We are less than a month from Olivier Messiaen's 100th birthday. His music is, for me, a recent discovery, which has become almost an addiction by now. I hope responses to this guestbook will give me more to think about regarding his music.
I don't think you need to think about POWs etc here, but I thoroughly understand why you do/one does.The Quartet for the End of Time is a work I love and one that responds for me to quite a wide variety of performance approaches. The Tashi one is good but so are many others. This one is a little different -
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It is one of those works that I cannot separate from the circumstances of their composition. Generally, I don't think it is a good idea to make such associations but sometimes I just can't help it. Beethoven's Eroica is another (not so much the Napoleon story as the arrival in the world of a piece of music so totally different to anything that had come before). With the Quartet for the End of Time I can't avoid thinking of the audience of POWs and their Nazi/German guards, many of whom seem to have found it something special despite it being played by relatively indifferent performers and despite it even now seeming a fairly challenging piece of music.
As I mentioned upthread, it basically took years away from the Catalogue d'oiseaux for me to acquire an interest in the work. By comparison with things like the Vingt Regards and Quartet, it sounded kind of "random" to me. Returning to all the works, I feel differently. The Vingt Regards sounds more formally rigid--more positively, for Messiaen, maybe more liturgical?--and the bird music sounds correspondingly more open and eclectically expressive. I find myself preferring listening to the Catalogue d'oiseaux over the others--though they all sound like they're by the same composer; this is something I never expected.Or indeed, I'll be perfectly happy that this is a work that I just won't like, ever. It happens, but I think it's important enough as a piece of music for me to give it a few more tries?
No, it is not a direct denial or negation, but don't even mention the composer's intent in the same breath as your argument, because your approach in no way takes the composer's intent into consideration. You're just hearing the music and letting it become whatever your imagination makes it, and this has nothing do with the composer's intent. Messiaen called his music a statement of his faith, which apparently you want nothing to do with.I don't doubt Messiaen's sincerity. But if I listen to any piece of instrumental music without knowledge of the identity of the composer or titles suggesting religious devotion, I am free to allow the music to inspire my imagination free of association. And for me this in no way is a denial or negation of the composer's intent.
The purpose may be religious, or social event, or ritual, but those are all universal human concerns. We don't have to know who the specific composer was; the important thing is that we can relate to it on a human level, and if not actually participate, at least empathize with the intent it was created for.Maybe the term art doesn't always have to be connected to music? What about all of the church music of the renaissance or medieval era created in anonymity? We don't know anything about the composers who created it other than they were providing music for the church or some other function.
They may have had other inspirations but were employed by the church, royalty or whomever? The same for traditional/folk music from around the globe. We can assume much of it was connected to some social event or ritual sacred or secular.
True. But the meaning in music is ambiguous and abstract."We listen to musical sounds in the air"
The same can be said for speech but we attribute meaning to certain primordial sounds - a scream is not a purr - and the patterns of language that creates words, phrases, etc.
Please do not instruct us on how to listen to music.If you listen to Messiaen like you listen to Debussy or Frank Zappa, you are missing the point.
So? Those are just subjective imaginings of a child. What does he know about Messiaen's intent? We all know this is NOT what the music was intended by the composer to be.Well, I remember we have a member here, who describes his experience of Messiaen (say 'Des Canyons aux Etoiles'), as clearly resembling children's cartoon's music.