One of the composers whose music really explores both extremes of this tension is Olivier Messiaen. His seeking of highly-ordered systems rested on his religious convictions, and was a means to express a deeply mystical view of the world. To understand Messiaen is to enter a world where the only things that really matter are the liturgy of the Church, Gregorian Chant, and birdsong. It should come as no surprise that Messiaen's only stage work was a vast telling of the life of St Francis of Assisi, where the ondes-martinot, a primitive electronic 'free music' machine of which Messiaen was a noted exponent, plays a prominent role. His other major orchestral work, Turangalîla-Symphonie, also includes the ondes whooping and wallowing away in the sound fabric.
Organists often find Messiaen's scores unsettling and difficult to approach. He was a highly virtuosic player, and reigned in the tribune of the Parisian church, La Trinite. There he played for several masses and the Office on Sundays, calling on a vast repertoire which extended from the works of Bach to his own improvisations, which drew on Messiaen's own musical language, the modes of limited transposition. His scores reflect this immersion of highly developed technique in the liturgy.
One of the things that strikes you on opening Messiaen's music is the amount of extra-musical material, in the form of essays outlining the musical ideas, quotations from the Bible, Missal and various other sources, and the constant labeling of items within the score, drawing attention to transcriptions of bird calls and rhythmic elements. So this points in another direction, of Messiaen's other life-work, teaching composition and analysis at the Paris Conservatoire. I often wonder at the extent to which Messiaen's work as a teacher impinged on his composition, given the comprehensive explanation and labeling present right from the earliest works, increasing in quantity and detail as he matured.
One of the interpretation challenges is to bring this analytically aware music to life. It is hard to avoid the feeling of being forced into Messiaen's system of symbols, scales, hybrid chords and bird calls: it is a highly determined system with rules and exceptions that only Messiaen could ultimately explain. It's difficult to imagine a more rigidly-organized system apart from some of John Cage's edgier random music pieces, where the only random element was the flipping of a coin -- and even that was subject to an assumption about the probability of landing up with heads twice in a row.
With all this in mind, I've got a little bit of Messiaen to share today. It's the final movement from La Nativite du Seigneur, a toccata titled Dieu Parmi Nous (God with us). The suite was published in 1936, and contains nine movements depicting or meditating on the events of the nativity, with movements describing the mother and child, the shepherds, wise men, and angels whizzing madly about. Other movements take a more explicitly music-doing-theology approach, meditating on the Word, the children of God, and Jesus's acceptance of earthly sorrow.
This movement is prefaced by a quotation made up from from the Gospels of John and Luke (translated very crudely here):
Word of the communicant, the Virgin of the whole Church: the one who created me sits in my tent, the Word became flesh and dwells in me. My soul glorifies the Savior, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.Here is Olivier Latry performing the piece in a concert from a few years ago.
Sometimes it's good to hear the same piece from different angles. One of the obvious ways is to hear more than one performer, but that can get a little tedious after a while. Another way to develop a different perspective is to hear a transcription for some other instrument. This is something I received a while ago. It's very different, but utterly amazing.
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