Blocks of granite
MUSIC-2 MICHAEL NYMAN
At a time when anyone making the attempt to comprehend 'new music' is faced with a labyrinth of seemingly mutually exclusive techniques and idioms, the position of Olivier Messiaen is both enigmatic and paradoxical in its relationship to tradition and renewal.
His music is traditional yet draws on many non-western musical traditions. He is a com- mitted composer, a devout Catholic, whose works are often unfashionably descriptive and programmatic. He notoriously lacks a sense of humour, which makes his organist's fondness for chains of luxuriously chromatic chords, Delius-fashion, the more blatant. His melodies and textures are not fragmented in the manner of the so-called post-Webern composers, yet he creates highly coloured and shifting patterns of sound out of bird song, in contexts which are nothing if not avant-garde.
This attempt to 'explain' the prodigious and controversial originality of Messiaen, now in his sixty-first year, is prompted by the en- lightened alternative ending to the Oxford- based Sixth English Bach Festival which was provided for Londoners in what amounted to a complete Messiaen sub-Festival. Concerts of representative piano, organ and choral works were crowned by a truly inspired feat of pro- gramme planning which brought together three orchestral works central to the understanding of Messiaen's creative development.
These three works, L'Ascension, Turangalik- Symphonie and Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, to point a not too misleading parallel, bear a relationship to each other simi- lar to the string quartets of Beethoven's early, middle and late periods, and it is not without significance that they were written at intervals of roughly fifteen years—in 1933, 1948 and 1964 respectively. In all three the musical material is in a heightened sense descriptive, expressing the texts or titles with which Messiaen is wont to label his movements. The music has the func- tion of meditation or commentary; yet it is obvious that the different languages the three works speak do not result from a mere differ- ence of programme, nor from a Stravinskyan assumption of stylistic masks. The overwhelm- ing lyricism of Turangalila-Symphonie—a cele- bration of human, not divine, love; a vast ten- movement reinterpretation of the Tristan and Isolde legend—has its roots in L'Ascension, just as Turangalila uncannily foreshadows the materials, techniques and treatment of Et exspecto. Yet one feels that the partisans who reacted so volubly to the emotional message of Turangalila at the Festival Hall on Friday would, had they been allowed to applaud, have expressed similar reactions to Et exspecto at Westminster Abbey on Saturday. It would be fascinating to know how Beethoven's audiences reacted to Op. 132 after Op. 59.
The physical grandeur of the Abbey, with its nobly echoing acoustic, was a near-ideal setting for Et exspecto, scored for woodwind. brass and percussion and intended, according to the composer, for 'churches, cathedrals, and even performance in the open air and on moun- tain heights.' Yet despite the fact that the playing of the Orchestre Philharmonique de l'oa-rF, under the rather detached direction of Charles. Bruck, actually belittled the physical grandeur of the work (as it did also of Turangalila), the dying-away of the pause-notes in the 'solos' for gong and tam-tam, and of the final tutti chords of the first, third and fifth movements, seemed to symbolise, by making one aware of the breaking-down and decay of sound in silence, the whole new concept of musical time and space which is one of the most important features of recent music.
Messiaen's innovations in this field are largely rhythmic in origin, for whereas the for- ward drive of the music of, say, Beethoven, partly depends on the complex interrelationship of basic beat, individual rhythmic patterns and harmonic movement, Messiaen destroys one's sense of pulse by extremely slow tempi; and by giving equal stress and value to different note- lengths, often creates with very fast or very slow notes the characteristic texture of an orches- trated or 'coloured' rhythm. This technique is present somewhat more than embryonically in the first and last movements of L'Ascension. where the melody becomes a series of parallel chords. Form is created not by 'development' but by juxtaposing blocks whose textures move but are at the same time static and hieratic. (Church-bell sequences give the same sort of effect.) In Et exspecto the blocks Messiaen handles are of granite—and one should perhaps draw attention finally to the last movement, 'And I heard the voice of a great multitude,' where the whole wind band, uniformly loud, move in gigantic, slow chords, while a series of gongs beat faster notes all with the same insistent intensity. The effect is overwhelming. However, with less matter of fact direction, and without lapses of ensemble discon- certing in music which relies so much for its effect on communal rhythmic precision, the work's true stature would have been more manifest.
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