Classical Music
Related: About this forum'Olivier Messiaen' Review: Composing in Sound and Color
Opinion by Tim Page 1mo 4 min read
The life and work of the French composer Olivier Messiaen continue to fascinate. A mystic Catholic who sought inspiration from birdsong, vast empty canyons, stained-glass windows and his own explorations of Asian music, Messiaen (1908-92) was an original thinker who, from the beginning, went his own way. His music combined jagged modernist melodies, complex rhythmic patterns and dense formal schemata in a manner that was, paradoxically, passionate, extravagantly colorful and sometimes swooningly Romantic.
Like Liszt and Scriabin before him, Messiaen spent his life in a state of synesthesia, a sensory crossing of wires that may result in seeing sounds. When I hear music, when I read music, Messiaen said, I see colors, which are marvelous and impossible to describe because they are moving like the sounds themselves. He described one of his harmonic sequences as going from blue striped with green to black spotted with red and gold, by way of diamond, emerald, purplish-blue, with a dominant pool of orange studded with milky white. Once, while watching a ballet, he became sick to his stomach because the purplish hue of the lighting clashed with his own conception of the color of G major.
Messiaen is a ripe subject for study. Though his works appear on concert programs less frequently than those of some of his contemporaries, he is far from an obscure figure. His most popular work, a piece best known in English-speaking countries as the Quartet for the End of Time, even inspired a 2014 novel with that title, by the Canadian writer Johanna Skibsrud. Now Robert Sholl, a professor of music at the University of West London who also teaches at the Royal Academy of Music has given us a slim, smart and sympathetic volume titled Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography.
Like Messiaens music, the book is not for everybody. Mr. Sholl knows the composers work intimatelyhe has played all of Messiaens organ music and seems to subscribe to much of his worldview. But Olivier Messiaen seems to me most valuable as an annotated meditation on the composers work for those who know it well and have the training to absorb its complications. As pure storytelling, it is somewhat less captivating.
More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/olivier-messiaen-review-composing-in-sound-and-color/ar-BB1r60pU
Quartet for the End of Time"
Turangalîla Symphony
Vingt Regards sur lEnfant Jésus
(Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus)
What's the Colour of Music? Messiaen and Colour
Xylophone orchestral excerpt- Olivier Messiaen - Oiseaux exotiques
Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques
Album cover!
Judi Lynn
(162,495 posts)La Coliniere
(1,005 posts)Messiaens Turangalila Symphony is one of my all time favorite pieces of 20th century classical music. Monumental, frightening, beautiful a one of a kind sonic masterpiece.
Judi Lynn
(162,495 posts)It's a real adventure.
Wikipedia has an excellent entry for the Symphony:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turangal%C3%AEla-Symphonie
Only the most accomplished, seasoned people would ever attempt it! Intense.
Thank you, so much.
La Coliniere
(1,005 posts)of Mozart in the Jungle where the orchestra performs Turangalila for incarcerated inmates at a penitentiary. That was really a nice surprise. If youve not watched Mozart in the Jungle, I think its still streaming on Amazon Prime.