Messiaen’s Musical Techniques: The Composer’s View and Beyond by Gareth Healey (review)

Gareth Healey undertakes a daunting task in his book, Messiaen’s Musical Techniques: The Composer’s View and Beyond. He poses the thesis that in order to understand the music of Olivier Messiaen clearly, one must thoroughly grasp his compositional techniques (no argument here). Healey navigates a challenging labyrinth in his book. He interprets Messiaen’s writings, primarily the Technique de mon langage musical (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1944) and the Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1994–2002), and music in order to plot the development of his ideas. Healey contends that being overly dependent on the composer’s writings does not serve the goal of acquiring insights into the music, due to the fact that the writings often contain individual analyses, explanations, and observations not bound together by any contextual glue. To remedy this, Healey takes great pains to note how Messiaen’s evolving ideas can be integrated, a subject that the composer or scholars of his music seldom broach. Building upon his earlier work on form in Messiaen (Gareth Healey, “Form: Messiaen’s ‘Downfall’?” Twentieth-Century Music 4, no. 2 [September 2007]: 163–87), Healey relates his reading of the composer’s techniques to broader organizational structures, concluding his book with an analytical methodology that purports to produce substantive analyses of Messiaen’s music.

In Messiaen’s Musical Techniques, Healey considers the composer’s musical language in three phases. After an introductory chapter 1 (pp. 1–3), Healey devotes the first phase of his examination to looking at Messiaen’s writings and the influence of music theorists and other composers (p. 1). Chapter 2 (“The Theoretical and Analytical Writings of Messiaen,” pp. 5–12) surveys Messiaen’s treatises, analyses of the music of other composers, and lectures in chronological order, beginning with the Technique and ending with the posthumous publication, Ravel: Analyses des œuvres pour piano de Maurice Ravel (Paris: Durand, 2003). The next chapter (“Theoretical and Written Sources,” pp. 13–26) charts those theories that influenced Messiaen, as well as those from which he borrowed. For these reasons, Healey focuses on how Messiaen approached plainchant, accentuation in Mozart, and ancient rhythms and modes. Chapter 4 (“Extra-Musical Influences,” pp. 27–44) explores the influences outside of music that shaped Messiaen’s compositional aesthetic, primarily birdsong, theology, philosophy, and literature, whereas chapter 5 (“The Influence of Debussy and Stravinsky,” pp. 45–66) looks at the pivotal influences of Debussy and Stravinsky on Messiaen.

Chapter 6 (“Rhythmic Evolution,” pp. 67–81) initiates the next stage of Healey’s examination, that of investigating the “development of the techniques discussed in these writings” (p. 1). This chapter explores the progressive expansion of Messiaen’s approach to rhythm by discussing different rhythmic techniques. Chapter 7 (“Harmonic Evolution,” pp. 83–95) serves as the pitch counterpart to the preceding chapter. It deals with Messiaen’s modal and non-modal harmonic vocabularies, along with various techniques applied to the pitch domain.

The last three chapters are concerned with Healey’s alternative analytical methodology that he uses to interpret works not covered by Messiaen in detail (p. 1). In chapter 8 (“Harmony: An Alternative Perspective,” pp. 97–109), Healey employs pitch-class set labels and inclusion relations, combined with an understanding of Messiaen’s music, to account for the composer’s highly varied harmonic vocabulary. After providing ten hypothetical models of form to which Messiaen’s music can be related in chapter 9 (“Form,” pp. 111–32), in chapter 10 (“Implementation of Analytical Methodology,” pp. 133–61), Healey applies analytical strategies developed in previous chapters to interpret music from different periods in Messiaen’s output, ranging from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940–41) to Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (1964). In all of these works, Healey strives to identify and comprehend Messiaen’s...