Abstracts
Information on speakers is given below, with titles.
Abstracts can be found by scrolling down the page. Links to make navigation easier will be added as soon as possible.
Keynote speeches will be given by:
Hugh Macdonald (Washington University, St Louis), The Legacy of the Belle Époque.
François-Bernard Mâche (composer, former Messiaen student), will examine Messiaen's use of nature within the broader context of the relationship between humanity and nature in the 20th Century.
Claude Samuel (Organizer, French Messiaen 2008 celebrations), Permanences d'Olivier Messiaen.
The following papers will also be presented:
Julian Anderson (Guildhall School of Music and Drama): Messiaen and the Notion of Influence
Yves Balmer (Ecole Normale Supérieure): Genèse des formes dans Visions de l’Amen
Markus Bandur (Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg i. Br.): “Symmetrical permutation”: Olivier Messiaen and the Genesis of Integral Serialism after 1950
Peter Bannister: Messiaen and modernism - a centenary assessment
Anne-Sylvie Barthel (Université Paul Verlaine de Metz): Messiaen: a model and originator for Xenakis' rationalization of compositional processes and development of additive rhythmics
Amy Bauer (University of California, Irvine): The Impossible Charm of Messiaen’s Chronochromie
Vincent Benitez (Pennsylvania State University): Music as Incantation: An Examination of André Jolivet’s Influence on Olivier Messiaen
Jonathan W Bernard (University of Washington): Messiaen’s Synaesthesia: A follow-up report
Jean Boivin (Université de Sherbrooke): In Search of an Objective Evaluation of Messiaen’s Theoritical Writings: The Reception of the Traité de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie
Stephen Broad (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama): Messiaen and Modern L’art sacré’
Siglind Bruhn (University of Michigan): Veiling and Revealing in Light and Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Oratorio on the Transfiguration
Roderick Chadwick (Royal Academy of Music): La Fauvette des jardins and the “spectral frame of mind”
Wai Ling Cheong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong): Birdsong, Revelation and Messiaen's Visions de l'amen
Christopher Dingle (Birmingham Conservatoire): A love without influence? Messiaen and Mozart
Robert Fallon (Bowling Green State University): Theology of Creation and Light in Messiaen’s Form and Harmony, 1960–74
Germán Gan-Quesada (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): ‘Is Messiaen a great musician?’ Messiaen's reception in postwar Spain (1945-1960)
Peter Hill (University of Sheffield): Messiaen and birdsong in the 1950s
Lucie Kayas: D'une pièce radiophonique à un cycle pour piano : genèse des Vingt Regards sur l'enfant Jésus
Anne Keeley (School of Music, University College Dublin): In the beginning was the Word? An exploration of the origins of Olivier Messiaen’s Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité
David Kopp (Boston University): Analyzing Messiaen’s Later Piano Music: Two Pieces from Petites esquisses d’oiseaux
Chris Murray (Université Lumière Lyon 2): Timbres-durées
Christoph Neidhofer (McGill University): Messiaen’s Counterpoint
Roger Nichols: Trois Petites Liturgies and the gift to be simple
Marilyn Nonken (New York University): Messiaen to Murail, or, what sounds become
Sigune von Osten - Beyond the score: my collaboration with Messiaen (and Yvonne Loriod) on Harawi.
Raffaele Pozzi (Università degli Studi di Roma III – Italia): The Reception of Olivier Messiaen in Italy: a Historical Interpretation
Caroline Rae (Cardiff University): Messiaen and Ohana: Parallel Preoccupations or Anxiety of Influence ?
Rebecca Rischin (Ohio University): For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet
Andrew Shenton (Boston University): Five Quartets: the search for stillness, serenity and reconciliation in the war works of T. S. Eliot and Olivier Messiaen
Robert Sholl: The Shock of the Positive: Messiaen, St Francis and Modernity
Nigel Simeone (University of Sheffield): Transfiguration by name…: the sketches for Messiaen’s oratorio
Philip Weller (University of Nottingham): Messiaen’s Poetics: the case of the Cinq Rechants
Heather White Luckow (McGill University): From France to Québec: Messiaen’s Transatlantic Legacy
* * * * * * * * * * *
ABSTRACTS
Julian Anderson (Guildhall School of Music and Drama): Messiaen and the Notion of Influence
Using these extracts as a starting point, I hope to elucidate Messiaen’s unusual habit throughout his life of absorbing the music of other composers in a surprisingly literal manner, whilst paradoxically transforming it into something uniquely personal and unmistakebly original. This offers interesting parallels with Messiaen’s musical employment of his en plein air transcriptions of birdsong. Parallels will also be drawn with the output of Stravinsky, perhaps the only other major composer who was prepared to admit other composers and other musics into his own work in such a persistent manner, with equally personal results.
Yves Balmer (Ecole Normale Supérieure): Genèse des formes dans Visions de l’Amen
On se propose dans cette communication d’analyser les processus de genèse des formes dans Visions de l’Amen à partir des manuscrits déposés par Messiaen à la Bibliothèque nationale de France en juin 1950. Le manuscrit BnF, ms. 9138 est nommé par Messiaen lui-même « brouillon » de l’œuvre, très raturé il renferme sept ensembles de feuillets libres dont le contenu correspond à peu de choses prêt à la version définitive de l’œuvre ; toutefois, les brouillons de chacune des sept visions sont protégés par des « chemises de récupération » qui s’avèrent après étude être des esquisses pour cette œuvre. C’est la question de la forme qui guidera notre interrogation de ces documents qui tendra à mettre en évidence à la fois le travail sur la grande forme en sept mouvements (seuls cinq mouvements étaient initialement prévus), et la genèse des formes de chaque Visions. Ce travail permettra une réflexion sur le travail compositionnel du compositeur et ses choix en matière de forme à partir des différentes hypothèses de départ qu’il avait inscrites dans ses esquisses. On éclairera cet exposé par les pages traitant de forme dans les écrits du compositeur, notamment Technique de mon langage musical.
