Download or read book Olivier Messiaen s Slow Music written by Diane Luchese and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen written by Vincent Benitez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olivier Messiaen: A Research and Information Guide is a unique bibliographical resource that presents the reader with the most significant and helpful resources on Olivier Messiaen, one of the twentieth century's greatest composers, published between 1930 and 2007. An introductory chapter offers a short biography of Messiaen, a consideration of his musical style and works, and a discussion of Messiaen studies. Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on the primary literature, organized around manuscript collections, articles and reviews, pedagogical works, lectures and librettos, prefaces, interviews, correspondence, and documentaries and filmed performances. Chapters 4 through 9 focus on the secondary literature, namely, biographical and stylistic studies, topical examinations, discussions of particular works, accounts of Messiaen in works devoted to other topics, reviews of books and significant performances of Messiaen's music, and examinations of source materials on the Internet. A list of works and a selected discography conclude the book.
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time written by Paul Griffiths and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olivier Messiaen was one of the outstanding creative artists of his time. The strength of his appeal, to listeners as well as to composers, is a measure of the individuality of his music, which draws on a vast range of sources: rhythms of twentieth-century Europe and thirteenth-century India, ripe romantic harmony and brittle birdsong, the sounds of Indonesian percussion and modern electronic instruments. What binds all these together is, on one level, his unswerving devotion to praising God in his art, and on another, his independent view of how music is made. Messiaen's music offers a range of ways of experiencing time: time suspended in music of unparalleled changelessness, time racing in music of wild exuberance, time repeating itself in vast cycles of reiteration. In Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, leading writer and musicologist, Paul Griffiths, explores the problems of religious art, and includes searching analyses and discussions of all the major works, suggesting how they function as works of art and not only as theological symbols. This comprehensive and stimulating book covers the whole of Messiaen's output up to and including his opera, Saint Françoise d'Assise.
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 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 System of Signs written by Andrew Shenton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Shenton's groundbreaking cross-disciplinary approach to Messiaen's music presents a systematic and detailed examination of the compositional techniques of one of the most significant musicians of the twentieth century as they relate to his desire to express profound truths about Catholicism. It is widely accepted that music can have mystical and transformative powers, but because 'pure' music has no programme, Messiaen sought to refine his compositions to speak more clearly about the truths of the Catholic faith by developing a sophisticated semiotic system in which aspects of music become direct signs for words and concepts. Using interdisciplinary methodologies drawing on linguistics, cognition studies, theological studies and semiotics, Shenton traces the development of Messiaen's sign system using examples from many of Messiaen's works and concentrating in particular on the M tations sur le myst de la Sainte Trinit or organ, a suite which contains the most sophisticated and developed use of a sign system and represents a profound exegesis of Messiaen's understanding of the Catholic triune God. By working on issues of interpretation, Shenton endeavours to bridge the traditional gap between scholars and performers and to help people listen to Messiaen's music with spirit and understanding.
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 Olivier Messiaen written by Olivier Messiaen and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2008 musicians and scholars world-wide celebrated the centenary of Olivier Messiaenâ (TM)s birth. One of the most influential composers in living memory, Messiaen is remembered as a great nature poetâ "a mystic whose music had a profound effect on the Twentieth-century avant-garde. This volume of essays, marking the occasion of Messiaenâ (TM)s centenary, was authored by musicologists, performers, composers, ornithologists and researchers from Australia, Germany, France, North America, Japan, New Zealand, Serbia and England. The writers, internationally acclaimed experts as well as emerging scholars, span three generationsâ "living testimony to the diverse and lasting sphere of Messiaenâ (TM)s legacy.
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen written by Robert Sholl and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2024-06-12 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a range of sources and fields, the rich life story of this polymathic composer. This groundbreaking biography offers fresh perspectives on the life, ideas, and music of French twentieth-century composer, organist, and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen. Drawing from previously unexplored sketches and archival material, the book seamlessly combines elements of biography, musicology, theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics to present a nuanced perspective on Messiaen’s work. Robert Sholl explores the profound impact of Messiaen’s devout Catholicism, which found expression through his work as a church organist, his engagement with birdsong, his interaction with Surrealism, and his profound influence on major musical figures of the latter twentieth century. Unlike previous biographies, this book also considers the perspectives of Messiaen’s contemporaries and students, providing a comprehensive understanding of his life and artistic legacy.
