravel but, more closely perhaps, with Wagner, Berlioz, Schumann and Bach. Like Bach, Messiaen indulges in naive, almost childish illustration; yet more significant in the music of both composers is their spiritual response to the natural world as a manifestation of the divine. Bach’s tone-painting appeals to the conceptual imagination; the cantatas abound in musical portraits of landscape (for example, the rolling waves of a lake, swaying ears of corn and distant church bells) as much as they convey feeling (for example, the emotional state of Christ’s disciples).
Theories, albeit unproven, of the affinity between music and colour also go back a long way. The great nineteenth-century French painter Delacroix, himself a keen amateur musician, associated colour closely with mood, ranking colour above draughtsmanship for its ability to convey a purely abstract or ‘musical’ quality independent of the subject depicted.9 Baudelaire, Kandinsky and Skryabin held similar views, the poet in his turn constantly haunted by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s vision in his Kreisleriana of the relationship between colours, sounds and perfumes. In this novel Hoffmann presents his hero, Johannes Kreisler, as ‘the little man in a coat the colour of C sharp minor with an E major coloured collar’ – an eccentric metaphor maybe, but are Messiaen’s colour associations any less fanciful? The continued absence of any demonstrable scientific correspondence between sound and light waves has evidently failed to kill the aspirations for such union which emerged out of the artistic idealism of the Romantic era.
Although Messiaen shares with Bach a liking for representative illustration and colourful religious imagery, he is aesthetically closer to the Naturphilosophen of the early nineteenth century, to those nature-worshipping German Romantics who strove for a new synthesis of art, religion and the whole of creation. Novalis, the leading poet of early German Romanticism, developed an intense belief in the mystical unity of all things. Others, like Wilhelm Wackenroder, Jean Paul, Friedrich von Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin, immersed themselves in an idealized transfiguration of the natural world in communion with the divine. However, their quest was bound up with an intolerable ecstasy and yearning intensified through the act of creation, which, for some, resulted in an agonizing sense of inadequacy, and for others, like Hölderlin and Schumann, led to isolation and madness. Messiaen, on the other hand, seems to have been blessedly endowed, even as a child, with a serene confidence in his God-given vocation, and to have achieved what the Romantics sought less successfully, an escape from ‘self’ to espouse the whole of creation.
Messiaen was, after all, no pantheist but a devout Roman Catholic. Nevertheless, his creed is close to that of Schelling, the leading aesthetician of Naturphilosophen, who said ‘nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature’. ‘I’m not ashamed of being a Romantic’, Messiaen remarked to Claude Samuel.10 And although Messiaen’s music may be devoid of nostalgia, his love of orientalism and birdsong has its counterpart in the Romantics’ escape into medievalism from the withering rationalism of the Enlightenment. His taste for the exotic has its parallel in their readiness to embrace everything fantastic. And by rejecting the sardonic detachment and intellectual excesses of his own immediate predecessors – the post-war French composers of the 1920s – and co-founding with Yves Baudrier, Daniel-Lesur and André Jolivet the group La Jeune France, Messiaen allied himself emphatically with a Romantic concept of music.
The magical forest, home to many of Messiaen’s birds, with its teeming life, dappled light and quiet mystery, has been a recurrent source of musical inspiration especially for Germanic composers. It wove its spell around Schumann and Weber, divulged new insights to Siegfried and enfolded Hänsel and Gretel in sleep. Mahler built his composing retreat high in the forest, the love of Pelléas and Mélisande is enveloped in its shadows. The sun rises above Arcadian groves in Daphnis et Chloé; the numbing grey of Tapiola extends across bleak Scandinavian forests. In Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage an English woodland glade witnesses both the charming courtship of Jack and Bella and the ritual dances of hunters and hunted, birds among them. If, in Messiaen’s music, the woods and forests so meaningful to Romantic experience have been replaced by a fascination with mountains, glaciers and desert canyons, this is but a natural imaginative progression. Indeed, looking back over the twentieth century, it would now appear that composers have turned no less for inspiration to the natural world than in the nineteenth, despite the structural emphasis of many of its artistic movements, neoclassicism, modernism and minimalism being but three of the most abstract. Latterly, mankind’s imagination has been caught up in a greater vastness of time and space, conjuring images like the ancient megaliths of Maxwell Davies’s Stone Litany and Birtwistle’s Silbury Air, the impenetrable distances of Ligeti’s Lontano, the prehistoric supercontinent of Murail’s Gondwana, the imagined psychological landscapes of Berio, or the natural wonders and technological vistas over which glide the cameras in the Philip Glass/Godfery Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi, with its striking time-lapse photography. Narrative music11 may have declined in the twentieth century, but extra-musical associations continue. In the wake of Monet’s gradual transformation of pictorial definition, throughout his late series of waterlily paintings, into an abstract yet lyrical form of energy in which colour and atmosphere function like music, composers likewise have generally moved away from narrative and naturalism towards a lyrical symbolism, exploring the inner depths and intangible far horizons of matter and the mind.