I would like to present my analysis of the Visions de l’Amen’s formal origins, based on a manuscript given by Messiaen in June 1950 to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Consisting of seven groups of loose sheets of paper whose content largely corresponds to the final version of the work, Messiaen referred to BnF manuscript 9138 as a draft. It includes many passages which have been crossed out. Nevertheless, each draft of the seven Visions is protected by recuperated sheets of paper, which upon study, reveal themselves to be true sketches of the work. My study of these documents will center on formal questions. These sketches reveal both Messiaen’s large scale formal concerns spanning the seven movements (Messiaen originally planned to write the Visions in five movements), as well as the formal origin of each individual movement. My study will allow for reflection upon Messiaen’s work habits as well as his choices of musical materials, taken and developped from the variety of ideas found in his sketches. I will supplement my analysis with Messiaen’s own writings on his formal practices, particularly those found in his Technique de mon lanagage musical of 1944.
Markus Bandur (Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg i. Br.): “Symmetrical permutation”: Olivier Messiaen and the Genesis of Integral Serialism after 1950
In the historiography of New music after 1950 it is an accepted truth, that Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949) of the Quatre études has been one of the influential key works for the emergence of Integral serialism.
The compositional technique with its special fixing ov every single note’s parameters as well as the anti-expressive attitude lead to the evaluation of this piece as a forerunner of integral serialism, if not mistakenly as a serial piece in itself, although Messiaen played down the piece’s importance in later years.
It has virtually gone unnoticed so far that Messiaen’s influence on early serialism is not restricted to the Mode. It is surprising to see that especially the numerical based technique of composing with permutations of a given sequence of notes, developed in 1949–50 and leading intentionally to certain orderings (e.g. an ascending chromatic scale) at specific points in time, has been realised by Messiaen before it became an important tool in the early works of the Darmstadt serialists since 1951 (Stockhausen, Boulez, Goeyvaerts).
My paper explores the background and the numerical aspects of this technique in Messiaen’s compositions as well as in his Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie, and deals with the religious implications of this combinatorial feature. It will become clear that this technique, which allows the calculated mediation of chaos and order in a somehow surprising fashion, leads to the theological centre of Messiaen’s music. This theological implication of Messiaen’s “symmetrical permutation”, as he puts it, enables us to understand, why early serialists focused especially on this technique in their first works.
Anne-Sylvie Barthel (Université Paul Verlaine de Metz): Messiaen: a model and originator for Xenakis' rationalization of compositional processes and development of additive rhythmics
Several scholars point out the very quick evolution of Xenakis’ style in his early works, from the folklorist tendancy of his first attempts to Metastasis (53-54), through Zyia (1952) and the first two volets of the Anastenaria triptych (from which Metastasis was planed to be the third one). At the same time – during the academic years 1951-52 to 1953-54-, Xenakis was - more or less evenly- attending Messiaen’s class at Paris National Conservatory. For this reason, the influence of Messiaen’s teaching in this evolution appears as an interesting debatable point. André Baltensperger was convinced of it but felt short of elements of evidence.
At that time, Xenakis kept notebooks on which he wrote down notes taken during Messiaen’s class and also his own personal compositional and theorical researches. Some common points – but new in Xenakis’compositional practice – appear clearly. They concern mostly the organization of durations, the permutations of musical elements and the search for non-arbitrary links between parameters.
Concerning rhythm, he left at that time folkloristic figures for an arithmetic organization in duration scales. He built on it polymetric proportional structures that he will use until the late seventies. Permutations- totally absent of earlier production - will become a topos of the xenakian creation.
In this evolution, Xenakis may have been directly influenced by Messaien’s strong and coherent ideas ; but they may also be seen as catalytics which have in somewhat way revealed Xenakis to himself. Messiaen would therefore have played the role of an « accoucheur ».
The study of this historical point may show Messiaen’s way of teaching in a special light.
1) F-B MACHE, « L’Hellénisme de Xenakis », in Un demi-siècle de musique… et toujours contemporaine, Paris, l’Harmattan, 2000, p.302-322 et A. BALTENSPERGER, Iannis Xenakis und die stochastische Musik, Berne, P. Haupt, 1996, p. 219-236.
2) Op. cit., p. 184.
Amy Bauer (University of California, Irvine): The Impossible Charm of Messiaen’s Chronochromie
Chronochromie occupies a seminal position in Messiaen’s œuvre, as both a culmination of the style oiseau from 1953 onwards and as a template for the preoccupation with colour and rhythmic complexity that would mark his later music. This paper uses analysis of Strophe I of Chronochromie to address a more universal question: the difficulty of moving beyond description to a hermeneutic understanding of Messiaen’s music, much less to say anything of its perception and cognition.
Chronochromie integrates for the first time Messiaen’s first fully-fledged isorhythmic permutation scheme with birdsong from two continents, 7- and 8-note harmonies, and a formal scheme derived from Greek poetics. In Strophe I three symmetrical permutations, set with 65 different chords, march asymmetrically beneath percussion accents and French birds (illustrated by winds and keyed percussion) to saturate chromatic, registral and timbral space. Messiaen’s Traité de Rythme, de Couleur, et d’Ornithologie presents the symmetrical permutations and accompanying harmonies of Strophe I as abstract patterns for our intellectual contemplation, devoid of functional context. Yet, Messiaen’s commentary stresses the limitations of these materials, the ‘charm of impossibilities’ that endows rhythm and harmony with a ‘great power’ rendered even greater in combination.
