Michael Hutcheon The Musical Modernism of Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was influenced by avant-garde composition from the beginning of his career. While rejecting the two major strains of musical modernism, neoclassism and, ultimately serialism, he developed his own innovations in melody and harmony, and also in rhythm. In addition, Messiaen turned to nature – to the songs of birds – as a source of preselected compositional materials thus creating his unique form of musical modernism. He applied all of these techniques in the composition of his only opera Saint François d’Assise, a massive work intended to transform operatic experience and informed by the symbolist works he had known from his youth.

Keywords: Olivier Messiaen; modernism; music; avant-garde; symbolism

It has been argued that the beginning of modernism in music began with the opening flute solo of Claude Debussy’s Prélude de l’après-midi d’un faune: ‘In this slithering phrase the key is in doubt, in the music’s fluctuating tempos and irregular rhythms and its use of tritones it declares that the common practice techniques of composition that had structured music from the 16th century onward have been suspended and the narrative mode of development has been abandoned.’1 This piece was based on a poem by the symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, and it ushered in a period that would reject Romanticism, challenge tonality and continually require innovation and progress. Some 25 years later the vocal score of another Debussy composition was given as a present to a 10-year-old, prodigiously gifted boy in Nantes, France. This was the opera Pélleas et Mélisande based on the symbolist play of the same name by Maurice Maeterlinck. It made an enormous impression on the boy and pointed him in the direction that he would follow throughout his life. The boy was Olivier Messiaen. The score with its new and daring departure from the past was the first that would lead Messiaen as a young man to be in his words ‘smitten with the avant-garde.’2 Messiaen would become a central figure in what Paul Griffiths calls ‘the last phase of modern music [...] the last effort to alter music radically and even to set the art on a new course’3 that had its most conspicuous origin in Paris. In this article, I want to trace Messiaen’s biography as a way of exploring some aspects of modernism in music and the development of Messiaen’s  1 Paul Griffiths, A Concise History of Modern Music from Debussy to Boulez (London: Thomas and Hudson, 1978), pp. 5-7 2 Peter Hill, and Nigel Simeone. Messiaen (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005), p.18 3 Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After: Directions since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 1 338 Michael Hutcheon own particular and perhaps, peculiar style of modernism. I want to ultimately arrive at his crowning achievement, the opera Saint François d’Assise, in which he combined his modernist experiments of a lifetime in a drama of religion that relied heavily on these literary symbolist roots. In 1919 young Olivier moved to Paris where he entered the Conservatoire at the age of 11. His teachers included Paul Dukas, the composer of the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue. This is also a symbolist work based on yet another play by Maurice Maeterlinck and was greatly admired by Messiaen. Young Olivier prospered in the Conservatoire and began composing in earnest in his late teens so that at the time of his graduation his works were being performed in public. Messiaen was already composing with a distinctive voice. While in many ways a traditionalist, he espoused in his music the modernist ethos of innovation and experimentation. His characteristic melodic and harmonic language was not that of conventional key structures (while still recalling them) but rather his own version of modal technique that he called ‘modes of limited transposition’. These are special scales, which because of internal symmetries, can only be transposed a limited number of times before their content repeats itself-that is fewer than the 12 transpositions possible with the conventional major and minor scales. One example of a mode of limited transposition is the whole tone scale where there is an interval of a tone between each note. It has only two possible transformations before reproducing itself. Its use was developed extensively by Debussy. This forms Messiaen’s mode 1 to which he added several others. The use of these modes gives Messiaen’s music, in its melodies and harmony, a distinct quality. In ways that mirror that literary modernist obsession with time, in the 1930s Messiaen began to explore concepts of rhythm using as points of departure the metres of Greek poetry and also Indian rhythms from an thirteenth-century text by Sarngadeva. One of the developments from this was what he called ‘non-retrogradable rhythms’ that reproduce themselves in reverse: these are rhythmic palindromes around a central time value. Consequently, as Richard Taruskin has pointed out, scales and rhythms that reproduce themselves ‘are both devices that arrest the sort of progression on which musical ‘development’ (i.e., the sonorous illusion of directed motion) depends. Non-progressive structures are necessary to any music that wants to represent or symbolize the atemporal (i.e., the eternal) within an inexorably temporal medium.’4 Messiaen was an extremely devout Catholic and his purpose throughout his life was to represent the truths of the Catholic faith in his music. These

4 Richard Taruskin, ‘Sacred Entertainments’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 15:2 (2003), 109- 26 (p.121)