Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception

Robert Fallon, Christopher Dingle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317097143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Focusing on Messiaen's relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen's music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen's compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception explores Messiaen's imprint on recent musical life. The first part scrutinizes his compositional technique in terms of counterpoint, spectralism and later piano music, while the second charts ways in which Messiaen's influence is manifest in the music and careers of Ohana, Xenakis, Murail and Quebecois composers. The third part includes case studies of Messiaen's reception in Italy, Spain and the USA. The volume also includes an ornithological catalogue of Messiaen's birds, collates information on the numerous 'tombeaux' pieces he inspired, and concludes with a Critical Catalogue of Messiaen's Musical Works.

PART I
Techniques

Perspectives on Techniques

Christopher Dingle and Robert Fallon

Solid technique is an essential, yet oft-maligned ingredient for a creative artist. It is often played down, as it can smack of the unglamorous, workaday aspect of what an artist does. Yet it is the product of many hours, days, months and years of formation, in being bound by the methods and rules of others, of repetition and habit, of disciplined time spent alone in self-imposed splendid isolation and self-abnegation. It is understandable, then, that artists may especially value the rare moments of inspiration, of new ideas and novel ways of doing things, of the message, purpose or function of what they do, of how they have broken the shackles of technical convention.

It is true, of course, that technique alone is of little or no value. One of the most damning charges that can be made is that an artist is an excellent technician, but no more, the implication being that all those years of learning the craft have not resulted in anything of value artistically. In performance, this is bound up with suspicions of the virtuoso dating back at least to the nineteenth century, so that, even now, there are those who dismiss much of Liszt’s output as being little more than a vehicle for bravura display with little artistic integrity. For some, to concentrate on matters of technique is to reduce the artist to the status of artisan, while others have suggested that it is misguided to have pretensions to do more than provide art as a utility. Nonetheless, while technique is generally regarded as requiring a purpose, what can easily be overlooked is that it is also what makes realizing the moment of inspiration possible. Christopher Dingle’s chapter on Yvonne Loriod was placed at the heart of Messiaen Perspectives 1 for her position as an influence upon, and source of information and insight about the composer. Nonetheless, she is a relevant figure here as well for, as is made clear, it was her extraordinary technical facility that revolutionized and galvanized Messiaen’s compositional thinking about the piano. Her technique did not just enable inspiration to be realized, but was itself a catalyst for inspiration.

Messiaen was immensely proud of his compositional technique, as is obvious from the amount of time and effort he expended in explaining his compositional language. While his interviews and prefaces to scores contain numerous technical expositions, by far the most important writings on his compositional methodology are the Traité and Technique. These have understandably spawned extensive discussion of specific aspects of his compositional arsenal, such as the modes of limited transposition or Transposed Inversion chords. Nonetheless, despite the impression sometimes given by Messiaen himself, such isolated technical resources were not simply bolted together in his music like compositional Lego®. He certainly did not feel bound by his own rules and, like Bach or Beethoven, Messiaen made full use of the intersections and ambiguities between elements of his music. He believed in the strength of his all-around musical education, and his music is a product of that deeper technique and, yes, his artistic inspiration. That Messiaen’s craftsmanship was of the highest order was readily apparent to his students, as Alexander Goehr has recalled: ‘None of us, including Stockhausen, were technically up to that standard. … It would be like trying to draw like Picasso. … He was very, very good! … as a craftsman, the écriture, he was simply sensational’.¹

Messiaen’s Vingt Leçons d’Harmonie, originally published in 1939, reflects one aspect of the solid foundations of his craft, a thorough grounding in the style of others through pastiche, but other aspects tend to be overlooked. For all sorts of reasons, it is easy to forget that Messiaen had rigorous training in counterpoint, especially fugue. Christoph Neidhöfer’s essay is thus especially welcome for shining a light on how counterpoint resonates throughout the composer’s career. Some of Messiaen’s techniques, such as the modes, or use of additive rhythm, are constant features of his music from the moment they are developed, readily malleable for any situation. However, others appeared only intermittently, accruing a set of associations through their relative rarity. One such group is explored in Dingle’s essay, ‘Messiaen’s Sacred Machines’, which, like Neidhöfer’s, draws upon passages from across the composer’s output.

The automated procedures discussed by Dingle are often rhythmic in nature, and, for many, this was the field where Messiaen’s contribution was greatest. A new approach to, and emphasis on, rhythm lay at the heart of his compositional thinking from at least La Nativité in 1935, though the fluidity of plainchant and Stravinsky’s developments were absorbed earlier and the different approach to time was there from the outset. Rhythm also drove the experiments of 1949–52, the period when exploration of technique came to the forefront of Messiaen’s music. The emphasis he placed on it is reflected by the fact that both Technique and the Traité begin with, and dwell for some time upon, rhythm.