I will argue that Chronochromie renders those abstract charms palpable through the blurring of musical parameters, demonstrated by an analysis of the rhythmic and contrapuntal interaction of seven birdsongs with the harmonic/rhythmic ‘ground’. The interpenetration of birdsong, harmonic colour, timbre, and duration represents an attempt to render audible that which was not audible in itself. For Messiaen, faith in the power of what can’t be heard or seen drives that which can: ‘But the birds are more important than the tempi, and the colours more important than the birds. More important than all the rest is the aspect of the invisible.’
Vincent Benitez (Pennsylvania State University): Music as Incantation: An Examination of André Jolivet’s Influence on Olivier Messiaen
1935 to 1950. Aside from a handful of studies, such as Bridget F. Conrad’s “The Sources of Jolivet’s Musical Language and His Relationships with Varèse and Messiaen” (1994), Antoine Goléa’s “André Jolivet et Olivier Messiaen” (La Musique: de la nuit des temps aux aurores nouvelles, 1977), Theo Hirsbrunner’s Die Musik in Frankreich im 20. Jahrhundert (1995), Hilda Jolivet’s biography (Avec André Jolivet, 1978), and Nigel Simeone’s “La Spiral and La Jeune France: Group Identities” (2002), relatively little has been written about this significant musical relationship. This may be due primarily to how Jolivet and Messiaen’s works differ in sound, and secondarily to the ways in which they described their musical techniques. Nevertheless, certain striking parallels are evident in the compositional aesthetics and music of both composers.
Messiaen and Jolivet began their association in the 1930s when each composer was developing his musical language. Messiaen thought highly of Jolivet’s work early on and frequently expressed his admiration for it. In 1937, Messiaen wrote a positive review of Jolivet’s Mana (1935) for La Sirène, which later formed the basis of a glowing preface to the work when it was published by Éditions Costallat in 1946. Indeed, Messiaen was so taken with Mana that he introduced the piece to his students at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1940s and continued to analyze it through the 1960s.
After describing Messiaen’s personal relationship with Jolivet, particularly their time together in La Spirale and La Jeune France, this paper explores Jolivet’s compositional aesthetics and why they appealed to Messiaen. Jolivet was fascinated by incantation, magic, and non-Western musical practices. This led him to develop a musical style that resembled Messiaen’s in its approaches to natural resonance, modality, atonality, and repetition. This paper considers how these stylistic elements, as reflected in Jolivet’s Mana (1935), Cinq Incantations (1936), and the Cinq Danses rituelles (1939), are manifested in selected works by Messiaen, with special analytical attention paid to Cantéyodjayâ (1949) and the Quatre Études de rythme (1949-50), where the influence of Jolivet’s harmonic language and rhythmic innovations is clearly evident.
Jonathan W Bernard (University of Washington): Messiaen’s Synaesthesia: A follow-up report
With the posthumous publication, over the period of almost a decade (1994–2002), of Olivier Messiaen’s massive (seven-volume) Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie, much more has been revealed than was ever previously known about how Messiaen conceived of and thought about his own music—especially, of course, his music from the late 1940s on, which postdates his earlier, much briefer treatise, the Technique de mon langage musical. It is somehow fitting that, in the schedule of publication, the volume on colour should have been saved for last. For the colour attributes of Messiaen’s music are not simply a matter of style; they stem, as is well known by now, from a neurological condition that induces cross-modal sensory responses: specifically, in Messiaen’s case, coloured-hearing synaesthesia. Since these responses are essentially involuntary, one gathers that they affect, to a greater or lesser degree, every aspect of Messiaen’s musical world; at the same time, paradoxically, they are intensely personal and private, inaccessible to others except by way of verbal descriptions of the phenomena as experienced by the synaesthete. Yet to the extent that these phenomena exhibit patterns that can be detected by others, they offer potentially important clues to such fundamental matters as the principles of harmonic structure in Messiaen’s music: clues that cannot be gleaned by any other means.
Up until the appearance of Volume 7 of the Traité in 2002, scholars who studied this aspect of Messiaen’s “formation” and its effect on his compositions had two principal sources of information to work with: one, scattered references of widely varying specificity, in interviews, lectures, program notes, and the like, to the colour qualities of particular passages or movements; two, colour labels in some musical scores from the 1950s on, identifying specific elements such as chords or rhythmically distinct strata. Using these sources, it proved possible to pin down many of the colour attributes of certain of the modes of limited transposition (nos. 2, 3, 4, and 6, which it has become customary to call the “colour modes”), attributes which vary drastically depending upon the specific transposition in use. However, large tracts of Messiaen’s harmonic language are independent of these modes, and it is in these areas that the tables in Volume 7 have provided much new and much-needed data, aiding the researcher in sorting out the varieties of (using Messiaen’s own terminology) turning chords, chords of contracted resonance, and the chord with inversions transposed to the same bass note. Building on my previous work on this topic, the present paper takes some meaningful steps in the direction of a general theory of harmony for Messiaen’s music based on colour correspondences and associations.
1) “Messiaen’s Synaesthesia: The Correspondence between Color and Sound Structure in His Music,” Music Perception 4 (1986): 41–68; “Colour,” in The Messiaen Companion, ed. Peter Hill (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 203–219.
