oliviermessiaen.net

Here are the abstracts in alphabetical order by author last name.

Yves Balmer
A portrait of Messiaen the Catholic, from Messiaen the reader of Catholic literature.
After precisely cataloguing the citations concerning Catholicism in Messiaen’s Traité de rythme, couleur et d’ornithologie, the author will create a typology of the works and authors cited according to their origin (Scripture, writings by Saints, Catholic artists, theologists, etc.). This typology will permit the virtual recomposition of the Catholic volumes in Messiaen’s private library, focusing upon works which, (we can assume due to their citation in the Traité), held a particular significance for the composer. The author will examine the relationship between various French Catholic movements and these writings, in an attempt to better define the portrait of Messiaen the Catholic, and Messiaen the reader of Catholic literature.
This article continues the projects of the forthcoming article “The Origins of Messiaen’s Catholicism,” presented at the University of Montréal in 2006, in which the author showed the influence of Messiaen’s father, Catholic literary movements, and non-conformist movements on the development of Messiaen’s Catholicism.

Peter Bannister
Messiaen as preacher and evangelist in the context of European modernism.
This paper investigates Messiaen’s unusual position within the musical avant-garde in Western Europe after 1945 as an expositor of unfashionable Catholic doctrine in a predominantly hostile intellectual environment. During a period when overtly Christian composition was generally viewed with deep suspicion by the artistic vanguard, Messiaen’s artistic credibility remained essentially undented (the critical controversy of the 1940s known as “Le Cas Messiaen” notwithstanding) even with those unsympathetic to his beliefs. Indeed he can be said to have evangelized the secular world of concert hall (Couleurs de la cité céleste, La Transfiguration, Des Canyons aux Etoiles, Eclairs sur l'au-delà ...) and opera house (Saint François d'Assise) in a unique musical dialogue with the culture of modernity. This constitutes a continuation and development of Messiaen’s pre-1945 trajectory both in words and music, stemming from a particular theological outlook concerning the relationship between the sacred and secular.
A major factor in the success of Messiaen’s project is his bold synthesis (acknowledging the example of Tournemire’s L'Orgue Mystique and bearing a striking, if not necessarily conscious resemblance to the aesthetics of Jacques Maritain) of ancient and modernist elements in a highly individual arc-en-ciel théologique at a time when the avant-garde largely regarded any reference to tradition as regressive. On a technical level, this is exemplified by Messiaen’s openness to the atonality of the Second Viennese School (attempting to bringing serial techniques into an explicitly Christian framework in pieces such as the Livre d’orgue) juxtaposed with an unshaken belief in the perennial validity of acoustically based résonance. The rootedness of Messiaen’s music in the physicality of sound discloses an affirmative theology of creation's goodness in stark contrast to the negative dialectics of much composition after World War II, while his on-going engagement with modernism derives from his eschatological hope. In conclusion I argue that this musico-theological stance can provide material for reflection on the part of composers of younger generations.

Vincent Benitez
The Fusion of the Philosophies of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Henri Bergson in Olivier Messiaen’s Theology of Time.
In the first volume of the Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie, Olivier Messiaen establishes a theological framework for his exploration of rhythm. Underpinning his discussion are ideas derived from Saint Thomas Aquinas and Henri Bergson. Drawing from Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Messiaen begins his discussion by distinguishing time from eternity, recognizing that time, which is linked with successive change, conflicts with God, who is immutable and completely simultaneous.
In writing about time, Messiaen found a contemporary counterpart to Aquinas in Bergson, modernism’s most representative philosopher. In his post-positivistic metaphysics, Bergson distinguished between intellect-based modes of perception, which involve quantifiable surface impressions, and intuition-based modes, which go beyond intellect and directly apprehend reality, which is characterized as the continuity of conscious states that underlies surface observations. In relation to space and time, which Bergson described as structured time and true duration, respectively, the quantifiable analysis of space in terms of a set of sequential points is inadequate when representing the continuous flow of time, for it tends to freeze and ossify what it illustrates. For Bergson, the intellect begins with the immobile and attempts to reconstruct movement by juxtaposing frozen moments; intuition, conversely, starts from movement, perceives it as reality itself, and views immobility as a snapshot taken by the mind.
This paper considers the philosophies of Aquinas and Bergson and their fusion in Messiaen’s theology of time. It interprets their merging as a qualification of modernism in an extreme surrealistic sense. By taking his cue from Jacques Maritain, whose work is related to both Aquinas and Bergson, Messiaen showed that he was influenced by the French Renouveau catholique. In fusing the thought of Aquinas and Bergson, Messiaen went beyond a simplistic equation of human clock-time with structured time, and eternity with true duration. Since time can be viewed as a dichotomy comprised of mutually external instants and a continuous flow that denies their pure instantaneity, Messiaen, like Maritain, recognized an aesthetic consequence emerging from this, namely, that when one object is included metaphorically in another, it has to be related back to the unique nature of spatial and temporal finite realities if art is to surpass fantasy.

