Download or read book Messiaen s Final Works written by Christopher Philip Dingle and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) completed the vast opera Saint Francois d'Assise in 1983, he was mentally and physically exhausted, and believed that this monumental work would be his final compositional statement. Seven further works emerged, however, 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 discernable 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.
Download or read book Messiaen s Final Works written by Christopher Dingle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) completed the vast opera Saint Frans dAssise 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 Frans dAssise 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 lAu-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 Messiaens final years.
Download or read book Performing Messiaen s Organ Music written by Jon Gillock and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gillock supplies details about the organ at La Trinité in Paris, the instrument for which most of Messiaen's pieces were imagined.
Download or read book The Life of Messiaen written by Christopher Dingle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-22 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible study of the life and works of the twentieth-century composer Olivier Messiaen.
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen written by Christopher Philip Dingle and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume assesses Messiaen's position as a creative artist of the twentieth century in the light of the latest research. In the process, it identifies some of the key myths, confusions and exaggerations surrounding the composer which often mask equally remarkable truths. In attempting to reveal some of those truths, the essays elucidate a little of the mystery surrounding Messiaen as a man, an artist, a believer and a musician.
Download or read book Messiaen written by Peter Hill and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With access to Messiaen's private archive, the authors have been able to trace the origins of many of his greatest works and place them in the context of his life. --book jacket.
Download or read book For the End of Time written by Rebecca Rischin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The clarinetist Rebecca Rischin has written a captivating book.... Her research dispels several long-cherished myths about the 1941 premiere.... Rischin lovingly brings to life the other musicians-- tienne Pasquier, cellist; Henri Akoka, clarinetist; and Jean Le Boulaire, violinist--who played with Messiaen, the pianist at the premiere."--Alex Ross, The New Yorker "This book offers a wealth of new information about the circumstances under which the Quartet was created. Based on original interviews with the performers, witnesses to the premiere, and documents from the prison camp, this first comprehensive history of the Quartet's composition and premiere held my interest from beginning to end.... For the End of Time touches on many things: faith, friendship, creativity, grace in a time of despair, and the uncommon human alliances that wartime engenders."--Arnold Steinhardt, Chamber Music"The clarification of the order of composition of the movements is just one of the minor but cumulatively significant ways in which Rischin modifies the widely accepted account of the events at Stalag VIII A.... For the End of Time is a thorough and readable piece of investigative journalism that clarifies some important points about the Quartet's genesis."--Michael Downes, Times Literary Supplement The premiere of Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time on January 15, 1941, has been called one of the great stories of twentieth-century music. Composed while Messiaen (1908-1992) was imprisoned by the Nazis in Stalag VIII A, the work was performed under the most trying of circumstances: the temperature, inferior instruments, and the general conditions of life in a POW camp.Based on testimonies by the musicians and their families, witnesses to the premiere, former prisoners, and on documents from Stalag VIII A, For the End of Time examines the events that led to the Quartet's composition, the composer's interpretive preferences, and the musicians' problems in execution and how they affected the premiere and subsequent performances. Rebecca Rischin explores the musicians' life in the prison camp, their relationships with each other and with the German camp officials, and their intriguing fortunes before and after the momentous premiere. This paperback edition features supplementary texts and information previously unavailable to the author about the Quartet's premiere, Vichy and the composer, the Paris premiere, a recording featuring Messiaen as performer, and an updated bibliography and discography.
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen s Opera Saint Francois d Assise written by Vincent Perez Benitez and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen s Catalogue D oiseaux written by Roderick Chadwick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts Messiaen's transformation of birdsong into music and its development into a major work of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Messiaen Perspectives 1 Sources and Influences written by Dr Robert Fallon and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-12-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen written by Peter Hill and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olivier Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques is arguably the first of Messiaen's major works to create a successful synthesis between his music and his passion for ornithology. Messiaen regarded birdsong as music--a belief that led for a time to an obsession with truth-to-nature. Here, Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone provide the background to Oiseaux exotiques, discussing Messiaen's relations with the 1950s avant garde and his involvement with the concerts of the Domaine musical, for which Oiseaux exotiques was composed. The authors analyse Messiaen's compositional methods in unprecedented detail and trace step-by-step the evolution of musical ideas from first notation to finished score.