Jean Boivin (Université de Sherbrooke): In Search of an Objective Evaluation of Messiaen’s Theoritical Writings: The Reception of the Traité de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie
The origins of Messiaen’s monumental Traité are complex. The composer was never completely satisfied with his manuscript and left the work incomplete upon his death. But not without first sketching out a detailed outline for his wife, Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, a devoted performer of his works and one of his first students. Another former Messiaen student, composer Alain Louvier, shared Loriod’s daunting task and also penned the forewords and introductions to each volume. Studies of Messiaen’s pedagogical career (Boivin 1995, 1998, 2007) confirm a close connection between the Traité and the composer’s oral teachings at the Paris Conservatory and at occasional classes held elsewhere, for instance, at Darmstadt. Nonetheless, a lack of information makes dating the various sections of the Traité difficult, more so since various parts exist in a range of versions. While Loriod provides little in the way of clarification, recent discoveries by Messiaen scholars (Hill and Simeone 2005) have begun to shed light on this problem.
The Traité presents difficulties for readers. Sketched out in infinite detail but left incomplete after 40 years of writing and reflection, the work is laden with repetitions, structured in a rather curious manner, and based on a disparate array of sources. Long awaited analyses such as the composer’s reading of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring may disappoint: individual musical parameters are treated in isolation and only select passages of the score are examined in detail. Yet few commentators (notably in France) have dared make a reasonably objective, critical examination of this posthumous work, and fewer still have examined all volumes.
This paper provides an overview of the critical reception of Messiaen’s Traité with particular attention to the reviews of Dingle (1995-2004), Hirsbrunner (2003), Keym (2004), Nichols (1996), and Verret (1995). While these authors underscore the Traité’s contributions, they also point to various lacunae, including important commentary related to Messiaen’s analysis of his own works. Still, only one author provides a particularly harsh assessment of the treatise. What seems like French indifference towards a theoretical work that is anything but insignificant may surprise. But a study of the existing literature also reveals that it remains difficult to draw a line between Messiaen’s music and his theoritical contributions . . . and that it is even more challenging to undertake an in-depth, critical study of his writings without seeming to diminish his importance and value, both as a composer and as a teacher.
Stephen Broad (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama): Messiaen and Modern L’art sacré’
Abstract to appear shortly
Siglind Bruhn (University of Michigan): Veiling and Revealing in Light and Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Oratorio on the Transfiguration
Jesus’ transfiguration on a high mountain in the presence of three apostles, told in the three synoptic gospels, is the culminating point of his public life. The phenomenon is described as 'metemorphothe', the emanation from his face and body of a dazzling brightness produced by an interior shining of his divinity. In his 1969 composition for chorus, soloists and large orchestra, La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Messiaen undertakes to render this visual event in musical language.
While the texts sung by the chorus quote from the biblical account in alternation with excertps from the Old Testament, the missal, and Thomas Aquinas, a single verse from the Book of Wisdom, ‘Candor est lucis aeternae...’ emerges as the oratorio’s central statement owing to its fourfold setting. It also gives rise to the work’s only explicit musical theme. I want to show that, just as the bright splendor surrounding the transfigured Jesus both reveals and veils his divine nature, so do Messiaen’s veiled musical signifiers help to reveal impressions that transcend verbal description. The musical contour of the ‘Candor’ theme, by reminding the initiates of Messiaen’s language of the flower of forgiveness and the rainbow of God’s promise, acts as a melodic transmedialization of the dazzling visual experience of which the gospels can barely speak.
Roderick Chadwick (Royal Academy of Music): La Fauvette des jardins and the “spectral frame of mind”
Messiaen remarked to Claude Samuel that “it’s in my Catalogue d’oiseaux and in La Fauvette des jardins that you’ll find my great formal innovation……I sought to reproduce in condensed form the vivid course of the hours of day and night”. In La Fauvette des jardins the passage of time at various levels, both real and simulated, invites close scrutiny. Messiaen, in his preface, comments that “the even flow of its [the garden warbler’s] discourse seem[s] to arrest time” - vivid reproduction of time’s passing is achieved, throughout large parts of the piece, by its illusory suspension. At the other end of the scale, he instructs the pianist to “observe precisely the durations of chords at the ends of phrases, in order that the colours may be perceived”, merging parameters in a way that may well have held fascination for a number of his students at that time.
This paper will analyse Messiaen’s evocation and manipulation of time in La Fauvette des jardins taking into consideration subsequent developments made by composers of what Gérard Grisey, amongst others, has called a “spectral attitude”. Reference is made to works such as Tristan Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli, where the play of resonance gives rise to “sinusoidal forms…..with, here and there, iambic or quasi-regular rhythms like heartbeats”. Pre-echoes of the classic spectral sound world occur in earlier Messiaen, such as the penultimate page of “Première Communion de la Vierge” which could be heard as a prototype for the opening of Grisey‘s Partiels. By examining how La Fauvette both anticipates and stands apart from the developments of Messiaen's successors, a contextual basis upon which to view the work will be established, and its innovative qualities further assessed.
Wai Ling Cheong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong): Birdsong, Revelation and Messiaen's Visions de l'amen
Visions de l’amen is in many ways a special piece in Messiaen’s oeuvre. As his only piano duet, it comes first among his many musical dedications to Loriod and marks his first attempt to compose a major work for the piano. It is also the only work closely examined by Messiaen in his two treatises, Technique de mon langage musical and Traité de rythme, de couleur et d’ornithologie. It is thus surprising that the existing literature completely overlooks the marvel of Visions de l’amen and fails to note that it is Messiaen’s earliest piece to have exhibited traits (the use of inexact doubling and color-chords) typical of his mature birdsong. That these new techniques are accommodated in Visions de l’amen is doubly striking since they disappear from the following works not to resurface until Réveil des oiseaux. It is as if he arrived at these techniques by accident and did not realize their potential until much later, though it also seems possible that the medium of a piano duet had provided him with a safer ground for experimentation.