Luke Berryman
The Changing Touch: Messiaen’s Organ Toccatas.
With his centenary fast approaching, the need to reassess Messiaen’s frequently misconstrued late works has become paramount. Even today, innovative musical approaches to a familiar theological program in his final organ work, Livre du Saint Sacrement (1986), remain largely unrecognized. New ideas are especially abundant in the last movement, “Offrande et Alleluia Final;” demonstrable through critical comparison with finale toccatas serving similar programmatic purposes in the earlier organ cycles. These experiments make the Livre of special interest within his output, yet scholars frequently overlook it; perceiving it as either a series of disconnected written-out improvisations, or as an arbitrary summation to the organ oeuvre. A close examination of the music, and the circumstances in which it was being composed, reveals that the Livre is not, as Griffiths has suggested, a “garland of mementoes?” Neither is it a summation, as many scholars often suppose. In fact, in Livre du Saint Sacrement, far from simply revisiting his familiar techniques (which had been exemplified on a grand scale in Saint François), Messiaen appears to discard many of them in favour of new ventures. By comparing Messiaen’s approach to his program in the final movement of the Livre, “Offrande et Alleulia Final,” with toccata movements serving similar programmatic purposes and standing in similar positions in their respective organ cycles (“Dieu Parmi Nous,” 1936; and “Le vent de l’Esprit,” 1949), we may begin to elucidate the purposes and outcomes of these experiments.
It will become apparent that the Livre does not tally with Dingle’s commonly-accepted portrait of Messiaen in the 1980s as a contented old man who is “at peace with the world.” Only once we have finally rejected this image will we be able to approach an understanding of Messiaen’s untameable desire for musical experimentation. In his final works it seems that, far from being contended, Messiaen may even have been questioning the success of some of his older techniques and continuing to search for new methods of expressing his personal theology.

David Cannata
Messiaen reads the Infancy Gospels: The Vingt Regards as Christology.

Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus

Wai Ling Cheong
The ‘invisible temple' of Sept Haïkaï.
If Messiaen’s claim to have given “Gagaku,” the centerpiece of Sept haïkaï, a “Christian dimension” proves intriguing, “Miyajima et le torii dans la mer,” the following piece of the set, may strike us as even more perplexing in makeup. Apart from the use of an octachordal soundband to imitate the shō playing of gagku music, “Miyajima et le torii dans la mer” is deprived of all other Japanese musical elements. Instead, there is a rich display of French birdsong, Greek rhythm, and, most unexpectedly, what Messiaen refers to as the “theme of chorale.” Even though the torii of Miyajima – unlike any other torii in that it is set up in the sea rather than on land – is commonly construed as a gateway that leads to the Shinto shrine, Messiaen takes a different perspective and viewed through the torii not the Shinto shrine but rather the open sea. This explains his conception of the torii as leading to what he calls “an invisible temple”, which he remarks emphatically as “the true temple”. The idea of an invisible temple and, by extension, an invisible God might have led Messiaen to arrive at the unexpected but nonetheless symbolic intrusion of a chorale. I thus argue that Messiaen’s use of such non-Japanese elements as French birdsong, Greek rhythm and, above all, the “theme of chorale” tells of a hidden program, a metaphor that is shrewdly withheld from his copious commentaries on the music.

Ryan Dohoney
The Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy: Theological Immanence and Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise. Far from being an absent trope in Messiaen scholarship, an assumption of theological content has been at the core of much discussion of his music. What has been less employed as a mode of inquiry is an examination of the reception of religious content as a cultural phenomenon. This paper takes such an approach as it examines the critical responses to the premier of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise.
When asked by Le Figaro for his opinion at premier of Messiaen’s opera, Cardinal Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, said of Saint François that it was a “provocation to a place usually dedicated to luxury, false representation, and sensuality.” It was an opera unlike any other, a fact noted by Messiaen himself in his press release and the perceived lack of traditional operatic traits proved to be a major concern for critics. The central question that emerged in the response was “is it an opera or oratorio?”
The goal of this paper is not to definitively answer that question. Instead I argue that the prevalent ambivalence about the genre of Saint François indicates a greater ambivalence about the role of religious work in the secular sphere, especially in France. I argue that by displacing the discussion of theology into a concern with genre, critical reception attempted to diffuse Messiaen’s “provocation” by reinforcing the boundary between opera and oratorio, simply put – theological content is proper to the genre of oratorio, but not to successful opera. In that regard, Saint François fails.

