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

1. It Is a Glistening Music We Seek

1. It Is a Glistening Music We Seek Composition: To What End? Olivier Messiaen is mentioned in many a twentieth-century survey in relation to the role he had in serialism. Around 1950 he was seen as a forerunner in the field of conceptual and technical innovations in music. During this brief period he produced works with often purely technical titles that to all appearances did not refer to religion. But although these works may possess an implicit religious meaning, as some authors have pointed out, Messiaen’s overall oeuvre—on paper, in any case—is emphatically determined by the many works with explicit religious titles, themes, and mottos.1 In the historical period in which his work came about, religion had already lost an important part of its undisputedness and communal basis in society. In a number of places, Messiaen records that he feels that he is not understood as a composer because he is speaking of religious affairs before ‘‘people who don’t believe in it or have little knowledge of religion and theology.’’2 His preference for the ‘‘surreal’’ in faith, which is expressed in the eccentricity of some of his titles and mottos, reinforces the impression that religious intentions and programs predominantly determine Messiaen’s oeuvre. But he was also working in a compositional environment that was rapidly becoming more and more science-driven; the alterity of his faith is squared, as it were, by the enigmatic character of his musical avant-gardism. For some time, Messiaen was considered to be a ‘‘mystical’’ composer, and to a certain extent this is still the case. Insofar as this is correct—and this needs to be considered more fully—it is also an effect of his excessive clarity. Messiaen has spoken and written remarkably much about his work, and his music, too, shows a penchant for the unequivocal. This may be a fortuitous circumstance if one desires to learn more about the relation between music and religion today. What, according to Messiaen, was his concern in composing ? How did he perceive this relation himself? These are the questions that form the springboard for an exploration, in this chapter, of the why, 13 14 It Is a Glistening Music We Seek what, and how of his composing. In addressing the last, the emphasis shall be on the theoretical, that is, on the structural possibilities that the composer saw for realizing his project. Messiaen’s lament that he was not understood—a theme that emerges frequently in his career—appears to indicate a desire for communication. It must first be established, however, that this is not necessarily the case. An anecdote recorded by Messiaen in his Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie shows that the sharing of meaning is, to him, secondary to the experience that precedes it, namely, the pure pleasure of inner listening. One day one of my students asked me why I compose music. That’s the type of question one oughtn’t ask. One could also say: Why do you live in a city? Why do you prefer the mountains to the city, or the sea to the mountains? Why are you married? Why aren’t you? Why do you have enemies? Why are you alive rather than dead? etc. I have tried to answer my student through successive elimination. I do not compose for a broad audience— neither do I compose for a few initiated. So, the student said, you compose for the single listener that you are yourself? Then, I found myself very embarrassed. I compose for the pleasure of inner listening at the moment itself of composing.3 Although Messiaen here appears to be indifferent to other listeners in such joyful composing and to have no intention whatever of communicating anything to others, he is emphatically clear in other places about his aim to compose in order to express, indeed to express something very specific. The following passage, dating from the 1960s, indicates perhaps most concisely the background against which his work is usually perceived, and it contains in addition a number of commonplaces characteristic for Messiaen, such as the notion that he was ‘‘born a believer.’’ Personally, I compose to champion, express, and define something. . . . The first idea I wanted to express, the most important, is the existence of the truths of the Catholic faith. I have the good fortune to be a Catholic. I was born a believer, and the Scriptures impressed me even as a child...