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March 5, 2009
Messiaen the Mysterious
Tim: I am massively into Olivier Messiaen's life and music right now. There's so much about him that I find fascinating. On one level he was a workaday church musician who played organ at Ste. Trinite in Paris every Sunday for over 60 years. Yet he was considered one of the most innovative composers of the twentieth century and taught some of the most radical and progessive composers at the Paris Conservatoire - Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, etc. His musical subject matter was primarily about the mysteries of the Catholic faith, yet he expressed it with an exotic compositional language. He was inspired by birdsong, both sacred (Aquinas) and secular philosophers (Bergson), Shakespeare, stained glass windows (especially Sainte-Chapelle in Paris [see the pictures in the second half of this post for our experience there] and Chartres Cathedral), the vast mountain ranges in Europe and America, etc.
There's so much interesting about him that I sometimes forget about his Quatuor pour le fin du temps, his most famous work which he composed while he was a prisoner in a German prison camp during WWII. I'm writing a paper in my Modern Music class on Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum ("And I Await the Resurrection of the Dead") from 1964, a work for woodwinds, brass and metallic percussion (bells, gongs, tam-tams). Awesome stuff!
For anyone interested, get the DVD Le liturgie de cristal or "The Crystal Liturgy," which is an excellent documentary about him. Netflix has it. For anyone really interested, check out this very cool website put together by Messiaen scholars. There's even a section on synesthaesia, for anyone interested in mixed up senses--hearing colors and smelling sounds and stuff like that.
Or go onto YouTube and watch the three part documentary Messiaen - A Life in Colour. It's a short British documentary celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth. Here's the first episode.
Tim , music stuff | By Tim and Jo | 8:19 PM
