Word: messiaen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...refreshers for Hitler-frustrated German musicians who wanted to brush up on their Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith and Schoenberg. In succeeding years, Darmstadt focused on the development of serial techniques in Schoenberg and Webern, and gave exposure to the works of such post-serial experimenters as Edgar Varese and Olivier Messiaen. Soon younger composers-notably Hans Werner Henze and Pierre Boulez-began unveiling compositions of their own at the festival's semiprivate "workshop" concerts...
Subtleties of Rhythm. After a prize-laden graduation from the Paris Conservatory, where he studied composition with Paul Dukas, the 22-year-old Messiaen won the coveted organist's job at La Trinite church in Paris, and later a teaching post at the conservatory. Today, he still gives composition classes and plays for weekly Mass, occasionally enlivening a service with a hair-raising, dissonant improvisation on the organ. In his spare time, he labors at a scholarly tome on the subtleties of rhythm, which he regards as "the primordial, perhaps the essential, part of music...
Ache in G Major. Little wonder, then, that Messiaen's compositions defy pigeonholing. Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine (1944), scored for soprano chorus, strings and a clattering assortment of percussion, celebrates God's omnipresence by mixing swatches of Gregorian chant with Hindu rhythms and the unearthly quavering of the Ondes Martenot (an electronic wave generator). The 77-minute Turangalila Symphony (1948), a thick layer cake of orchestral textures, is part of Messiaen's treatment of the Tristan legend, which he considers "the greatest myth of human love." Chrono-chromie (1960) echoes the sounds of nature...
Such mixtures seem quite natural to Messiaen, who describes himself as "a born believer, musician and revolutionary." He taught himself to play the piano at eight, at ten was devouring the scores of Don Giovanni, Die Walkure and Pelleas et Melisande. He conceived a lifelong fascination with "all things mysterious and marvelous," and found that musical sounds gave him inner visions of colors; once, he got a stomach ache while watching a ballet because the violet hue of the lighting clashed so badly with the tonality of G major...
...resort town of Royan last week, as Messiaen presided over an international piano competition, he reflected that the young musicians he has influenced have not imitated him but have gone their own way, forging new electronic, mathematic or aleatory (chance) musical techniques. His own ideal is still "to rejoin the eternal durations and resonances, to apprehend the inaudible which is above music." Meantime, he is content to clap on his beret, pack up his music paper, and drive off for some bird watching...