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  • Performing Messiaen's Organ Music: 66 Masterclasses
  • Robert Fallon
Performing Messiaen's Organ Music: 66 Masterclasses. By Jon Gillock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. [xxii, 403 p. ISBN 9780253353733. $39.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography.

Once asked to name the organists who had served his music well, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) replied that the American Jon Gillock could play his music better than he could. A member of the Juilliard faculty for most of the final quarter of the twentieth century, Gillock specializes in what his website calls "the French spiritual repertoire" (www.jongillock.com, accessed 25 September 2010). He studied with Messiaen in 1977 and recorded his music on the composer's "own" organ at Paris's Église de la Sainte-Trinité. He gave the New York premiere of Messiaen's final organ cycle, Livre du Saint Sacrement, in 1984 and the world premiere of the posthumous Offrande au Saint Sacrement in 2002. Drawing upon Messiaen's own copies of his scores, Gillock's Performing Messiaen's Organ Music offers expert advice on how to play Messiaen's complete works for the instrument, which number among the most ambitious solo compositions of the twentieth century.

The main purpose of the book, Gillock says, is "to make the works of Olivier Messiaen more accessible" (p. xv). He succeeds by providing a handbook for organists on how to understand, prepare, and perform these widely respected but often intimidating works. By treating each movement independently and progressing through the works chronologically, however, the book's segmented structure renders it more suitable for reference than for reading cover to cover.

The book has two parts: fourteen chapters (one per work) presenting sixty-six prose "master classes" (one per movement) and three chapters on the organ at La Trinité. Each master class provides the movement's title and subtitle (usually biblical) in both French and English, followed by a description of the music, which is taken either from the score or from Messiaen's own program note. Gillock mentions printing errors, issues of registration, and the work's relationship to the Church calendar, and then dissects the movement phrase by phrase, often outlining the structure and artfully describing his sense of its ideal timbres, tempo, phrasing, and mood. He explains how to count the sixteenth notes while feeling the beamed notes as beats, whether or not they are even in length, and how to ignore the barlines in some pieces while using them for phrasing in other pieces. He especially attends to the images and stories that Messiaen loosely narrates in many of his works, mapping musical events to their supposed biblical inspiration or theological concept. Each master class unfolds over an average of five generous pages; the reader will need scores in order to follow the many details.

The final forty pages of the book include three chapters on Messiaen's organ at La Trinité: a translation of an essay by Messiaen, an account of the organ's history, and a description of it as it has existed since 1966. Finally, two appendices address Messiaen's biography and the appropriate liturgical services for performing individual movements; a glossary defines terms related to Messiaen's technique.

Gillock's performance suggestions are evocative and well-informed. He focuses on Messiaen's connection to the French organ tradition, where "adjacent repeated notes are expected to be tied," "repeated notes in the same voice are always marked with a staccato mark," and "phrase marks do not indicate breaths (silences) but an internal organization of the notes" (p. 7). He appropriately suggests that Messiaen's birds sound "natural" (p. 156), and advises that chant-like passages be played as if they were sung (though he does not specify what that means). He offers particularly thoughtful studies of some of Messiaen's longer and more difficult pieces, such as Les corps glorieux and Livre d'orgue, even parsing their formal structure and organizational principles. At over one hundred [End Page 551] pages, his insightful chapter on the eighteen-movement, two-hour Livre du Saint Sacrement nearly constitutes a book unto itself.

The book's most illuminating passages reveal Gillock's command of organ registration, particularly his familiarity...

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