This paper will focus on Messiaen’s appropriation of birdsong in “Amen des anges, des saints, du chant des oiseaux”, the fifth piece of Visions de l’amen. A survey of Messiaen’s music and prose helps trace how his birdsong and his view of it change over time and this helps provide the context for a detailed investigation of the techniques as well as the aesthetics associated with the birdsong of “Amen des anges, des saints, du chant des oiseaux”. I will argue that the piano duet is his earliest piece to have exhibited traits typical of his mature birdsong and is therefore of paramount importance to any serious attempt to detail his outstanding development as an ornithologist-composer. In short, this paper will bring to light for the first time the key significance of Visions de l’amen in Messiaen’s life-long experimentation with birdsong.
1) Most major works composed before Visions de l’amen had already been treated at some length in Technique, though there is evidence that Visions de l’amen was treated in a hurry. Similarly, most major works from Visions de l’amen up to Couleurs de la cité céleste (with the exception of Réveil des oiseaux, Oiseaux exotiques and Catalogues d’oiseaux) are analyzed in whole in Traité.
2) The color-chords remain anonymous at this stage but were tabled and analyzed in details in the seventh and last volume of Traité.
Christopher Dingle (Birmingham Conservatoire): A love without influence? Messiaen and Mozart
The music of Mozart was Messiaen’s first, and most enduring musical love, one that went far beyond musical influence and enthusiasm. In examining his many utterances, the evidence begins to mount that, for Messiaen, Mozart was not merely a favourite composer, but that he was the composer par excellence, the epitome of musical perfection And yet, while everyone notes the love of Mozart, nobody, other than Messiaen himself, has suggested any kind of musical influence. This paper considers whether this omission is tenable, and and proposes several areas that might provide fertile territory for someone prepared to take up the challenge of a serious investigation of the creative influence of Mozart upon Messiaen.
Robert Fallon (Bowling Green State University): Theology of Creation and Light in Messiaen’s Form and Harmony, 1960–74
Despite numerous efforts to define Messiaen’s relationship to Roman Catholicism, scholars have reached no consensus about the foundation of his musical theology. Studies have discussed his connection to several medieval figures, including Sts. Aquinas (C. C. Hill 1998, Pelikan 2000), Francis (Petersen 1998), Bernard, and Bonaventure (Fallon 2005, 2007a) as well as to such modern figures as Chateaubriand (Freeman 1996), John XXIII (Dingle 2000), Maritain, Couturier, Chardin, Lubac, and von Balthasar (Fallon 2002, 2005, 2007b).
Although each of these sources adds to our understanding of Messiaen’s theology, a 13th-century theological movement called “Gothic spirituality” synthesizes several important strands of this medieval tapestry, helping to explain Messiaen’s recurring theme of mediation between heaven and earth. Gothic spirituality drew heavily from Neoplatonism and posited a relationship between noumena and phenomena, spirituality and aesthetics. In Neoplatonic cosmology, creation emanates from superabundant being and exemplifies traces of that being in a hierarchy that illuminates the soul more brightly the closer it rises toward God. The Trinity, creation, and light are its key images.
In this paper, I build on my two previous studies on how Gothic spirituality elucidates Messiaen’s entre-deux-guerres compositions and bird style by explaining how Gothic theology of creation and light influenced Messiaen’s works from 1960 to 1974. For example, illumination informs the light imagery in Chronochromie, Couleurs de la cité céleste, La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, and Des Canyons aux étoiles…, while creation informs not only the nature sounds in these works, but also the Trinitarian concerns of La Transfiguration and Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité. I discuss probable medieval and contemporary sources for Messiaen’s Gothic spirituality and analyze recurring formal principles and harmonic tendencies of his colored harmonies.
Germán Gan-Quesada (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): ‘Is Messiaen a great musician?’ Messiaen's reception in postwar Spain (1945-1960)
Almost a decade after the cultural catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War, Spanish musical composition began managing to retrieve the efforts made before the conflict by the so-called ‘Generación de la República’ (E. and R. Halffter, G. Pittaluga, S. Bacarisse etc.), under the wide shadow of Manuel de Falla’s music. From the late forties to 1960, some pieces from the earlier avantgardists trends (Stravinsky, Bartók, Viennese School) and by younger composers (Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono) could be heard in public concerts and meant an incentive for those musicians who were searching for new aesthetic references, very far from the old-fashioned nationalist taste assumed by Francoist cultural politics.
This paper aims to show Olivier Messiaen’s importance in this updating process, from his visits –together with Y. Loriod– to Barcelona and Madrid in 1949 until the Spanish first performance of Visions de l’Amen (April 1960); it will focuse too upon his controversial appreciation in critical and musicographic literature of the period in Spain.