Robert Fallon
Dante as Guide to Messiaen’s Gothic Spirituality.
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). Each of these sources adds to our understanding of Messiaen’s theology. Nevertheless, a 13th-century theological movement called “Gothic spirituality” synthesizes several important strands of this medieval tapestry. In this paper, I will be the first to show the influence of Gothic spirituality on Messiaen, who I argue was guided in this tradition by his reading of Dante.
That Dante was not a theologian, but a poet, can only have appealed to Messiaen the musician. I explore how Messiaen may have interpreted these comparisons and how he could have encountered Dante. I then discuss formal similarities between Messiaen and Dante, including the use of symmetry, prime numbers, and retrogradatio cruciformis. Finally, I point out many parallelisms in their views of theology, particularly in reference to Tristan, Bernard, Francis, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, the Neoplatonic doctrines of illumination and emanation, bird metaphors, rainbows, the music of the spheres, the abyss of hell, and the varieties of perfection found during the slow ascent to Paradise. Because these characters and theological principles appear in the works of both Messiaen and Dante, I suggest that Dante, along with Mozart and Stravinsky, was the artist whom Messiaen chose as his Bloomian precursor.

Adam Gustafson
Messiaen the Dogmatic.
That we often understand the theology of Olivier Messiaen as mystical points toward a conflict that exists not within his own theology, but within a general contemporary mindset that only accepts faith as something that exists beyond logic. In other words, it is the experiencing of Christian myths as truth that made Messiaen a mystical thinker. However, as Aleksei Losev points out in his work, Dialectics of Myth, all systems of logic are inherently mythical. In this book, Losev asks us to rethink the accepted notion that myth is an untruth. Rather, he argues that myth is a dynamic and necessary system of truths and dogmas that exists at all times, even within the realm of scientific logic. When Losev’s theories are applied to Messiaen’s theology we begin to understand the term mystic as a misapplication, the result of a failure to understand the nature of myth, and further, dogma. Using Losev’s work and the writings of Messiaen as presented in Almut Rӧssler’s book, Contributions to the Spiritual World of Olivier Messiaen, this paper will first define the definitions of myth and dogma. Next, Messiaen’s own theology will be placed within such a system in order to understand his faith as more dogmatic than mystical. Finally, the importance of understanding the distinction between mystical and dogmatic thought will be examined with regard to how we understand Messiaen’s intentions as a musician.

Karin Heller
The Music of Messiaen: An Inspiration for Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger’s Renewal of Liturgy in the Wake of the Second Vatican Council.
This contribution highlights Olivier Messiaen’s life and work as a church musician within the 20th century Church of France. In a more or less ideologically pressured context, Messiaen remained faithful to the Gregorian renewal movement initiated by Solesmes in 1922, while other currents exalted liturgy as an appropriate tool for evangelisation and committed themselves to composition of church music in vernacular language.
Hostilities and misunderstandings between the ecclesiastical authorities and Messiaen’s art led the French composer to limit his production of church music and to transfer the idea of the Catholic liturgy into concert halls. This effort, together with his strong interest in nature, reflects a view proper to Romantic theology. With Hans Urs von Baltharsar, Messiaen shares the use of the categories of poetry, figures, transpositions, colors, and sounds. His oeuvre reflects his personal research on music as much as it does his personal vision of the Christian faith.
Jean-Marie Lustiger’s admiration for Messiaen is best expressed in his statement, “I hear in Messiaen’s music the inspiring power of the Word and the expression of a musician who has received the Word; I found [in this music], through the meditation expressed by the musician, aspects that helped me to understand in a new way the Word he commented on.” Lustiger’s affinity with Messiaen’s music is rooted in a deep conviction that liturgy is God’s way par excellence of making himself visible through the Word within human history. This comprehension explains why Scripture became absolutely central during Lustiger’s ministry as a pastor of Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal.
Called to implement the liturgical reform in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Lustiger wrote, together with the church organist and composer Henry Paget, a contemporary liturgical repertoire entirely at the service of the Word of God. What made these programs unique was not only the exclusive use of vernacular Scripture texts, but their structure. They had the form of a dialogue and a drama, as featured in the gospel readings. In their own way, Lustiger and Paget have realized Messiaen’s genuine combination of Scripture and music within an ordinary Parisian parish.

