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Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature

Article in Journal of the American Musicological Society · August 2010

DOI: 10.1525/jams.2010.63.2.392

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392 Journal of the American Musicological Society

convincingly any original symbolism in Messiaen’s music, score analysis should

be combined with evidence from Messiaen’s writings and biography, church
and theological history, and French intellectual and musical cultures. None-
theless, these studies augment our understanding of the ubiquity of
Messiaen’s theological symbolism, and in the future, more critical studies may
benefit from their speculative claims.
The essays in Musik des Unsichtbaren embody the second and third waves
of Messiaen studies, contributing new information about his religious milieu
and new interpretations of his theology. Future scholarship will undoubtedly
continue to decipher the meaning of Messiaen’s theological messages and
should draw liberally from the second wave in order to link his music to his life
and to the thought of the Catholic Church.
Much of the scholarship published for the 2008 Messiaen Centennial has
expanded the scope, refined the detail, and raised the quality of Messiaen stud-
ies. Particularly notable books are van Maas’s The Reinvention of Religious
Music for counterpointing his music with the philosophy of religion, and Hill
and Simeone’s Messiaen for enriching the story of his life and works. From
these and the other books reviewed here, Messiaen doffs his historiographical
cowl and appears far more human, engrossing, and connected than he is
shown to be in either the summary that the composer gave of his music
(rhythm, color, birds, and faith) or the story that the New Grove Dictionary
promulgated of an isolated figure. Instead, he emerges as an influential com-
poser, a generous and joyful personality, and an exploratory, unrestrained, en-
gaged, and thoroughly theological thinker. These books (and others recently
published) deserve careful reading by scholars who continue to parse his musi-
cal and theological ideas in the third wave of Messiaen studies. Combining
their factual, analytical, historical, and philosophical strengths will enable the
continued growth in quality and quantity of scholarship on this complex and
inspired composer, solidifying his rightful place at the core of the twentieth-
century musical and musicological canons.

ROBERT FALLON

Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature, edited by Christopher Dingle and
Nigel Simeone. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. xxv,
351 pp.

Messiaen Studies, edited by Robert Sholl. Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2007. ix, 269 pp.

Both volumes under review were published in 2007 with the Messiaen cente-
nary of 2008 in mind. The Ashgate book, as stated in Christopher Dingle and
Nigel Simeone’s introduction (Olivier Messiaen, p. xxii), stems from the 2002
 Reviews 393

Sheffield conference on Messiaen, and while the Cambridge University Press

book has no such origin, many of the same authors (Robert Fallon, Allen
Forte, Andrew Shenton, and Nigel Simeone) have made contributions to
both volumes, and the books share a number of common topics. Taken to-
gether, they give readers some sense of the state of Messiaen studies.
“Messiaen’s Chords” are obviously the major concern of Allen Forte’s
chapter of that title in Olivier Messiaen, a subject he pursues with essentially
the same analytical strategies to identify source harmonies in his chapter for
Messiaen Studies (“Messiaen’s Mysterious Birds”). Messiaen’s harmonies are
also discussed in Amy Bauer’s chapter on Chronochromie in the Cambridge
book. Catalogue d’oiseaux is the focus of both Forte’s and Jeremy Thurlow’s
chapters in Messiaen Studies. Fallon, on the other hand, chooses to discuss
Oiseaux exotiques, and he successfully traces one main source of Messiaen’s ex-
otic birdsongs to “a set of six 78 rpm records published in 1942 as American
Bird Songs by Comstock Publishing” (Olivier Messiaen, p. 117). Fallon and
Stefan Keym (Messiaen Studies), together with Dingle and Jacques
Tchamkerten (Olivier Messiaen), add to the existing literature on Saint
François d’Assise, with topics that range from forms, compositional intents,
and backgrounds to Messiaen’s advanced use of the ondes Martenot. The
question of Messiaen’s interactions with his contemporaries recurs in the
Ashgate book, as evinced by the chapter-long studies of his relationships with
Cocteau (Stephen Broad), Dutilleux (Caroline Potter), Maurice Toesca
(Edward Forman), and Hubert Devillez (Simeone), all richly documented.
The Ashgate and Cambridge books close with, respectively, Père Jean-
Rodolphe Kars’s examination of Messiaen’s work from the perspective of
Catholic liturgy and Arnold Whittall’s “Messiaen and Twentieth-Century
Music.” All in all, there are a total of twenty-seven chapters, only some of
which will receive consideration in the following review.

We might start with some of the recurring themes, shared across the two
books. “Mysterious Birds,” Forte’s chapter for the Cambridge book, ap-
proaches Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux from a set-theoretical angle. Forte
lists eleven source harmonies—five modal and six nonmodal. In doing so,
Forte claims to have taken into consideration “all five categories he [Messiaen]
describes in Tome VII (2002) of TRCO [Traité de rythme, de couleur, et
d’ornithologie]” (Messiaen Studies, p. 103).1 His decision to exclude the chord
of the total chromatic (accord du total chromatique), is a good one, since it
makes no sense to include 12-1 in the ensuing exercise of identifying source
harmonies. For the remaining four categories, however, we note some dis-
crepancies between Forte’s list and Messiaen’s Traité VII. Forte lists nos. 2, 3,
4, 5, and 6 of Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition even though Traité

1. Olivier Messiaen, Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1949–1992), 7 vols. (Paris:

Alphonse Leduc, 1994–2002), 7:109–90.
394 Journal of the American Musicological Society

VII lists only modes 2, 3, 4, and 6. The inclusion of mode 5 is intriguing since
Forte has explained on another occasion (his chapter for the Ashgate book)
why Messiaen keeps only modes 2, 3, 4, and 6 in Traité VII (see Olivier
Messiaen, p. 101n25). Another discrepancy concerns the chords of contracted
resonances (Forte’s category 3). While Traité VII lists both the 1er accord à ré-
sonance contractée and the 2e accord à résonance contractée (pp. 157–64), Forte
includes only the chords of the former class, which he calls the “chords of
contracted resonances” (Messiaen Studies, p. 103).
Short excerpts from Catalogue d’oiseaux are then analyzed by resorting to
“source harmony identification.” Forte sets up “a guideline to select primary
source harmony membership” in order to safeguard that “preference is given
to the source harmony in which a set occurs as a subset the greatest number
of times” (p. 107; my italics). I shall refer to this “guideline” again below.
Although Forte does not explain why the identification of source harmony
membership in the birdsong of Catalogue d’oiseaux is worth pursuing, he
does state that his intention is “to dispel the notion that Messiaen’s birdsong
[sic] somehow lie outside the composer’s compositional-technical world”
(p. 102). This remark may well be taken to imply that, in Forte’s view, the
birdsong is derivable from the source harmonies. Indeed, the main core of the
chapter contains analytical proofs gathered by Forte to support this view.
Forte concludes his essay by providing “an overview and summary of the
eleven source harmonies and their representations in the thirteen birdsongs of
the Catalogue d’oiseaux” (p. 103). This might give the impression that Forte
has analyzed the whole of Catalogue d’oiseaux when in fact he tackles only the
“representations” of the source harmonies in short excerpts, one from each of
the thirteen pieces of Catalogue d’oiseaux. Only a very small proportion of the
score of Catalogue d’oiseaux is analyzed. More specifically, only the first song
(occasionally the second or a later song) of the bird named in the title of a
piece is extracted and scrutinized for its source harmony membership. As
shown in Forte’s examples 5.1 to 5.13, each excerpt (one or two measures
long with the exception of example 5.7) is parsed into segments that contain
four to eight pitch classes, and the primary source harmony membership of
each segment is listed. In this way, Forte succeeds in showing that the bird-
songs he scrutinized, when segmented, are uniformly referable to one or more
of the eleven source harmonies. But a few questions come up. While segments
that contain seven or eight pitch classes are less liable to appear fortuitously as
subsets of the source harmonies (most of which comprise seven or eight pitch
classes), segments that contain only a small number of pitch classes are liable
to appear in more than one source harmony. This fact may explain why Forte
finds it necessary to set up “a guideline to select primary source harmony
membership” (p. 107).
Forte’s example 5.9 (p. 114), which gives the only instance of a 4-z15 ap-
pearing in his segmentation of the thirteen short birdsong excerpts, is a case in
point. Forte parses the first two measures of “La bouscarle” (Catalogue
 Reviews 395

Table 1 Forte’s Identification of the Source Harmonies of Segments “a” to “g” in His
Example 5.9 (p. 114)

Segment Referential pitch-class set Source harmony

a 4-z15: {7,8,11,1} Mode 4 (8-9)

b 4-5: {7,8,9,1} Mode 4 (8-9)
c 4-9: {6,7,0,1} Mode 4 (8-9)
d 5-14: {6,7,8,11,1} Mode 4 (8-9)
e 5-6: {7,8,9,0,1} Mode 4 (8-9)
f 6-5: {6,7,8,9,0,1} Mode 4 (8-9)
g 7-7: {6,7,8,9,0,1,2} Mode 4 (8-9)

Table 2 The Inclusion of the Referential Pitch-Class Sets (Specified in Table 1) in

Messiaen’s Modes 2, 3, 4, and 6

Each square-bracketed integer indicates how frequently a pitch-class set appears in a mode.

Mode 2 (8-28) Mode 3 (9-12) Mode 4 (8-9) Mode 6 (8-25)

4-5 [6] 4-5 [8] 4-5 [4]

4-9 [2] 4-9 [3] 4-9 [2]
4-z15 [8] 4-z15 [6] 4-z15 [4] 4-z15 [4]
5-6 [6] 5-6 [4]
5-14 [4]
6-5 [4]
7-7 [4]

d’oiseaux, no. 9) into as many as seven segments, works out the referential
pitch-class sets, and identifies their source harmonies. Table 1 shows Forte’s
identification of the source harmonies of this excerpt. As shown in Table 2, a
strict adherence to Forte’s guideline will lead us to identify the source har-
mony of 4-z15 as mode 2 and that of 5-6 as mode 3, since modes 2 and 3
contain the largest number of respectively 4-z15s and 5-6s. His example 5.9,
however, records the source harmony of 4-z15 and 5-6 as mode 4, suggesting
that Forte might have found it necessary to compromise his guideline, perhaps
in order to render mode 4 a source harmony for all the composite segments.
Forte’s analytical findings are most revealing in cases where a segment is
referable to only one source harmony and is close to or the same as the source
harmony in size. In cases where a segment is referable to two or more source
harmonies and is substantially smaller than the source harmony, any suggested
membership is liable to be challenged, notwithstanding any attempt to adhere
strictly to the guideline.
In “Messiaen’s Chords,” his essay for Olivier Messiaen, Forte also lays
heavy emphasis on subset identification. At the outset, Forte draws our atten-
tion to Messiaen’s “extensive repertoire of unusual chords” and informs us
396 Journal of the American Musicological Society

that the “goal” of his study “is to gain a better understanding of how and per-
haps why Messiaen assembled his remarkable chords in the way he did”
(Olivier Messiaen, p. 91; my italics). Forte’s answer to this question of how,
which becomes clear about halfway through the chapter, is presented as a
major finding: “Thus it seems likely that some, perhaps all, ‘non-modal’
chords [‘assembled’ by Messiaen] might be explained in terms of their dis-
junct subset constituents, subsets that are members of one of the distinctive
modes [2, 3, 4, and 6]” (pp. 104–5). Forte then cautions Messiaen scholars to
“bear in mind that the bases of its [the music’s] chordal artefacts developed,
additively, during the course of the composer’s creative life to embrace not
only the modes of limited transpositions, but all five categories [of chords] he
describes in Tome VII of the Traité” (p. 113). Forte’s projection of an evolu-
tionary path from the modes to what he posits as Messiaen’s fabrication of
“non-modal” chords out of the combination of modal subsets is an attractive
idea, though we need to take into due consideration the fact that sets of
smaller sizes, depending on the segmentation, can readily be interpreted as
subsets of modal supersets that possess as many as eight or nine pitch classes.
While not directly reflected in the title “Messiaen’s Journey towards
Asceticism,” Paul McNulty’s chapter focuses rather exclusively on Mode de
valeurs et d’intensités and its manifestation of an abrupt change in Messiaen’s
musical language. McNulty investigates factors that could have precipitated
Messiaen’s composition of Mode de valeurs at that particular point in history.
These include “[René] Leibowitz’s criticisms, students deserting him [for
Leibowitz], and difficulties at work and with the Press” (Messiaen Studies,
p. 71). One rare source consulted is Leibowitz’s article “Olivier Messiaen ou
l’hédonisme empirique dans la musique contemporaine,” a “highly charged
critique of Messiaen’s Technique de mon langage musical ” (p. 68) published in
the journal L’Arche (1945). McNulty also considers as decisive Messiaen’s at-
tendance at a performance of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared
piano in 1949. This point is, however, less convincingly argued, for McNulty
readily accepts as proof such peripheral details as Boulez’s explanatory notes
delivered before Cage’s performance and Karel Goeyvaerts’s remark that
Messiaen found Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes “his most riveting musical ex-
perience since he first discovered Çârngadeva’s deçî-tâlas” (p. 72).
Peter Hill, a pianist specializing in the performance of Messiaen’s music,
also shows particular interest in Mode de valeurs. Hill’s chapter on Quatre
études de rythme is especially welcome as a pianist’s perspective on the hearing
and playing of what might be considered Messiaen’s most cerebral music.
Central to Hill’s discussion are the commercial recordings of the Quatre
études de rythme by Messiaen (1951) and Loriod (1968). Hill observes that
“Loriod and Messiaen represent two possible extremes of interpretation,”
while recordings of the Études by Håkon Austbø (1999), Gloria Cheng
(1994), Peter Hill (1986), Roger Muraro (2001), and Yuji Takahashi (1976)
“explore the territory in between” (Olivier Messiaen, p. 86). Nevertheless,
 Reviews 397

Hill’s remarks on Messiaen’s and Loriod’s “overpedalling” of Mode de valeurs

and their failure to use the piano’s middle pedal to sustain bass notes when the
hand has to leave the keys to reach for higher notes suggest that their record-
ings are not always heard as polar opposites. “With music [Mode de valeurs]
that leaves so much open to question,” writes Hill, “one looks to Messiaen’s
recording for revelation.” Messiaen’s 1951 rendition of Mode de valeurs is,
however, for Hill, “a shock,” not least because overpedalling is one thing that
Messiaen seems to have detested most (p. 89).
Hill’s study of selected recordings of the Quatre études de rythme is in some
ways paralleled by Andrew Shenton’s comparative analysis of the score of
Messiaen’s Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité with the composer’s
1972 recording, a project carried out to determine “Messiaen’s manner of
realisation” (Messiaen Studies, p. 187). Shenton’s chapter for Ashgate
(“Observations on Time in Olivier Messiaen’s Traité ”), on the other hand,
joins Jean Boivin’s “Musical Analysis According to Messiaen: A Critical View
of a Most Original Approach” and Gareth Healey’s “Messiaen—bibliophile”
in their efforts to learn more about the composer and his music from the
Traité. Shenton’s chapter for Olivier Messiaen explores Messiaen’s discourse
on time in the first chapter of his Traité I. Boivin’s quest to understand how
the Traité reveals Messiaen as a music analyst leads him to examine more dis-
parate parts of the Traité. The same strategy underlies Healey’s study of
“Messiaen’s literary interests” (Olivier Messiaen, p. 159), which begins with a
list of “[f]ictional and poetical works mentioned in the Traité” (table 10.1;
pp. 160–61), though, curiously, important figures such as Paul Valéry and
Pierre Reverdy (mentioned in Traité VI, p. 190) are missing from his list.
Robert Sholl’s exegesis of Harawi in “Love, Mad Love and the ‘point su-
blime’: The Surrealist Poetics of Messiaen’s Harawi” is populated by quota-
tions from the writings of André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Pierre Reverdy.
Reflecting on Messiaen’s chords in the “Pia” section of “Syllabes” (Harawi,
no. 8), for instance, Sholl asserts that “[they] affect a changing tissue of den-
sity, and therefore timbre, which irradiates a lyricism that is in Reverdy’s words
‘an aspiration towards the unknown, an indispensable explosion of being
dilated by emotion towards the exterior’ ” (Messiaen Studies, p. 54). Sholl
concludes the music-analytical part of the chapter with the intriguing remark
that Messiaen’s chords “are the psychotic and pulmonary murmurs that lead
inevitably to arrest” (p. 54). One question that may concern us about the sur-
realism of Harawi is whether it owes more to Messiaen’s words than to his
music. If we remove the lyrics and play the voice part on one or more instru-
ments, will Harawi become considerably less surrealistic in appeal? While this
question may not have concerned Sholl, his reference to “Messiaen’s Surrealist
musical language” (p. 37) suggests that he is likely to have viewed the music
(not just the words) of Harawi as surrealistic in effect.
The main thrust of Matthew Schellhorn’s chapter is that Messiaen’s Trois
petites liturgies de la Présence Divine (1943–44) is closely modeled on
398 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Stravinsky’s Les noces (1914–23), and yet Messiaen deliberately played down
this influence. Recalling André Hodeir’s reference to Messiaen’s Trois petites
liturgies as an “effeminate replica of Les Noces,”2 Schellhorn adds that
“Messiaen was at pains to dissociate Trois petites liturgies as a whole from
Stravinsky’s piece” and was willing to admit only their common use of piano,
xylophone, and chorus (Olivier Messiaen, pp. 40–41). Schellhorn then
launches “a detailed comparative study of the two works,” a quest which he
finds “wanting” (p. 41). Schellhorn’s comparative study begins with instru-
mentation, octatonicism, and rhythm before he examines more broadly the
musical, textual, and aesthetical similarities between the two works.3
Schellhorn’s chapter excels in spelling out the similarities between
Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies and Stravinsky’s Les noces, but his point about
Messiaen’s refusal to acknowledge more fully the indebtedness of Trois petites
liturgies to Les noces may be overextended. After all, Messiaen had in his class
hailed Stravinsky as “le plus grand compositeur du monde” (p. 60) and paid
tribute to Stravinsky in his Revue musicale article “Le rythme chez Igor
Strawinsky” (1939). Does it really seem “both surprising and significant that
Messiaen did not mention them [the octatonic collections in Les Noces] in
Technique de mon langage musical” (p. 45)? And does it matter that Messiaen
did not include Stravinsky in the list of people he thanked in the preface to the
same treatise (p. 60)? Schellhorn’s concern seems to go beyond an inquiry
into compositional influence to verge on worries over Messiaen’s honesty.
Simeone’s “Messiaen in 1942: A Working Musician in Occupied Paris”
(Messiaen Studies) provides a detailed account of the composer’s musical activ-
ity (performances, reviews, commissions, publications) from November 1940
to December 1941, and of course also 1942. Messiaen’s 1942 diary serves as a
main reference, but Messiaen’s 1941 diary and L’Information musicale, a
Paris-based weekly journal that survived the Occupation, are also cited. In
view of the documentary nature of Simeone’s study, it is only natural that he
did not draw conclusions from the information collated, but tried rather to re-
construct what Messiaen’s musical life was like during the period.
The first of Simeone’s paired chapters for Ashgate also introduces a little-
known source, in this case Messiaen’s speech on the occasion of his installation
in the Académie des Beaux-Arts (music section) of the Institut de France on
15 May 1968. Simeone’s remark that “Messiaen was the first occupant of the
newly-created ‘Fauteuil VII’ of the music section” (Olivier Messiaen, p. 279)

2. André Hodeir, Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music, trans. Noel Burch (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1961), 120.
3. Given the importance of octatonicism in both composers’ works, it is understandable that
Schellhorn may find it necessary to spell out Pieter van den Toorn’s grouping of the explicit and
implicit use of octatonicism in Les noces under “List 1” and “List 2.” That Schellhorn introduces
changes to van den Toorn’s lists without saying so is, however, worrying. Cf. Olivier Messiaen, 45;
and van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1983), 44–46.
 Reviews 399

explains in part why Messiaen chose to speak in praise not of a musician, but
rather a visual artist, the tapestry maker Jean Lurçat (1892–1966), who shared
with him similar enthusiasm for the Apocalypse and the numbering of colors.
Apart from an “introductory note” and a footnote about Lurçat’s last work,
Le chant du monde (a monumental set of ten tapestries), this chapter contains
Simeone’s translation of Messiaen’s speech. Referring to Lurçat as “a great
colour-rhythmician” (p. 283) and noting that “he always respected the non-
retrogradable rhythms in the colours of their [butterflies’] wings” (p. 284),
Messiaen may have thrown as much light on his own artistic vision as on that
of Lurçat in this speech.
Philip Weller adds to his translation of Cécile Sauvage’s L’âme en bourgeon
an extended “Afterword,” which gives us useful hints on how Messiaen could
have molded the reception of this set of poems. Composed by Messiaen’s
mother while pregnant with him, L’âme en bourgeon is highlighted and
praised repeatedly by Messiaen for its prophetic insight—the mother knows
already that a son and, more importantly, a musician will be born. Weller
draws our attention to the musical settings of poems from L’âme en bourgeon
by Messiaen’s first wife Claire Delbos. Weller mentions also that Messiaen’s
performances of Delbos’s settings were later supplanted by “spoken perfor-
mances of Cécile’s poetry” replete with “Messiaen’s spoken introductions”
(Olivier Messiaen, p. 268). This set of circumstances may give us a glimpse of
how Messiaen’s life traced various orbits around his mother and two wives,
Delbos and Yvonne Loriod. According to Weller, the centenary of Sauvage’s
birth in 1984 was marked by a spring concert, with excerpts from Catalogue
d’oiseaux and Vingt regards played by Loriod to frame Christiane Laborde’s
reading of poems from L’âme en bourgeon (p. 268). Sauvage’s poems survive,
but not Delbos’s settings.
Both Dingle and Fallon contribute a chapter on Messiaen’s Saint François
d’Assise to Olivier Messiaen and Messiaen Studies respectively. While the stated
aims of their studies are very different, some overlaps are notable. Both of
them mention Zeffirelli’s 1972 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and both make
metaphorical references to the “photographic negative” (Olivier Messiaen,
p. 320) or “negative image” (Messiaen Studies, p. 230) when comparing Saint
François d’Assise to Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Dingle) and Mozart’s Don
Giovanni (Fallon). Stating the objective of his chapter, Dingle writes: “What
follows is not a comprehensive survey of the provenance of every phrase from
the libretto of Saint François.4 Rather, the relationship between Messiaen’s
sources and Saint François is examined for what it reveals about the composer
and the work” (Olivier Messiaen, p. 301). The opening part of Dingle’s
chapter adheres closely to the stated objective, in which he points out that

4. Incidentally, Fallon notes in his essay that such a survey has already been conducted by
Camille Crunelle Hill (Messiaen Studies, 220n52). See Hill, “The Synthesis of Messiaen’s Musical
Language” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 1996).
400 Journal of the American Musicological Society

“Messiaen ignores temporal chronology in favour of the spiritual narrative”

and at times “dispenses with biographical veracity” (Olivier Messiaen,
p. 304). In contrast, Fallon finds Messiaen’s claim that the opera tells of the
spiritual growth of Saint Francis inadequate. In his view, the opera revolves
around the “two paths to paradise, joy and beauty” (Messiaen Studies, p. 228),
though he argues more convincingly how reforms in Catholicism in
twentieth-century France—ressourcement theology, Catholic Action, and the
Second Vatican Council—could have influenced Messiaen’s composition of
Saint François d’Assise.
In “Forms of Love: Messiaen’s Aesthetics of Éblouissement” Sander van
Maas considers how the composer’s theological background might have influ-
enced his aesthetics by relating Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics
and Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of the idol to Messiaen’s “music of
éblouissement” (Messiaen Studies, p. 83). There is, however, little evidence that
Messiaen knew of Marion’s writings. In an effort to figure out what the
composer meant by the music of éblouissement, van Maas draws on Messiaen’s
Kyoto lecture (1985). This is an important choice, for on no other occasion
did Messiaen more concretely delineate this elusive notion through musical
examples. Van Maas examines one of Messiaen’s examples—rehearsal number
6 of the eighth piece of La transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ
(1972)—before he concludes that the use of window-form is a critical factor.
The passage, which is only six measures long, is played in a mesmerisingly slow
and perfectly constant beat of 20 M.M., so that its timing and form contrast
sharply with its context. The creation of this sort of “window” is typical of most
musical passages that Messiaen mentions as examples of son-couleurs and
éblouissement. (p. 85)

Messiaen’s analysis of the same passage in the Traité VII attaches importance
to his use of the color chords; there is, however, no mention of the window
form.5 Indeed, the extent to which the colored music of éblouissement de-
pends on the window-form should, in my view, be questioned. For van Maas’s
postulation does not help explain why Messiaen cites the seventh and four-
teenth pieces of La transfiguration, chorales in which no window-form is in
evidence, as examples of the music of éblouissement. If we go further and com-
pare all of Messiaen’s five examples cited in the Kyoto lecture, we come up
with the same result: immensely slow block chords with no other common
traits.
In “Messiaen and Twentieth-Century Music,” Arnold Whittall explores
“Messiaen’s relation to, or distance from, the idea of a ‘tradition’ ” (Messiaen
Studies, p. 233) by citing a wide range of scholars and composers of twentieth-
century music. The chapter is rich in quotations, of which extended ones

5. See Traité VII, 277–80.

 Reviews 401

abound. Whittall visits in turn the writings of Jonathan Cross, David Clarke,
Edward Lockspeiser, David Drew, Célestin Deliège, and Robert Sherlaw
Johnson (pp. 232–35). Among composers of twentieth-century music,
Whittall considers Elliott Carter as Messiaen’s “closest contemporary and
most profound complement” (p. 252). And yet his discussion of Toru
Takemitsu comes close to the discussion of Carter in scope. Approaching the
end of the chapter, Julian Johnson’s Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural
Choice and Musical Value (p. 252) provides ample citations before Whittall re-
sumes a comparative reading of Messiaen and Carter—Éclairs sur l’au-delà . . .
and Symphonia: sum fluxae pretiam spei—to end the chapter.
Whittall’s discussion of Messiaen’s harmonies, which mainly revolves
around two short excerpts from La fauvette des jardins (pp. 235–41), inhabits
the most intensely analytical part of his chapter. Remarking that Messiaen’s
music “might even be seen as fulfilling” François-Joseph Fétis’s “gloomy pre-
diction of the future course of music,” he quotes at some length from Bryan
Hyer (p. 240).6 By this stage Whittall’s lukewarm attitude toward Messiaen’s
music unveils a position that becomes almost naked in the way he ends this last
chapter of the book. Pinpointing Messiaen’s “lack of affinity with so much
that is fundamental to twentieth-century culture,” Whittall concludes that
“whether Messiaen is regarded primarily as a modernist or as something else
becomes irrelevant in face of the fact that a history of twentieth-century music
without his name and work prominently placed is, quite simply, inconceiv-
able” (p. 253).

It must be more than a coincidence that both Messiaen Studies and Olivier
Messaien were published in 2007 in memory of the same Messiaen advocate,
Felix Aprahamian (1914–2005), since the books also share a number of au-
thors and topics. Both collections contribute to Messiaen scholarship through
the dissemination of novel views and obscure sources. The chapters may be
uneven in standard, but the juxtaposition of insightful writings alongside less
insightful ones seems largely unavoidable. Messiaen Studies would have bene-
fited from the addition of a more substantial introduction and a bibliography.
Fortunately, the Ashgate book has both, and while it may look less hand-
somely printed than the Cambridge book, it is commendable for bringing to
light a wealth of primary sources, some of which will surely provide useful av-
enues for those who endeavor to reach out for even more enlightened under-
standing of the “man apart,” his music, and his time (Olivier Messiaen, p. xxi).

CHEONG WAI LING

6. Bryan Hyer, “Tonality,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas
Christensen, 726–52 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), at 748.

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