Peter Hill (University of Sheffield): Messiaen and birdsong in the 1950s
Abstract to appear shortly
Lucie Kayas: D'une pièce radiophonique à un cycle pour piano : genèse des Vingt Regards sur l'enfant Jésus
Anne Keeley (School of Music, University College Dublin): In the beginning was the Word? An exploration of the origins of Olivier Messiaen’s Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité
In his early career Messiaen regarded music as language. Although over time his aesthetic perspective appeared to shift, he remained fascinated with this idea and persisted in trying to find ‘[…] a type of musical language that would communicate.’ This langage communicable is the essential element in his Méditations sur le Mystère de La Sainte Trinité (1969). Using it, Messiaen incorporates into the music precise verbal statements - direct quotations from the Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas dealing with Trinitarian theology. The langage communicable is not, however, simply a vehicle for Aquinas's words. It is the fabric that gives a sense of musical cohesion to the work.
Messiaen’s appropriation of Aquinas’s words has meant that his organ cycle is usually – and perhaps perfunctorily - associated exclusively with Aquinas’s theology. In the course of this colossal work, however, there are but three quotations from Aquinas. Furthermore, an exegesis of the work that takes account of all the elements in the score suggests that the inspiration for the work derives from a theology that diverges significantly from Aquinas. The origins of the Méditations are in a 1967 event celebrating the centenary of l’Église de la Sainte Trinité and its organ. This comprised a series of meditations by well-known Parisian preacher, Mgr Charles, to which Messiaen reacted with alternating organ improvisations. The extent to which Mgr Charles’s words may have influenced the fully-composed organ cycle is something I am currently researching
Consequently, this paper will aim to explore in greater detail – with reference to Mgr Charles’s words - the ideas that are central to the musical structure of the Méditations. The paper’s ultimate goal is to offer a broader understanding of what the composer is trying to do in his choice of musical materials and his arrangement of those materials.
David Kopp (Boston University): Analyzing Messiaen’s Later Piano Music: Two Pieces from Petites esquisses d’oiseaux
Messiaen’s later piano music has received much less analytic attention than his earlier music. The more orderly aspects of Messiaen’s earlier style are less in evidence in the later style, subsumed into a broader harmonic palette featuring enhanced use of complex chords and textures, with content relating to a wide range of traditional scales and modes of limited transposition. Petites esquisses d’oiseaux, a group of six short birdsong pieces, provides opportunities for close analyses of complete Messiaen pieces. The music’s continually changing textures, tempi, pitch content and expressive character present challenges both to performance and analysis. This paper will concentrate on aspects of the first two pieces, ‘Le rouge gorge’ and ‘Le merle noir’, with occasional reference to the later pieces :
· the organizational roles of modes and scales less prominent in earlier Messiaen (particularly modes 7 and the pentatonic scale)
· the interrelationship of functional harmonic patterns, modally derived chords, and Messiaen’s characteristic harmonies of color and resonance
· aspects of formal organization (four parallel episodes in ‘Le merle noir’, with unifying harmonic elements; six more loosely related, less unified episodes in ‘Le rouge gorge’)
· the evolution of the birdcalls from earlier pieces
· several distinct recurring textures (including a Pärt-like tintinnabulation) and their fluid relation to tempo and pitch organization, with ever-changing, subtly varied mixtures and repetitions
· issues of continuity and coherence given a highly disjoint surface presentation, particularly in ‘Le rouge gorge’.
Chris Murray (Université Lumière Lyon 2): Timbres-durées
Messiaen’s little-known work of musique concrète. Timbres-durées was created during the spring of 1952. This was the time of an important stylistic juncture for Messiaen, marking his move to what has been termed his “style oiseau”. A collaboration with the young Pierre Henry, I will reveal how Timbres-durées fell into obscurity after being presented at conferences in Paris, Donaueschingen, and the United States as a model of contemporary musique concrète.
My analysis situates Timbres-durées in relation to other works by Messiaen as well as works of musique concrète from the same period. The historiographic aspect of my paper examines little-studied documents and discusses the origins of the work’s reception and the circumstances of its fall into disfavor. I will reveal how these events were connected to Messiaen’s relationship with the developing world of electroacoustic music and its principle figures. I will also address this work’s embodiment of Messiaen’s contradictory embrace of natural sounds as musical and his creative dependence upon musical écriture.
This paper will be a revised and expanded form of findings contained in my Masters thesis, work which is also at the heart of my current doctoral research. It was made possible by discoveries made in French and Belgian archives as well as by the recent release of a recording of Timbres-durées by the French Institut National de l’Audiovisuel.
Christoph Neidhofer (McGill University): Messiaen’s Counterpoint
Building upon the analytical method I developed in my article “A Theory of Harmony and Voice Leading for the Music of Olivier Messiaen” (2005), this paper examines the contrapuntal features of selected works that use the modes of limited transposition. I shall understand “counterpoint” in a broad sense, from the combination of different lines within a single mode to the superposition of entire blocks of material in different modes. I will first show how Messiaen’s so-called “clusters of chords” are built from carefully crafted voice-leading patterns that, aside from the well-known parallel voice leading in his “parallel successions of chords” and open fan motions, include various types of invertible counterpoint, among other patterns. I will then identify the verticalities (“chords”) projected by the combination of the lines, and will show how as listeners we perceive the harmonies from at least two perspectives simultaneously, which I call the step-class perspective (hearing the constituent intervals in terms of the number of scale degrees they span within a mode), the mod-12 perspective (hearing the absolute size of intervals measured in semitones), and—where applicable—the tonal perspective (including hearing tonal functions). I show that it is the combination of these perspectives that produces the “stained-glass quality” of Messiaen’s modal music. My analyses will demonstrate how this effect is amplified even further in Messiaen’s polymodal passages.
The paper will also address the spacing of Messiaen’s chords from a step-class perspective (with reference to prior work by Cheong and Bernard on spacing consistencies in Messiaen’s harmonies). Examples to be discussed include excerpts from Visions de l’Amen (II), Vingt Regards sur l’ Enfant-Jésus (V), and Harawi.
