The Messiaen Companion by Russell Hoban

Author:Russell Hoban [Peter Hill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571281046
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

1 9 January 1993.

2 The dedicatee of Technique de mon langage musical (1944).

PART II

Piano Music II

PETER HILL

Messiaen seems to have possessed the rare ability to instruct and inspire composers, without expecting (or receiving) their uncritical loyalty. Indeed it is striking how little trace of Messiaen’s idiom one finds in the music of his pupils. In part, this is a consequence of Messiaen’s spiritual philosophy, which colours his music at every level. To those who studied with him in the 1940s, this side of Messiaen was uncongenial, even repellent, and Boulez is not the only one to have viewed Messiaen ambivalently, his comments veering between admiration and a tone which is almost offensively derogatory. (Incidentally, Messiaen was well aware – as he remarked to Samuel1 – that his passion for birdsong was open to ridicule; his reaction to slights to his religious beliefs is not recorded.) It was always more likely, therefore, that Messiaen’s influence would be indirect, arising from technical innovations, from his pioneering study of modern scores, and from his fascination with music of non-European cultures.

All these come sharply into focus in Messiaen’s own work in the remarkable pieces with which he made a return to the piano (Cantéyodjayâ and the Quatre études de rythme) in the late 1940s. These stand in total contrast to the musical inflation of Turangalîla: the conciseness of utterance is without precedent in Messiaen’s music to this date, and is matched by a brittle, percussive use of the piano, an exhilarating dryness of sonority from which the sensuous and contemplative side of Messiaen’s music is almost completely excluded. Stripped of the usual descriptive and symbolic meanings, the radical and purely musical concerns of the works drew Messiaen into a musical mainstream, for the first and only time in his life; their cult status (of the études in particular, which became known through a pair of 78s made by Messiaen himself) was to confirm Messiaen, at least temporarily, as a father-figure to the post-war avant garde.

In Cantéyodjayâ, the music’s high spirits reflect the stimulating circumstances of its composition, at intervals snatched between teaching at Tanglewood. As a non-descriptive piece, Cantéyodjayâ is a Messiaen rarity (the first since the Rondeau of 1943); but although there is no programme, the music hints at meanings beyond itself, as suggested by the titles sprinkled through the score. Those in a sort of pseudo-Sanskrit have been decoded by Paul Griffiths,2 to reveal sly references to Turangalîla: ‘statoua’ for a phrase suggestive of Turangalilâ’s ‘statue’ music, ‘doubléafloréalîla’ for the flower theme. In part, then, Messiaen’s private game was a glance backwards. It would be wrong, however, to read too much into this: Messiaen was working at speed, quarrying ideas from his own music (as he always had done) simply because they were lying to hand.

Moreover the strong element of spoof should not disguise the fact that Cantéyodjayâ is the start of something decisively new, as Messiaen was surely aware; indeed the (at times) fanatical panache with which he worked through compositional

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