Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences

Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences
Author: Robert Fallon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317097181

Focusing on Messiaen’s relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen’s music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen’s compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences presents many new primary sources, including discussion of Messiaen’s birdsong cahiers, sketch and archival materials for his Prix de Rome entries and war-time Portique, along with performance practice insights and theological inspiration in works as diverse as Visions de l’Amen, Harawi, Timbres-durées and the organ Méditations. The volume places the composer within a broader historical and cultural framework than has previously been attempted, ranging from specific influences to more general contexts. As a centrepiece, the book includes an examination of the impact of one of the greatest influences upon Messiaen, Yvonne Loriod.

Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception

Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception
Author: Robert Fallon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317097157

Focusing on Messiaen’s relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen’s music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen’s compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception explores Messiaen’s imprint on recent musical life. The first part scrutinizes his compositional technique in terms of counterpoint, spectralism and later piano music, while the second charts ways in which Messiaen’s influence is manifest in the music and careers of Ohana, Xenakis, Murail and Quebecois composers. The third part includes case studies of Messiaen’s reception in Italy, Spain and the USA. The volume also includes an ornithological catalogue of Messiaen’s birds, collates information on the numerous ’tombeaux’ pieces he inspired, and concludes with a Critical Catalogue of Messiaen’s Musical Works.

Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue D'oiseaux

Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue D'oiseaux
Author: Roderick Chadwick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107000319

This book charts Messiaen's transformation of birdsong into music and its development into a major work of the twentieth century.

Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen
Author: Vincent Benitez
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2017-09-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 135158913X

Olivier Messiaen: A Research and Information Guide, Second Edition presents researchers with the most significant and helpful resources on Olivier Messiaen, one of the twentieth century's greatest composers. With multiple indices, this annotated bibliography will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field. The second edition has been fully revised and updated.

Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise

Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise
Author: Vincent Perez Benitez
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253042909

In this comprehensive study of Olivier Messiaen's magnum opus, Saint François d'Assise, Vincent Perez Benitez examines the opera from both theological and musical-analytical perspectives to ask how Messiaen expresses his Catholic theology through his work. Benitez combines a close reading of the opera score with accounts from Messiaen's associates, studies of Messiaen's birdsong notebooks and other primary documents, and an examination of the religious, musical, poetic, and visual arts literature with which the composer was familiar to explore how the opera's harmonic language and sound-color relationships motivate its musical meaning and expression. Through his analysis of these diverse sources and comparisons of Saint François d'Assise with other works such as Berg's Wozzeck and Wagner's Parsifal, Benitez places Messiaen's compositional practice within larger musical perspectives and historical contexts.

Messiaen's Final Works

Messiaen's Final Works
Author: Christopher Dingle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351558420

When Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) completed the vast opera Saint Fran?s d?Assise in 1983, he was mentally and physically exhausted, and believed that this monumental work would be his final compositional statement. In fact, he completed seven further works, and these form the focus of the present study. Christopher Dingle suggests that, following the crisis provoked by the opera, Messiaen's music underwent a discernible change in style. He examines these seven works to identify characteristics of the composer's music, in particular an often overlooked aspect of his technique: harmony. Part I of the book begins with a brief historical survey before discussing Saint Fran?s d?Assise as the work which defines everything that follows. Part II examines the series of miniatures that came after the opera and their links with ?lairs sur l?Au-Del?., his final masterpiece. ?lairs forms the subject of Part III of the book. Each movement is analysed in turn, before the work is considered as a whole and its hidden structure and motivic cohesion is revealed. Finally, Part IV considers the incomplete Concert ? and key stylistic features of the works of Messiaen?s final years.

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music
Author: Dr Lesley A Wright
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1472423569

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the frenchpianomusic.com website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.

Olivier Messiaen: Journalism 1935–1939

Olivier Messiaen: Journalism 1935–1939
Author: Stephen Broad
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2016-05-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317085930

One of the foremost composers of the twentieth century, Olivier Messiaen wrote widely on his music and on his beliefs. This is the first edition of his early journalism and provides both the original French text and an English translation. The writing in this volume dates from the 1930s, before the composer gained the international reputation that he and his music now enjoy. The pieces he wrote range from reviews of individual performances to essays on particular works or composers and articles that discuss more general themes such as sincerity of expression in music. Many of the articles included in this collection are new to the Messiaen bibliography, and others are available here for the first time in English. A number are, as Broad describes them, 'quietly shocking' in that they force us to reappraise certain aspects of the composer such as his role in La Jeune France, and his wider participation in the debates of his time. This edition, therefore, represents a new source for understanding Messiaen and provides a fascinating glimpse of the composer in the early part of his career.

Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860–1960

Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860–1960
Author: Deborah Mawer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317121805

This edited volume of case studies presents a selective history of French music and culture, but one with a dynamic difference. Eschewing a traditional chronological account, the book explores the nature of relationships between one main period, broadly the 'long' modernist era between 1860–1960, and its own historical ‘others’, referencing topics from the Romantic, classical, baroque, renaissance and medieval periods. It probes the emergent interplay, intertextualities and scope for reinterpretation across time and place. Notions of cultural meaning are paramount, especially those pertaining to French identity, national and individual. While founded on historical musicology, the approach benefits from interdisciplinary association with philosophy, political history, literature, fine art, film studies and criticism. Attention is paid to French composers’ celebrations and remakings of their predecessors. Editions of and writings about earlier music are examined, together with the cultural reception of performances of past repertoire. Organized into two parts, each of the eleven chapters characterizes a specific cultural network or temporal interplay, which may result in synthesis, disjunction, or historical misreading. The interwar years and those surrounding the Second World War prove particularly rich sources of enquiry. This volume aims to attract a wide readership of musicologists and musicians, as well as cultural historians, other humanities scholars and concert-goers.

Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences

Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences
Author: Christopher Dingle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-09-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781138245938

Focusing on Messiaen's relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen's music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen's compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences presents many new primary sources, including discussion of Messiaen's birdsong cahiers, sketch and archival materials for his Prix de Rome entries and war-time Portique, along with performance practice insights and theological inspiration in works as diverse as Visions de l'Amen, Harawi, Timbres-durées and the organ Méditations. The volume places the composer within a broader historical and cultural framework than has previously been attempted, ranging from specific influences to more general contexts. As a centrepiece, the book includes an examination of the impact of one of the greatest influences upon Messiaen, Yvonne Loriod.