The Romantics, too, were perpetually groping at the frontiers of the mysterious, wondering at the nature of God and time, questioning the place of man in the universe and delving into every branch of science. The German painter, Philipp Otto Runge, in a letter to his brother dated 9 March 1802, encapsulates a philosophy of Romantic art to which, one suspects, Messiaen could have subscribed:
When the sky above me teems with countless stars, when the wind whistles through endless space … when the sun lights up the universe and mists rise from the valley, then I throw myself down on the grass among the rose-sparkling dewdrops, and each blade of grass quivers with life, the earth beneath me writhes with life, and everything is in tune with everything – then my soul cries aloud with joy and hovers around me in immeasurable space; there is no longer any above or below, no longer any beginning or end; time is stilled, and I feel the living breath of God which drives the world through space and is the motive force and life of all.12
Nearly two centuries later, the infinity of space has become vaster, time more enigmatic, and the known world more extraordinary and wonderful. Messiaen’s adoration is for the creator of an even more astonishing universe, but his Romantic sentiments, tempered like Bach’s by the organ loft, submit to an unshakeable religious conviction rare among twentieth-century composers. Untroubled by doubt, his vision of creation is as theologically correct as it is devout.
Notes
1 This passage and the quotations in the previous paragraph are taken from ‘Canyons, Colours and Birds – an Interview with Olivier Messiaen’ by Harriet Watts, Tempo, 128 (1979), pp. 2–8.
2 Not that the presence or absence of text makes much difference to the character of Messiaen’s music. Virtually all his music is programmatic, and some of it even embodies implied texts represented symbolically, like the ‘alphabetic’ pitch and duration series devised for the organ Méditations of 1969 and used in the third and fifth movements of Des canyons, in which letters are assigned precise pitch and duration equivalents. When Messiaen uses voices, their role is on a par with birdsong. The latter may be more interesting rhythmically and melodically; but human voices, moving in serene chordal homophony, suggest that unity of the communion of angels and of the resurrected which is an essential part of Messiaen’s vision. To this end, he invariably prefers texts which are contemplative and non-dynamic. Where, in La Transfiguration, we meet fragments of biblical narrative, these serve only to define a context; their musical setting has the impersonal neutrality of quasi-plainsong through which the composer distances himself from any hint of developing drama. But if word-setting has no effect upon Messiaen’s penchant for episodic structure and does little to increase dramatic tension, undoubtedly voices add lustre to what are already splendid scenes of musical pageantry.
3 Watts, op. cit., p. 6.
4 Claude Samuel: Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris, Belfond, 1967); quoted in Roger Nichols: Messiaen (Oxford University Press, 1975, 2/ 1986), p. 21.
5 Messiaen composed this movement in the belief that the stars do sing, since one can record their vibrations, each star having its own frequency and ‘pitch’. More recently Gérard Grisey has employed the periodic radio transmissions from pulsars, received directly in the concert hall via a radio telescope, in his multidimensional piece, Le noir de l’étoile.
6 Incidentally, both Aldebaran and Betelgeuse are orange-red stars, but Messiaen overlooks this fact, as their colour is harmonically inconvenient. Orange-red is, of course, also the colour of Bryce Canyon, and its introduction into ‘Les ressuscités et le chant de l’étoile Aldebaran’ would only confuse the prevailing ‘blue’ sonority which the composer had planned to be the prevailing colour of this movement.
7 Watts, op. cit., p. 4.
8 From Messiaen’s programme notes on Des canyons aux étoiles.…
9 See Edward Lockspeiser’s extensive study of this fascinating subject in Music and Painting (Cassell, London, 1973).
10 ‘Je n’est pas honte d’être romantique’ (Samuels, op. cit., p. 141).
11 There is no narrative in Koyaanisqatsi and the Glass operas are also conceptually non-narrative.
12 I am indebted to Marcel Brion’s book, Schumann and the Romantic Age, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury (Collins, London, 1956) both for this extract and for his illuminating discussion of the aesthetics of the Naturphilosophen.