Martin Lee
Complexity within Simplicity: Modes and Color Chords in the First Movement of Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’au-delà ...
Éclairs sur l’au-delà ... is about Messiaen’s past – the past as seen through his reuse of themes and compositional procedures from earlier works, as well as a return to both his long held belief in Catholicism and love of nature. Both old and sick, Messiaen likely accepted the possibility that Éclairs would be his last work. But while reflecting on his past, he also looked forward to an eternal afterlife. Such “visions of the beyond,” in fact, are promised by the title.
Beginning with Traité VII, this paper focuses on a table of chords derived from Messiaen’s modes of limited transpositions and his favorite color chords. The identification by set-class names provides a means for isolating the more common chords and harmonies that Messiaen uses in the music. My analysis of the first movement of Éclairs, “Apparition du Christ glorieux,” reveals how Messiaen manipulates a simple alleluia chant accompanied by complex chords that engage his color vision. My interpretation of the color chord tables in Traité VII allows me to develop a method for interpreting how Messiaen uses his color chords. Specifically, I explore how Messiaen projects a colorful heavenly scene as the opening vision for the dramatic “battle” as described in the book of Revelation in the New Testament and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theodramatik, that is, how he makes specific colors evolve as the music progresses.
At first glance, this movement would seem to exploit an orchestral chordal harmonization of the chant using Messiaen’s unique harmonies; however, a closer look reveals details of color images that dictate Messiaen’s choice of chords and their specific ordering. This paper seeks to relate aural and visual perceptions through the use of voice-leading and hierarchical structure, aided by a comprehensive study of the chord tables in Traité VII.

Sander van Maas
On Messiaen’s “Saintly Naïveté”.
This paper will address the construction and meaning of the “naïve” in Messiaen. Questions concerning this often used word in relation to the composer abound. Which elements of Messiaen’s music, statements, attitudes are associated with this notion? In what sense is this notion applied, and how can this usage be understood culture-historically? What is the relation between Christian faith and the naïve? Why should Messiaen’s alleged naïveté be “impressive” and “provocative,” as Taruskin contends? How does the naïve come about and function in the context of self-conscious modernity? What does Messiaen’s “saintly naïveté” (Griffiths) – if indeed there is one – tell about the status of contemporary Christianity? Addressing these and related questions I will suggest ways to make sense of an aspect of Messiaen that keeps inspiring respect in both his fans and critics.

Stephen Butler Murray
Divine Intimacy: Olivier Messiaen and a Theology of Joyous Relationality Between God and Humanity.
In the same sense that the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich believed that his sermons made his otherwise inaccessible theology available to the nonacademic world, so too the Roman Catholic composer and organist Olivier Messiaen believed that theologically imbued music could transform the secular concert hall into the liturgical expanses of a cathedral. Both musically and theologically innovative, Messiaen strove to distance himself from depictions of humanity’s sinfulness, and instead reveled in his music’s capacities to effect a kind of revelation of God through which a theology of joy might be articulated. The intimacies of divine love and human redemption appear all throughout Messiaen’s later works, while also embracing a sweeping sense of glory and transcendence. The hopefulness of his theological perspective pervades this music, whereby an intimacy between God and humanity, between the absolutely local and the absolutely transcendent is made palpable to the listener and the performer. In this paper, I plan to examine five aspects of this theology of divine intimacy that Messiaen offers: the emotional connection between musical movements and the believer’s reaction to the divine; the use of exuberance and extravagance by which Messiaen proffers immeasurable joy; the capacity of music to transcend the boundaries between the divine and the human; the theological perspective of “Die parmi nous” whereby a transcendent God is born into the world in the Nativity; the potential for music to bridge the gaps of unbelief, so that the secular world might encounter God anew, particularly in his Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence divine; and the utility of birdsong to render an intimacy between God and the created order of nature.

