Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen was a France composer, organist, instructor, and ornithologist whose music is distinguished by his deep devotion to Catholicism, exoticism, and character. At age 11 he moved into the Paris Conservatoire, learning body organ and improvisation with Marcel Dupré and structure with Paul Dukas. In 1930, he became the main organist at La Trinité Cathedral in Paris, a post he kept for a lot more than 40 years. His recognized teaching profession is proclaimed by visits in Darmstadt (1950-1953), his popular courses in tranquility and analysis in the Paris Conservatoire from 1947, and his visit as teacher of structure there in 1966. His amazing list of college students contains Boulez, Stockhausen, and his second wife, keyboardist Yvonne Loriod, among numerous others. In synthesizing a person style, Messiaen found out in the music of Debussy the properties of “amazing” modes like the whole-tone and reduced scales, phoning them “settings of limited transposition.” The natural symetricalities of the modes allowed Messiaen to generate progressions and melodies free from the tonic-dominant polarity of traditional tonal music, while staying in addition to the twelve-tone program aswell. Messiaen was gifted with a solid feeling of “synaesthesia” or hearing in shades. He often referred to his music with regards to “color progressions,” also equating crucial signatures and choices (models) of pitches with particular shades. Young, Messiaen developed a solid interest in tempo, especially fostered by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Springtime. His rhythmic investigations ranged from Gregorian chant, to ancient greek language poetic meters, to Indian raga, to gamelan music. He shortly still left regular metric divisions behind, although repetition continued to be a fundamental element of his rhythmic vocabulary. Many of these components are described in great details in his 1944 publication, Technique de mon langage musical (Technique of my musical vocabulary). In 1940, while a prisoner of battle from the Germans, Messiaen constructed Quatuor put la fin du temps (Quartet for the finish of your time). The quartet’s exclusive instrumentation of piano, clarinet, violin, and cello was created for, and premiered by Messiaen and three fellow inmates while in detention; it became among the great chamber functions from the twentieth hundred years. Messiaen was among the initial composers to use serial ways to parameters apart from pitch (such as for example duration, register, and dynamics) in Setting de valeurs et d’intensités (1949) for single piano. His fascination with basic chant and tempo led him towards the historic Greeks and Hindus, where he uncovered processes such as for example nonretrogradable, additive, and subtractive rhythms. The Turangalila-symphonie of 1948 may be the most artificial of his early functions. It features wealthy orchestration, imaginative usage of tonal colours, Hindu rhythms, and a formal plan that unfolds in huge, block-like constructions. Also of notice here is among the first uses from the Ondes Martenot, an electric instrument with the capacity of generating eerie glissandi, aswell as monophonic melodies. Messiaen experienced a deep like of birdsong, and spent enough time in the open making considerable transcriptions, a lot of which would surface area in his functions, most notably within an arresting orchestral passing in Chronochromie (1960) as well as the monumental Catalogue d’oiseaux (Catalog from the Parrots) (1958) for single piano. His huge body of body organ music, made up mainly during his tenure as organist in the Sainte Trinite Cathedral, is usually highly idiomatic, vibrant in tranquility and sign up, and rhythmically clever. From 1950, his Messe de la Pentecote (Mass from the Pentecost) is usually a assortment of improvisations that he formed into a structure. His just opera, St. Francis d’Assise, was finished in 1983.