Messiaen: The Technique of My Musical Language-Structure

Unpublished assignment of Messiaen studies.  

Warning:

This work by The nights under the Southern Cross is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License

pp. 27-30

Structure

The other most significant characteristic in Messiaen’s music is the timeless quality. “The tendency of the music to drift, apparently without aim, is also a function of its harmony.”[i] Comparing with the German composers’ work, the music dose seems apparently without aim. The nature of German tradition, the “German constructive genius”[ii], had always displayed a great interests in the movement of ‘moving towards to a goal’, not even the goal itself. “For him the chief charm of modulation was ‘the getting there, and not the arrival itself.”[iii] This concept was fully extended in Wagner’s musical language, as he himself proclaimed his work as an “art of transition”.[iv]

.....
"Already in the eighteenth century Fontenelle had inquired, ‘Sonata, what do you want of me?’ Debussy’s fervent desire to found a genuinely French art inevitably led him away from the grand form of Beethoven. He looked upon sonata form, with its exposition, development, and restatement of musical ideas, as an outmoded formula, ‘a legacy of clumsy, falsely interposed traditions.’"[v]


The so-called ‘timeless quality’ can also be found in Debussy’s musical language. “The other notable characteristic of Debussy’s opera are the moments of repose, even stasis, that punctuate the action. There is a lot of waiting in Pelléas; extended scenes in which nothing much happens.”[vi] In some of Messiaen’s composition, it is simply because one of his notions of music is to “express some noble sentiments (and especially the most noble of all, the religious sentiments exalted by the theology and the truths of our Catholic faith),”[vii]. As it was declared by Griffiths: “The capacity to speak of God comes only when the march of time is forgotten, as it is forgotten in Plainsong, …”[viii]


One may wondered whether music has to be always ‘moving towards a goal’, rather than to be ‘extending the moment of repose’. Moreover, the question also arises whether the sense of the organic has to be produced motifically or tonally rather than the unbroken interlocked organic sense being produced rhythmically, harmonically, and atmospherically. It is necessary to be aware of the differences between the sentiments of individual compositions, in order to understand, associate, and appreciate the music, ....


[1] “It is a glistening music we seek, giving to the aural sense voluptuously refined pleasures.” On one hand, Messiaen’s notion about music was rather similar to Debussy’s: “fantasy of the senses” or the Gallic old ideal of art, which was “ to charm, to entertain, and to serve”.

[i] Andrew Ford, Illegal Harmonies: Music in the 20th Century, (Alexandria: Hale, 1997), p. 76.

[ii] Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 87.

[iii] Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 25.

[iv] Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 5.

[v] Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 87.

[vi] Andrew Ford, Illegal Harmonies: Music in the 20th Century, (Alexandria: Hale, 1997), p. 11.

[vii] Olivier Messiaen, Technique de mon Langage Musical, trans. John Stterfield (Paris: Leduc, 1944), p. 13.

[viii] Paul Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, (London: Faber, 1985), p. 17.