Download or read book Messiaen the Theologian written by Andrew Shenton and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Olivier Messiaen, music was a way of expressing his faith. He considered it his good fortune to have been born a Catholic and declared that 'the illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest and no doubt the most useful'. Messiaen is one of the most widely performed and recorded composers of the twentieth-century and his popularity is increasing, but the theological component of his music has so far been neglected and continues to provide a serious impediment for some of his audience. Messiaen the Theologian makes a significant contribution by providing cultural and historical context to Messiaen's theology.An array of international Messiaen scholars cover a wide variety of topics including Messiaen's personal spirituality, the context of Catholicism in France in the twentieth century, and comparisons of Messiaen with other artists such as Dante and Maritain.
Download or read book The Rest Is Noise written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Download or read book Messiaen written by Robert Sherlaw Johnson and published by Omnibus Press. This book was released on 2009-12-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Sherlaw Johnson's pioneering work on the music of Olivier Messiaen has become the foundation stone upon which all Messiaen scholarship is based. In it he discusses all Messiaen's main works, exploring his musical language, the development of his technique, his individual approach to harmony and rhythm, the theological and symbolic aspects of his music, and his use of birdsong. The appendices include a complete chronological list of works, a bibliography and a list of bird names. Messiaen died in 1992 aged 84. In between the publication of the last edition of this book in 1989 and this final, updated version he composed a further set of masterpieces that are more than a postscript to his compositional oeuvre. This new edition brings the book fully up to date on these and other works and offers additional assessment on Messiaen's influence as a composer. Robert Sherlaw Johnson (1932-2000) was a lecturer in music at the University of Oxford and a fellow at Worchester College. He was also a composer and Pianist of note who recorded a number of Messiaen's works, including the Catalogue d'Oiseaux, of which he gave the first complete performance in Britain at Coventry Cathedral in 1973. This edition of his Messiaen study has been updated by Dr Caroline Rae.
Download or read book Messiaen s Interpretations of Holiness and Trinity written by Siglind Bruhn and published by Siglind Bruhn. This book was released on 2008 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three of Olivier Messiaen's later works, La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, and Saint François d'Assise, are linked by the fact that the composer refers to and quotes from Thomas Aquinas. The composer's reception of Thomistic texts is one of the principles guiding the interpretations in this study. On the one hand, Messiaen had been pondering Thomas's thoughts on the role of music in the life of a Christian and on music's possible spiritual content all through his professional life; on the other hand, the oratorio, the organ meditations, and the opera are the only works in which Messiaen quotes extensive Thomistic sentences addressing purely theological subject matter. The first aspect, Messiaen's appropriation of or felicitous congruence with the medieval theologian's views on music underlies all analyses as a kind of background fabric. The second aspect, Messiaen's quotations from the Summa theologica and their musical translation, determines segments of a larger discussion that, in the book's three main chapters, attempts to do justice to the compositions as a whole. While Thomas' theological aesthetics appears as a thread woven through a texture in a way that brings it only periodically to the foreground, the statements from Thomas's writings provide essential foundations determining the works' content and its musical rendering. This book is part of Siglind Bruhn's Messiaen Trilogy.
Download or read book Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music written by Siglind Bruhn and published by Pendragon Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our visually-oriented society, music appears to stand apart from other arts. Yet just as a poet can write a poem whose focus is a painting, so musicians have composed scores based on poems, paintings, and other non-musical art forms. In instrumental music such reinterpretations are especially intriguing as the verbal or visual stimulus does not appear in performance but is rendered in musical form. In this study, Siglind Bruhn investigates how three French composers of the twentieth century, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Olivier Messiaen, express extra-musical subtexts in their piano works. She shows how the relation between the subtexts and the musical works can be broadly catagorized in terms of pictoriality and interiority. In all cases, Bruhn analyzes each musical piece and each source text in its entirety and in depth, drawing on her broad background in both literary and musical interpretation of the twentieth century. For pianists who seek to better understand an individual work, for scholars in the growing field of musical hermeneutics, and for lovers of music in general, this volume explores and makes explicit connections between music and other arts.
Download or read book Music for the End of Time written by Jennifer Bryant and published by Eerdmans Publishing Company. This book was released on 2005 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the story of how French composer Olivier Messiaen was able to overcome the desolation of a World War II prison camp through the power of music.
