Centenary Events (see also the calendar link)
Philharmonia Orchestra Messiaen Festival in London.
General Links (alphabetical)
last.fm. Listen to Messiaen's music on last.fm.
BBC Music Profiles: Olivier Messiaen. BBC Artists page including streaming audio, recommended books and recordings, related literature and links.
Glandaz Organ Company. Olivier Glandaz rebuilt the organ in Sainte Trinité. Includes information specific to the church and organ.
Music for the End of Time. Michael Linton's March 15, 2004 article on Quatour pour la fin du temps, originally published in First Things.
Olivier Messiaen 1908–1992: An Appreciation. Julian Anderson's September 1992 retrospective on Messiaen, originally published in The Musical Times.
Olivier Messiaen. IRCAM's composer site for Messiaen, including a partial (but very detailed) works list and links to Messiaen citations on other IRCAM pages.
Regards sur Olivier Messiaen. Japanese-language repository of an updated catalogue of works, chronology and other materials, including an analysis of Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant Jésus. Includes partial translations of some materials into English.
Research and Literature Links
Messiaen2008.com. French langauge site with detailed information on Messiaen.
Birdsong transcriptions. Comparison of five of Messiaen's birdsongs with the actual birdsongs he used as models. The spectrograms, the 78 rpm records from which he derived the North American birdsongs in Oiseaux exotiques, and Messiaen's aesethetic of imitation are discussed in Robert Fallon, "The Record of Realism in Messiaen's Bird Style," in Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature. ed. Christopher Dingle & Nigel Simeone (Ashgate, 2007).
FindArticles.com: Messiaen. Search results for Olivier Messiaen on FindArticles.com, including free access to journal articles from The Musical Times and other resources.
The Pegasus Archive: Stalag VIIIA. Information about the German POW camp that Messiaen was interned at during the Second World War. Includes descriptions of camp life and the practice of the arts by camp prisoners.
Alphonse Leduc. Major French publisher of Messiaen's work.
Editions Henry Lemoine. French publisher of some works by Messiaen.
Universal Edition. Publisher of some works by Messiaen
Durand-Salabert-Eschig. French publisher of some works by Messiaen.
YouTube Links
YouTube now has many interesting Messiaen related links. These will not be duplicated here, however some interesting additions have been added to this site for general interest.
In Memoriam Messiaen. Music by David Patterson a former student of Olivier Messiaen performed by The New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble; Charles Peltz, director.
LACRYMOSA plays Olivier Messiaen. Progressive On Demand Records presents: Chihiro S. (bass), Mituo Koshiba (bass-clarinet), Ayumi Matsui (violin), Masa Sasaki (drums), Takeshi Naganuma (glocken), Intermede from "Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time)". 1994. LACRYMOSA live at SilverElephant.
Amazing performance of Dieu parmi nous on the accordion by Artem Nyzhnyk.
Art links
La Nativitié du Seigneur - a set of nine separate art works, each approximately 60cm square, created by Sophie Hacker in 2007 to illustrate the nine movements in Olivier Messiaen's 1935 Organ suite of the same name. Larger versions can be seen here.
Arturo Martin Burgos - solo painting exhibition based on Messiaen´s composition Éclairs sur L’Au-delà at SALA SIGLO XXI - Huelva - Spain. May 7-25 2008. For a number of years now, music, and in particular the French composer Olivier Messiaen, have provided the inspiration for the paintings of Arturo Martín Burgos. In 2000 his work focused almost exclusively on the two great orchestral pieces by Messiaen: Turangalîla-Symphonie and Des canyons aux étoiles.
Miscellaneous Links
Tanglewood is an estate and music venue in Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts and is the home of the annual summer Tanglewood Music Festival and the Tanglewood Jazz Festival. It has been the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home since 1937.
The Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt harboring one of the world's largest collections of post-war sheet music, also hosts the biannual Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (next occuring in 2008 - follow link on Musikinstitut page), a summer school in contemporary classical music founded by Wolfgang Steinecke. A large number of avant-garde composers have attended and given lectures there, including Olivier Messiaen, Luciano Berio, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel.
The Olivier Messiaen Page. Messiaen fan site. Includes a list of works, recordings, related literature and a personal collection of Messiaen photographs.
The BBC Bird Sounds Page. Information and resource pages for the BBC's bird song-related broadcasts and recordings.
The British Library Wildlife Sounds Archive. One of the world's largest and most comprehensive sound archives, including a searchable catalogue and ordering for copies of recordings contained in the archive.
Burke Museum Ornithology Database. One of the Internet's most comprehensive ornithological resources, including a searchable database of more than 60,000 birds.
Allen Forte Archive at the University of North Texas. Forte is a theorist at Yale who has done much work on Messiaen's musical language. His wife, Madeleine (née Hsu) is a pianist and writer who also works on Messiaen music.The site includes a video of a joint lecture-recital given by the Fortes on Messiaen's Préludes and Vingt Regards (Selections).
Internet Movie Database: Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen's Filmography.
Media Art Net: Olivier Messiaen. A brief biography by Julia Gerlach.
Commercial Links
Naxos Composer Biography: Olivier Messiaen. A very brief biography and link to a Naxos recording of Messiaen's work.