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

4. The Gift of Dazzlement

4. The Gift of Dazzlement The notion of saturation surfaced more than once in the discussion of the dazzlement passages in Chapter 2. A saturated sound-image was created with Messiaen’s so-called turning chords (La Transfiguration, Part VIII); along with that, different forms of chromatic saturation were mentioned, as with the sound field of the third movement (Part XII) or the fully chromatic chords in both chorales (Parts VII and XIV). Especially in these latter instances , saturation pertained to a parametric phenomenon: the notion referred to the fact that all twelve tones on the chromatic scale occurred in the sound field or the relevant chord form. This particular notion of saturation is based on the parametrical reduction of music.1 In the former case, however, a different type of saturation is attained, a sonic excess that cannot be described as a summation of tones—even not of all twelve, and even not in terms of the whole that is larger than the sum of its constituent parts.2 This particular notion of saturation, this sonic excess, will be the subject of this chapter. As we have seen, the Christian element in Messiaen’s music cannot satisfactorily be described in terms of representation (thematizing, symbolizing, sound imagery, and the like). Connecting the representation of faith to a music that is reduced, in the process, to sheer description in musical theoretical terms (see Pascal Ide’s analysis of Le corps glorieux), leads to a construct that minimizes, trivializes, and eventually even erases both music and religion .3 Any search for music and religion in such an analysis, any attempt to locate the musicosacral or the sacromusical, is doomed to remain sterile. But what if such a quest departs from the first form of saturation, that is, an excess that cannot be described as the effect of a parametric constellation? Could there be a relation between this excess, on one hand, and the phenomena of éblouissement (or dazzlement) and breakthrough on the other? Or, to reformulate this question, is Messiaen’s experience of dazzlement perhaps concerned with an excess that is wholly different from the excess of chromatic saturation (experienced, for example, as relative to the surrounding modality)? 89 90 The Gift of Dazzlement The latter suggestion is not merely possible but even probable, if JeanLuc Marion’s phenomenology of ‘‘a phenomenon saturated with intuition’’ (abbreviated as the saturated phenomenon or phénomène saturé) is considered , as shall be done presently. This is particularly so if Messiaen’s music, or music as such, is considered in the light of Marion’s phenomenology of the idol (Section 2) and the icon (Section 3). The opening offered by this approach to thinking Christianity in Messiaen’s music introduces, however, a certain fissure between the aesthetic and theological possibilities of his music. This fault line between the aesthetic notion of the sublime and the theological notion of glory leads, at the end of this chapter in Section 4, to a renewed confrontation with the theories and concepts that were constitutive for the romantic religion of art or Kunstreligion. The Saturated Phenomenon Marion objects to any kind of phenomenology that is based on the decision to privilege subjective constitution within the duality (intention/intuition, signification/fulfillment, noesis/noema, and so forth) of the phenomenon. As he argues, such privileging either leads to a reduction of the phenomenon , subsumed in the figure of the ‘‘poor phenomenon’’ (phénomène pauvre d’intuition, with the example of ideal and propositional objects in mathematics and logics), or to an objectification of the phenomenon (phénomène de droit commun, that is, the scientific object and technical-industrial product). These reductions then imply a representation of the phenomenon that excludes , in the philosophical sense (and in the theologically or musicologically inspired analyses of music too, as I have argued), anything that is historical, contingent, irrational, or overwhelming, thus impeding the phenomenological admittance to precisely those experiences and events that constitute our quotidian surroundings (Marion refers to ‘‘the beings of nature , the living in general, the historical event, the face of the Other in particular , etc.’’) and that would (and should) be the subject of thinking.4 This analysis induces Marion to criticize metaphysics for its nihilism, as would become apparent in the fact of its orientation toward ‘‘the paradigm of phenomena that do not appear, or appear just a bit.’’5 As was argued, this is a viable analysis that applies to...