The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book would not have been written if I did not have the support of many people. Foremost, I wish to thank Hent de Vries, who over the years has inspired my writing and enriched my mind with his overwhelming erudition and grand-scale approach to matters philosophical and theological. I feel privileged that I could always rely on his warm support and encouragement for this wildly interdisciplinary project. My other supervisor, Rokus de Groot, deserves an equal share of my gratitude for his infinite patience and his preparedness to let me go into any direction I wanted. In our many sessions he showed me how the ear is the organ of curiosity and that, ultimately , to think well is to listen well. Of all the others who have contributed to this book—and there are many more than I can mention here—Kiene Brillenburg Wurth should be mentioned as the true savior of the project. Although we have had more beautiful things to share since the birth of Titus, I cherish the days in Amsterdam and Paris when it seemed that every stone in the pavement hid a crucial insight for the argument of the manuscript . Her love for nineteenth-century theories of art opened my eyes for what was really at stake, and surely I am not alone in this respect. However, all this could have led to the present book only through the support of one incredible person, whose career spans the publication of many books cited in the pages that follow: Fordham University Press editor Helen Tartar. It was she who inspired and supported unwaveringly the translation and reworking of the original Dutch book. I thank Aleid Fokkema for translating the wide-ranging and sometimes technically difficult manuscript so skillfully , and the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for their financial support. I thank Andrew Shenton and the anonymous reviewer for their support for and critical comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and, last but not least, editors Gregory McNamee and Eric Newman for their diligent work in the final stages. Needless to say, all remaining flaws are mine. xi And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him. —2 Kings 3:15 Auris prima mortis ianua, prima aperiatur et vitae. The ear was death’s first gateway; let it be the first to open up to life. —Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 28:5 ...