Stephen Schloesser
The Charm of Impossibilities: Mystic Surrealism as Contemplative Voluptuousness.
In his Technique of My Musical Language (1944) Messiaen declared: “One point will attract our attention at the outset: the charm of impossibilities . . . . at once voluptuous and contemplative.” Calling for the hastening by prayer of the coming of the “liberator” who would be “both a great artisan and a great Christian,” Messiaen invoked lines by two writers. First, Pierre Reverdy (presumably the “great artisan”), a poet whose work and thought were essential to the invention of post-World War I surrealism. Second, Ernest Hello (presumably the “great Christian”), a writer whose work and thought, central to 19th-century Catholic Revivalism (renouveau catholique), aimed at carrying out the mission of Dom Prosper Guéranger’s monumental l’Année liturgique [Liturgical Year] — namely, to penetrate beyond the historique and the théologique into the mystique.
Was Messiaen’s invocation of the 19th-century mystique and the 20th-century sur-réaliste an arbitrary juxtaposition of two personal interests? Or is there a serious internal connection between them? I will argue for a connection by setting out the context of Jazz Age Catholicism and then reading within it the figures that Messiaen invoked as his primary influences in the 1944 text: his mother, Cécile Sauvage (poetess); William Shakespeare (dramatist of the magical); Paul Claudel (symbolist poet and icon of the renouveau catholique); Paul Reverdy and Paul Éluard (surrealist poets); Ernest Hello (19th-century Catholic Revivalist; symbolist writer; author of contes extraordinaires, short stories of the macabre in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe); Benedictine monk Dom Columba Marmion (20th-century Catholic revivalist; heir to the mystique tradition of Dom Guéranger); and a figure that Messiaen does not mention but perhaps should have — Charles Tournemire, symbolist musician and composer of l’Orgue mystique, inspired by and modeled on Guéranger’s l’Année liturgique.

Douglas Shadle
Messiaen’s Relationship to Jacques Maritain’s Musical Circle and Neo-Thomism.
The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s philosophical reach extended much farther into Parisian musical life than we currently recognize. Before World War II, Maritain and his wife Raïssa developed intimate relationships with several prominent musical luminaries. Olivier Messiaen, however, now considered the twentieth century’s premier Catholic composer, appears strangely to have sidestepped Maritain’s influence. Had he not, his fate might have been substantially different. In order to understand this unpredictable development, we must first explore the theological and musical milieu in which Jacques Maritain played a central role.
Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’ medieval theology, Maritain’s philosophy of art orients artistic production away from emotional expression and focuses instead on art’s foundation in the intellect. His closest musical companions, Igor Stravinsky and Arthur Lourié, adopted many of his fundamental ideas in their own writings and attempted to create a “neo-Thomist” musical style. Maritain’s ideas also entered into broader critical discourse in music periodicals, as a wide circle of important composers and critics responded positively to his views. Indeed, their continued adoption of a broadly defined neo-classical aesthetic was a direct response to his philosophy.
Although they appeared at the height of Maritain’s influence on Parisian musical life, Messiaen’s earliest religious compositions bear no apparent stylistic resemblance to neo-classicism or Lourié’s musical neo-Thomism. His sacred works from the 1930s, for example, differ markedly in style from those of both Poulenc and Lourié, two of Maritain’s closest allies. Viewed in the light of its theological context, however, the radical separation between Messiaen’s music and that of Maritain’s circle makes more immediate sense. Like several prominent Catholic theologians, Messiaen rejected neo-Thomism’s austerity in favor of a biblically-oriented outlook. Consequently, his style and success paralleled the thought and widespread theological acceptance of two of his favorite contemporary theologians, Romano Guardini and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Robert Sholl
Olivier Messiaen and the Avant-Garde.
Messiaen’s interest in the Surrealist movement in the 1940s was perhaps unsurprising. Surrealism represented a radical modernist aesthetic that attempted to re-integrate aesthetic experience into life through the politicisation of art. At the vanguard of the revolutionary avant-garde aesthetic, Messiaen’s students (Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis), unwittingly inherited his spirit of confrontation and regeneration. Even as they searched for autonomy and authentic expression down supposedly secular paths, their work therefore entailed a reaction to and a continuation of Messiaen’s theological, aesthetic and compositional preoccupations.
The search for a non-ideological and transcendental autonomy without God (for Boulez, Berio and Xenakis at least), would founder on its own epistemological rocks. For an ardent Catholic such as Messiaen, faith was his means of politicisation and also a means to re-orientate such avant-garde politics. Yet, by attempting to re-direct the search for the absolute in western music towards God, Messiaen also revealed that theological concerns were inextricably connected to the bedrock of avant-garde thought. This study will examine these concerns in relation to a small compositional period in Messiaen’s output (1948-53). It will investigate how Messiaen’s music of this period engaged with and transformed the radical aesthetic of the avant-garde, and how it afforded him the impetus to renew and refresh his musical language.