Roger Nichols: Trois Petites Liturgies and the gift to be simple
Abstract to appear shortly
Marilyn Nonken (New York University): Messiaen to Murail, or, what sounds become
Tristan Murail (b.1947), recognized alongside Gerard Grisey as a father of spectral music, studied with Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire from 1967 to 1972. Of Messiaen’s students, Murail may be, aesthetically, his closest heir. Messiaen’s influence can be most compellingly traced through Murail’s piano music: six compositions spanning the course of his still vibrant career (1967-2003). However, it is a particularly revealing to focus on Murail’s first piano work, Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe,written as an audition piece for his Conservatoire application. Rediscovered in the early 1990’s, this composition reveals how Murail initially mimicked Messiaen’s stylistic signatures, by exploiting non-retrogradable and expanding rhythmic structures, modal sonorities, and dense chordal configurations. Even at this early stage, however, Murail was evolving into a mature artist who in revolutionary ways was expanding on his teacher’s most startling innovations in the realms of timbre, harmony, rhythm, and form. As a pianist who commissioned Murail’s Les Travaux et Les Jours, his most recent piano work, and recorded his complete piano music (Metier MSV-CD 92097, 2005), Marilyn Nonken considers issues of both analysis and performance in exploring Messiaen’s extraordinary influence.
Sigune von Osten - Beyond the score: my collaboration with Messiaen (and Yvonne Loriod) on Harawi
Abstract
will appear shortly
Raffaele Pozzi (Università degli Studi di Roma III – Italia): The Reception of Olivier Messiaen in Italy: a Historical Interpretation
In the Italian musical milieu Olivier Messiaen has been generally recognized as an eminent composer of the twentieth century music. Strangely enough, this aura does not correspond to a consequent large presence of his music in the concert programme and a widespread knowledge of his works. The first aim of this paper is to reconstruct the performance and reception history of Messiaen’s music in Italy since 1945 to examine, from a historical and critical perspective, this evident contradiction.
Among the first who wrote about Messiaen’s music, the authoritative music critic Guido Maggiorino Gatti underlined, in 1946, a «theoretical and literary excess» in the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. This judgement clearly shows the influence of Benedetto Croce’s idealistic aesthetics which refused to give any relevance to the technical-theoretical aspects of the arts. This philosophical trend dominated cultural criticism in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. Significantly, Luigi Dallapiccola, champion of the Italian postwar musical rinnovamento with Goffredo Petrassi, expressed, after an initial perplexity, a different position and his great admiration for the French composer. Following a lecture of Messiaen and a performance of Visions de l’Amen held in Florence in 1947, Dallapiccola published a review in the magazine «Il Mondo europeo» speaking of a «large and impressive work».
The moderate attention reserved to Messiaen’s music in Italy, compared to the reception in other European countries such as United Kingdom or Germany, mainly came, on one side, from a conflict between Messiaen’s musical aesthetics and the cultural politics of the Catholic Church after the reform of the Vatican II, and, on the other side, the position of PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) which had a strong political power in Italian cultural institutions during the 1970s. In fact Messiaen’s spiritual modernism was deeply far whether from the pop music orientation or from neocecilian conservative restoration plans which appeared in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. In the meanwhile, the Italian Left and the PCI gave their support to the avantgarde music of a younger and more “revolutionary” generation of composers (Berio, Boulez, Nono, Manzoni etc.) not connected, as Messiaen was, with suspect Christian or spiritual imageries.
Caroline Rae (Cardiff University): Messiaen and Ohana: Parallel Preoccupations or Anxiety of Influence ?
Maurice Ohana avoided making public statements about the music of his illustrious contemporary Messiaen, his regrettable silence reflecting certain tensions among the sometimes less than fraternal society of Parisian composers of the last sixty years. Even in the 1980s, when Ohana had achieved widespread recognition and was among the esteemed of his generation, two distinct compositional factions could be identified: one comprising those who had been students of Messiaen or whose music had been promoted through the Concerts du Domaine musical or Ensemble Intercontemporain; the other comprising those who were not. Ohana, like Dutilleux and many others, belonged to the latter category and composers from one group could not comfortably be mentioned in the company of those from the other. Although such tensions have since waned, Ohana did not live long enough to experience the gradual mellowing that has characterised the period since his death in 1992, the same year as Messiaen.
Another reason for Ohana’s regrettable silence about Messiaen is what might be called anxiety of influence. Despite the apparent divergence of compositional groups since the 1950s, many features in the music of Messiaen and Ohana demonstrate similarities that reveal their respective contributions to be branches of a compositional tree rooted in the fertile loam of Debussy and nourished by kindred influences from the exotic to the esoteric, the religious to the mystic. This paper will explore these parallel preoccupations: their love of Nature, of plainchant and the sacred vocal repertories, the adaptation of certain techniques derived from Medieval and Renaissance practice as well as other features including referential tonality, chordal structures, the incorporation of non-European rhythmic patterns and devices such as added-resonance. These will be set against a background of certain aesthetic principles of La Jeune France echoed in the ideas of Ohana’s compositional protest group of the late 1940s, Le Groupe Zodiaque. While Ohana sought to make a virtue of his independent position, the aim will be to show unity within diversity and the presence of inspirational ideas that belonged to the French artistic mainstream of the last century.
