Following are excerpts from Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (Paul Griffiths).
This is a particularly dense book, integrating Messiaen’s chronology with a thorough analysis of his works and his particular approach to musical composition. Griffiths intertwines Messiaen’s life-story, philosophy, religious convictions and music into a tightly woven and challenging treatise. A majority of the book centers around the technical aspects of his compositions, revealing the most recent developments in 20th Century compositional thought, although the author’s background in music theory and analysis becomes pedantic at times.
Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon, France (lifespan: Dec. 10, 1908 – April 27, 1992). After studying in Paris’ Conservatoire in the 1920’s, he became the church organist and music director of La Trinite in Paris. He lived and wrote music in Paris throughout his life, having been taught by Paul Dukas and influenced by Milhaud, Stravinsky, Frank, and Vierne, and Dupre.
Messiaen was highly religious from his youth and viewed music as an extension of his relationship with God, penning into his scores many references to and about God and the Bible. He once wrote, “music can encompass an opening towards the beyond, towards the invisible and the unsayable, which can be made with the help of sound-colour and amount to a sensation of dazzlement.”
Messaian, in the author’s text, had a “dissatisfaction with European progressive time and with Western views of music as polite social entertainment, emotional confession or abstract recreation of the mind. Very little in Messian’s is polite; almost nothing is abstract; and though the subjectiveness of his music is open to debate, in conscious intention it is objective, concerned only with the conveyance by the most suitable means of holy truth…Messiaen, too, was responding to what he has always seen as his purpose, that of presenting the truth of the church in musical form.”
Paris, when Messiean began his musical pursuits, “had a widespread understanding of music as a spiritual discipline, and art concerned with human and eternal time. Stravinsky himself…recognized this in his dictum of 1935 that: ‘The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man and time.”
It was this very thought, regarding time, particularly ‘eternal time’ that inspired Messiaen’s work throughout his life. His attempt to paint the sense of ‘eternity’ in his works became the hall-mark of his style. In order to do this, however, he had to depart from the traditional approach of ‘linear’ thinking found in most Western art music. Instead of establishing a sense of direction or forward movement, he, on the contrary, did everything he could not to give a sense of forward movement at all, endeavoring to create a ‘static’ sense, using repetitive cycles, verse-refrain structures, incomplete forms, “overlaying of rhythmic cycles of different durations, offering an image of eternity in the long time it must take for an original superimposition to be repeated…Messiaen’s music is full of heterophonies: of different threads moving at different speeds- and sometimes in different directions, since his frequent use of exact retrogression so readily suggests a reversal in the flow of time. Counterpoint is music synchronized to one clock; heterophony, and Messiaen’s complex heterophony above all, is the music of many clocks, running fast and slow, forwards and backwards…it is not surprising, therefore, that the most potent influences on Messiaen should have come not so much from Debussy and Stravinsky as from plainsong and from exotic music: from the rhythms and modes of ancient Greece and India, from the resonant heterophonies of Bali, from the ululations of birds.”
Messiaen developed a new set of musical scales to aid in the process of ‘stopping time’ he called “modes of limited transposition” which, by design, limit the forward movement of harmony. “Messiaen’s pitch structures…invite permanence rather than progression: his modes of limited transpositions, and harmonies made to sound like natural resonances. Repetition is the enemy of progress, and as such it was gradually extinguished during the development of Western music from Bach to Schoenberg. By contrast, even Messiaen’s earliest published compositions…forgo the directional movement of diatonic-symphonic music in favor of the stasis of symmetrical modality and the circular return of repetitive form.”
The author concludes, “New ways of experiencing time in music are equivalent to new ways of experiencing space in painting, sculpture and architecture, or to new ways of experiencing thought in writing. It is through these equivalences that Messiaen finds it in himself to respond to the surrealist challenge to reinvent the world according to the pattern of the mind, not to represent reality as brought to us by history and by the senses, but to create new realities from within. What may have helped him to become a greater artist…was his realization that those new realities could come also from a source that had been overlooked in the twentieth century – Christianity, the greatest surrealist conception of them all: a view of the world at odds with the perceived reality…Christianity is a body of thought and imagery that has grown in the minds of some of the outstanding geniuses of two millenniums…it cannot but have stabilized and tested Messiaen’s creative endeavors besides stimulating them. He himself would argue that there is the even greater difference that Christianity is the vehicle of the Truth. But to point to that Truth, ‘by want of Truth’, it may be enough that purely with the means of his art he has made the irrational real.”
Messiaen is perhaps the best example of a modern ‘Bach’, one who was sincere in his Christian faith, integrating that faith into his very bold creativity in modern music. He is yet to be widely known, but his work will continue to challenge future generations of artists, having established new ways of approaching the organization of sound. His example of sincere Christian faith together with forefront creativity is indeed a rare and precious model of excellence in today’s world.
On a humorous note: while at Eastman, I had the opportunity to study with Samuel Adler. He studied with Olivier Messiaen in France. I have always admired Messiaen’s work and asked Dr. Adler what it was like to study with him. His somewhat terse response, “All we did is take walks through the woods and he would talk about birds and Jesus…birds and Jesus!”