Remarkable as it may seem, Messiaen’s harmony was long given relatively scant attention. However, as is clear from a review of recent literature, it has finally begun to receive serious scrutiny.² Like a number of other composers working in the latter part of the twentieth century, Messiaen’s harmony explored a free-ranging, post-tonal landscape, in which major triads nestle alongside much more intricate sonorities. The music is neither tonal nor atonal, but it includes inferences, echoes and resonances of tonal writing within both simple and complex chords, and for that matter of atonal writing. The difficulty for the analyst is in finding an appropriate label for it. In Messiaen’s Final Works, Dingle suggests the term ‘omnitonal’ as possibly appropriate for music by the composer of Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà…, while acknowledging that it may not suit the music of others.³

One area that Messiaen did not expound upon at any length, and which remains little discussed in the literature, is his use of texture and orchestration, especially from the mid-1960s onwards. The way that he highlights aspects of the harmony or rhythm in his orchestral works is one aspect of this, placing his instrumental expertise at the service of other aspects of his technical armoury. A study of his chord spacing, for example, would be invaluable, but it would be important, also, not to overlook Messiaen’s orchestration in its own right. Any composition student trying to develop the art of orchestration could do a lot worse than to study the score of Des Canyons aux étoiles…. The compositional scope of the music is on the same level as La Transfiguration, and the impression is of a massive work, and yet the ensemble is relatively modest. In particular, Messiaen manages to balance just 13 strings with full wind and percussion sections.

What is soon clear from examining Messiaen’s music is that, while any analytical approach is likely to reveal insights, to follow a single systematic approach to the exclusion of others is crudely myopic for a composer with such a rich range of resources. Messiaen does not squeeze into neat boxes. His own terminology has limitations, and can obscure, but it provides labels that are useful so long as the analyst is not restricted by them. The essays by Roderick Chadwick and David Kopp provide examples of how to negotiate the information from Messiaen intelligently. They are much needed examinations of Messiaen’s final two piano works, La Fauvette des jardins and Petites Esquisses d’oiseaux respectively. In both cases they demonstrate an ease with Messiaen’s own viewpoint and terminology, but are far from bound by it in terms of analytical (and performance) insight. Chadwick focuses on form and situates La Fauvette des jardins within the context of Messiaen’s students’ development of spectralism. Among many other things, Kopp, too, focuses on Messiaen’s form and the interplay between supposedly distinct types of material. Even Robert Fallon’s first complete published listing of Messiaen’s birds reveals a kind of negotiated methodology in its melding of Messiaen’s avian nomenclature with that of contemporary ornithology, his catalogue showing at a glance the enormous role that birdsong played in his toolkit of techniques. What emerges from each of these chapters is that there is much more going on in Messiaen’s music than meets the ear and eye, or than he was willing or able to reveal.

1 Alexander Goehr, unpublished interview with Christopher Dingle, Cambridge, 4 July 1996.

2 Some notable examinations of Messiaen’s technique include: Amy Bauer, ‘The Impossible Charm of Messiaen’s Chronochromie’, in Robert Sholl (ed.), Messiaen Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Vincent P. Benitez, ‘Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen’s Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note’, Journal of Musicological Research, 23/2 (April–June, 2004): pp. 187–226; Wai-Ling Cheong, ‘Rediscovering Messiaen’s Invented Chords’, Acta Musicologica, 75/1 (2003): pp. 85–105; Christopher Dingle, Messiaen’s Final Works (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Allen Forte, ‘Olivier Messiaen as Serialist’, Music Analysis, 21/1 (2002): pp. 3–34; Robert Sherlaw Johnson, Messiaen, 2nd paperback edition, updated and additional text by Caroline Rae (London: Omnibus Press, 2008); Stefan Keym, ‘“The Art of the Most Intensive Contrast”: Olivier Messiaen’s Mosaic Form up to Its Apotheosis in Saint François d’Assise’, in Robert Sholl (ed.), Messiaen Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Andrew Shenton, Olivier Messiaen’s Syste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Note
• Introduction Christopher Dingle and Robert Fallon
• Part I Techniques
• Part II Influence
• Part III Reception
• Appendix: A Critical Catalogue of Messiaen’s Musical Works
• Select Bibliography
• Discography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Contents of Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences