By |

by Michael Johnson

Of all the musical jewels Olivier Messiaen left us, his Turangalîla-symphonie is most commonly associated with him. It is not a symphony in any traditional sense but rather a mosaic of ten movements that unfolds over an hour and twenty minutes. One critic jocularly characterized it as replete with “dancing rhythms, tantric sex and laughing gas”. Messiaen called it “superhuman, overflowing, dazzling and an exercise in abandonment”.

In this complete version, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel with Yuja Wang at the piano, the drama and the abandonment are among the best of many recordings.

Next year marks the 80th anniversary of Messiaen’s two-year struggle to hold all the disparate elements of this masterpiece together.

His prolific output seems sure to survive in the volcanic world of contemporary composition. His balance of originality and accessibility makes him popular with concert-goers and objects of interest to the wider music world. His controversies have faded with time, but his theology, birdsong and synesthesia serve his memory well. He has left a strong imprint on the world of modern music.

His mysteries and controversies continue to attract music sleuths. Did Pierre Boulez really say Messiaen’s music made him want to vomit? Scholars have been trying to track down that unkind cut for decades but details remain clouded. Boulez has denied that he ever used the word. Others say he did. His objection to Messiaen was his use of the ondes Martinot in some of his works, most spectacularly in Turangalîla.

Pianist Peter Hill, an English scholar and Messiaen specialist, tells me in an email exchange that he “skirted the (Boulez) issue cautiously” in his 2007 book Messiaen because he was not satisfied he had nailed it. The wording he came up with was that Boulez could be “almost offensively derogatory” about Messiaen although he could also be an admirer. How Boulez was so conflicted continues to intrigue musicologists. Messiaen’s widow and primary performer of his piano works, Yvonne Loriod, told Hill a few years ago that Boulez was “very hot-headed” and recalled that he made some deeply wounding remarks backstage to Messiaen after a rehearsal of Turangalîla in 1948.

Seiji Ozawa’s marked score of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, with inscription from the composer

Messiaen acknowledged that the music establishment found the twittering of birdsong in his compositions to be misplaced. “It makes them (his critics) laugh, and they don’t hold back,” he acknowleged in an interview. His widow later recalled that his music always faced a mixed reception during his lifetime. “He would sometimes win the admiration of the public but the critics could be very, very spiteful,” she said. And he was pilloried by the atonal elite for not being far enough avant the garde.

Even today, I keep running into Messiaen-lovers. One French woman who as a child heard Messiaen play the Sainte Trinité (Holy Trinity) organ in Paris. She tells me his playing could be “grandiose, almost frightening”. Messiaen took a liking to her and invited her one day to sit at the organ. She still remembers touching a few keys. “He smiled when I put a shy finger on the keyboard, then he struck the first majestic chords of the Bach Toccata and Fugue. The church was flooded with waves of that gigantic sound. I carry it with me these many years later.”

Controversy aside, Messiaen’s place in music history is assured today, with some music scholars ranking him alongside Stravinsky as one of the most innovative voices of his time. Major works were commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and he was in demand worldwide for teaching harmony and composition.

He became a virtual rock star in Japan, where he discovered Japanese traditional music and borrowed from the harmonics he was hearing there for the first time. A mountain peak near Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, was named “Mount Messiaen” in 1976 in homage to his orchestral suite Des canyons aux étoiles. A handful of his works remain in the standard repertoire but there is much more Messiaen that is rarely played. A closer investigation reveals a unique sound world, much of it inspired by birdsong. He left a legacy of more than a hundred works for piano, orchestra, chamber groups, solo instruments, many enhanced by electronic instrumentation and a gathering of exotic bells, gongs and cymbals and Balinese gamelans he collected from around the world.

Messiaen’s friendly manner also left good memories among those who studied with him. He laughed easily and had a taste for loud shirts toward the end of his life. His relaxed attitude toward students was to let them grow naturally, not to force them into traditions or trends. Loriod recalls her long marriage to him as passing “with never a cross word.” She has also said that she was kept at arm’s-length from his creative process. She was never informed of his works in progress, she said, and was only allowed to study and play the works when completed.

Messiaen’s circle as a popular Paris Conservatoire professor included students Boulez, Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Harrison Birtwhistle, Alexander Goehr, George Benjamin, Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, among others who went on to push the avant-garde boundaries. Boulez, writing in The Messiaen Companion, credited Messiaen with “the great merit of having freed French music from that narrow and nervous ‘good taste’ inherited from illustrious forebears …”

Internment and forced isolation from the rambunctious Paris creative scene during World War II may well have enabled the birth of one of the most original chamber works of the 20th century. Messiaen produced his famous quartet virtually under German orders. “You are a composer. Then compose,” the main guard told him shortly after he was settled in. He was given private quarters, manuscript paper, pencils and erasers, and he set to work. After months of concentration on his ideas, the intensive rehearsal time snatched between work details, Quartet for the End of Time was premiered in January 1941 in the prison camp before a packed barracks. “The first difficulty was to read the piece,” recalled violinist Jean Le Boulaire. “The second was to play it together. That wasn’t easy … We had run across something we had never seen before.”

The smartly uniformed German officers of the camp occupied the front row, probably perplexed by the other-worldly sounds of the composition. Most of the audience was no better equipped to appreciate it but as a relief from camp routine it was warmly welcomed. Even today, parts of the Quartet can be hard going. Messiaen tended to think, compose and speak in synesthesia colors. He once described the sound he sought as “orange veined with violet”. Birds chirp throughout, some on the piano, some on the violin. In the fifth movement, “The Ethereal Sounds of Dreams.” an ostinato of orange-blue is superimposed on cascades of violet-purple. And the climactic eighth movement ends in a melodic second theme of orange-green.

One of my musician friends in Bordeaux says it took him ten years to grasp the piece. Now it is one of his favorites. Typically, Messiaen was less than forthcoming on some details. He often told interviewers that 3,000 prisoners attended the premiere. Some writers put the number at 4,000, or 5,000 and even 30,000. One researcher posits 350-400, sensibly basing her estimate on the capacity of the room in which it was performed. The title of the Quartet refers to the biblical passages in Revelation 10.1-7 in which an angel descends from heaven and declares that “there shall be no more time” – meaning eternity will arrive, with no past and no future to distract us from God.

A large proportion of scholarly study has gone into Messiaen’s romance with birdsong. He once said he believed birds are “the best musicians on the planet,” and credits them with inventing the chromatic and diatonic scales, and engaging in the first group improvisation in their “dawn chorus”. He would spend nights in haystacks or barns to hear it. “I simply write what I hear, then adapt it for our modern instruments,” he once said.

Birds chirp two or three octaves above piano range and some sing in quarter-tones, he said. These qualities cannot be reproduced on a standard piano but Messiaen does a fair imitation with high-register piano writing. In teaching his classes, he liked to whistle bird calls before demonstrating his piano variations.

I spent the summer listening to 16 CDs in one of Messiaen’s boxed sets and never quite fell into a trance but can now fully appreciate his extraordinary richness. One of many interesting pieces I discovered, his 1963 Colours of the Celestial City, combines all of his principal musical motifs – Christian symbolism, plainsong, birdsong, rhythm and his colour associations with musical chords. It stakes a claim to colour composition, a style he clung to for the rest of his life. Messiaen was distressed when sceptics refused to accept his mental colorations as basic to his compositions despite his precise descriptions of the vivid orange, greens and purples he saw in his mind. “I see colours whenever I hear music, and they see nothing, nothing at all. That’s terrible. And they don’t even believe me,” he said to German interviewer

The concept of orchestral use of keyboard instruments extended to his piano writing as well in which he exploited the instrument’s timbre to the full, writes Robert Sherlaw Johnson in his 1975 book Messiaen. The composer’s piano output is voluminous, with Catalogue of Birds generally noted as his most important piece. Peter Hill, in an essay on the piano music, called Messiaen’s piano writing “the equal of any twentieth-century composer in scale and scope, and arguably without parallel in the originality of its technique”. Hill, who has recorded the complete piano works, remarked to Loriod in a private interview that he considered two piano compositions, Four Studies of Rhythm and Cantéyodjaya (a name borrowed from southern India), “very important works”. She replied that the study was in reaction to serial composition which Messiaen believed was too concerned with pitch and not enough to rhythm. He didn’t like Cantéyodjaya much, she added, “but it’s certainly fun to play”. A recent recording by respected German pianist Stefan Schleiermacher brings bounce to the writing and displays Messiaen at his playful, whimsical peak, at least in piano composition. But “fun to play”? Only for the most accomplished players.

Messiaen died after surgery at the Beaujon Hospital in Paris April 29, 1992. After his funeral, Yvonne Loriod ordered a special gravestone topped with the sculpture of a bird.

Michael Johnson is a music critic and writer with a particular interest in piano. He has worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He has been a regular contributor to International Piano magazine, and is the author of five books. He also writes for this sites sister site ArtMuseLondon.com. Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux, France. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

By |

The following text is the welcome address from Karl Paulnack, Director of the Music Division, Piano Faculty, of the Boston Conservatory. It is moving, succinct and sensitive.

One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re wasting your SAT scores!” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp. 

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. 

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds. 

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. 

Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town a few years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation. 

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?” 

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft. 

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well. 

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”