Rebecca Rischin (Ohio University): For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet
Abstract will appear shortly
Andrew Shenton (Boston University): Five Quartets: the search for stillness, serenity and reconciliation in the war works of T. S. Eliot and Olivier Messiaen
T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets were published in 1943; Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps was published in 1944. Both works were written during the Second World War although both contain earlier material. This essay catalogs the composition and publication of both works and analyses certain primary themes, noting extraordinary similarities in the subject matter including the manipulation of time, moving towards a state of grace, the sadness and tedium of life and ways of knowing God.
Radical new compositional techniques by Messiaen have parallels in new literary techniques by Eliot, which come to developmental fruition in these works. These techniques are discussed along with the philosophy and theology of each man, as outlined in the quartets. An examination of the multi-movement form of each work elucidates the narrative and didactic function of each and explains how both men were trying to reach beyond time to ‘the still point of the turning world,’ in an attempt to find stillness, serenity and reconciliation. Finally, the extraordinary success of both works is assessed in the context of the time in which they were written and the way they impact future generations as they attempt to get to the state Eliot described as ‘beyond poetry and beyond music’.
Robert Sholl: The Shock of the Positive: Messiaen, St Francis and Modernity
Abstract will appear shortly
Nigel Simeone (University of Sheffield): Transfiguration by name…: the sketches for Messiaen’s oratorio
The genesis of Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ is particularly richly documented among the papers and manuscripts in Messiaen’s private archives. As well as extensive correspondence with Mme Perdigão of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon (who commissioned the work), there are also a number of manuscript sources showing several stages of the composition process itself, from early sketches, through more developed drafts, to a complete short score and, finally, the fully orchestrated version. This paper will present these different stages in the work’s composition, taking one short passage as an example, in an attempt to shed some light on how Messiaen went about the act of composition.
Philip Weller (University of Nottingham): Messiaen’s Poetics: the case of the Cinq Rechants
The present paper forms part of a larger project devoted to Messiaen’s understanding of poetry and the poetics of his (primarily but not exclusively) vocal music, as well as his attitude to language and imagery more generally. Following on from an investigation of the songs and song cycles and also the Cécile Sauvage poetry, it sets out to chart some of the subtleties and complexities, as well as the brilliant simplicities and the unerring directness in performance, of the Cinq Rechants of 1948. Taking its cue not just from the much discussed ‘Tristan complex’ and the general context suggested by Messiaen’s well-known preoccupations of the later 1940s, but also from the rich – yet in so many ways very far from obvious – hinterland of ideas provided by the songs of the Claude le Jeune Printemps, it will suggest ways in which the composer’s working aesthetic is able, here as elsewhere, to find a productive balance between the known and the new, the archaic and the modern, the ideational and the musical.
The specific sound-world and structural articulations of the Rechants owe something to Messiaen’s chosen models, but the composer uses this creative point of departure as a means of exploration to arrive at something original and radically new, and in that sense unexampled. This situation offers, in microcosm, a thumbnail sketch of one of the most characteristic things about Messiaen: his paradoxical combination of traditionalism and modernism, displayed in many different ways throughout his work. And it also allows us to explore the component ‘source materials’ independently of the composer’s own account as given in the Traité. The paper therefore sets out to examine the nature and rôle of Baïf’s radical poetic experimentations (which were the basis for Le Jeune’s equally radical musical solutions in Le Printemps) as a parallel case to that of the Rechants, in which the invention of the verbal patterns and the self-evidently ‘difficult’ vocality of the overall musical texture stand in a relationship of (again productive) tension to the phrase contours and the melodic gestures of the individual vocal lines. Much as in the Le Jeune songs, these elements are held together, and thus reconciled, at the level of metre and rhythm. The paper will also look, very briefly, at the more general question of Messiaen’s poetic preferences (not least his great attachment to Rilke, his liking for a labyrinthine mixture of disclosure and concealment, and the eccentric yet uniquely eloquent ‘homespun’ poetics of Harawi, a kind of precursor to that of the Rechants) as a rich source of expressive and declamatory gestures (invariably concise, frequently quasi-visual), as well as of phonemic sound-material.
Heather White Luckow (McGill University): From France to Québec: Messiaen’s Transatlantic Legacy
Québec’s New Music movement of the 1950s and 60s was driven by a group of composers who studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. This paper focuses on Messiaen’s influence upon three of his Québécois students who adopted several of Messiaen’s compositional tools as the basis of their own techniques: Serge Garant (1929-1986), Clermont Pépin (1926-2006), and André Prévost (1934-2001). While the three developed different musical styles, their compositional techniques have much in common, which I attribute, in part, to the influence of their teacher. My paper shows that this influence is most evident in the works written during and immediately after their studies with Messiaen.
Garant composed Concerts sur terre (1951) while a student of Messiaen. This work uses materials reminiscent of Messiaen’s harmonic structures and melodic lines that partition the octave symmetrically. While on the boat returning to Québec, Garant sketched elaborate plans for a new work, “Variations pour deux pianos” (1952, incomplete), featuring rigorous permutations, non-retrogradable rhythms, and Hindu rhythms. Pépin employed the modes of limited transposition frequently in his early mature works, including Guernica (1952) and Le Rite du Soleil Noir (1955), while Prévost was fascinated with symmetrical permutations and large-scale palindromes of pitch and rhythm, as will be illustrated in examples from Mobiles (1959), Sonate pour violon et piano (1960), and Terre des hommes (1967).
The paper compares and contrasts techniques used by the three Québécois composers with Messiaen’s own compositional devices. My analyses draw upon information from compositional sketches housed in archives in Montréal and Ottawa, program notes and prefaces to scores, the composers’ self-analyses, and most importantly, their recollections about their experiences with their teacher.