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 Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 313 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 largely been neglected, or dealt with superficially, and continues to provide a serious impediment to understanding and appreciating his music for some of his audience. Messiaen the Theologian makes a significant contribution to Messiaen studies by providing cultural and historical context to Messiaen's theology. An international array of 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 between Messiaen and other artists such as Dante and T.S. Eliot. Interdisciplinary methodologies such as exegesis, theological studies and analysis are used to contribute to the understanding of several major works including Sept Haïkaï and Saint Francis d'Assise. By approaching Messiaen and his music from such important and original perspectives, this book will be of interest not only to musicians and theologians, but also to readers interested in the connection between spirituality and the arts.
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 Messiaen Perspectives 2 Techniques Influence and Reception written by Robert Fallon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 457 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 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.
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen written by Nigel Simeone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Olivier Messiaen died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a man apart; a deeply religious man whose only sources of inspiration were God and Nature and a composer whose music progressed along an entirely individual path, artistically impervious to contemporaneous events and the whims both of his contemporaries and the critics. Whilst such a view contains a large element of truth, the past ten years has seen an explosion of interest in the composer, and the work of a diverse range of scholars has painted a much richer, more complex picture of Messiaen. This volume presents some of the fruits of this research for the first time, concentrating on three broad, interrelated areas: Messiaen's relationship with fellow artists; key developments in the composer's musical language and technique; and his influences, both sacred and secular. The 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. Specifically, the volume covers Messiaen's attitudes and associations to Cocteau, Stravinsky's Les Noces, Dutilleux and Toesca, as well as exploring his teaching techniques, the Traite rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie, Messiaen's harmony, performing and transcription techniques, composing for Ondes Martenot, his association with ballet, Saint Fran‘s d'Assise and the influence of his faith. Messiaen himself contributes directly in the form of a speech that he gave about the tapestry-maker Jean Lur and the collection also includes the first literary translation of L' en bourgeon; the garland of poems written by Messiaen's mother, Cle Sauvage, when she was expecting him. The composer de
Download or read book Four Last Songs written by Linda Hutcheon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Later life is a fraught topic in our commercialized, anti-aging, death-denying culture. Where does creativity fit in? The canonical composers whose stories are told in this book--Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), Richard Strauss (1864-1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)--offer radically individual responses to that question. In their late years, each of these national icons wrote an opera around which coalesced major issues about their own creativity and aging, ranging from declining health to the critical expectations that accompany success and long artistic careers. They also had to deal with the social, political and aesthetic changes of their time, including World Wars and the rise of musical modernism. By investigating their attitudes to their creativity in the face of aging, together with their late compositions and the critical reception of them, this book tells the stories of their different but creative ways of dealing with those changes. Bringing their respective specialties of medicine and literary criticism to bear on the study, the authors show how the late nineteenth century, where these stories begin, saw the discovery and definition of "old age” as a social, economic, and medical construct. And thus were born, in the twentieth century, both geriatrics and gerontology as disciplines. Despite recent medical advances and increased life expectancy, the strikingly dichotomous cultural views of age and aging--both positive and negative--have not changed much at all. What also has not changed are the reception of late-life works as caught between decline and apotheosis and the fraught discourse of "late style.” The stories in this book weave all these elements together, highlighting both the shared vicissitudes of aging and the individual power of creativity as a way to meet them.
Download or read book Deleuze s Way written by Ronald Bogue and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the essential question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Deleuze's philosophy this book provides clear indications of the practical implications of Deleuze's approach to the arts through detailed analyses of the ethical dimension of artistic activity in literature, music, and film. Bogue examines Deleuze's "transverse way" of interrelating the ethical and the aesthetic, the transverse way being both a mode of thought and a practice of living. Among the issues examined are those of the relationship of music to literature, the political vocation of the arts, violence in popular music, the ethics and aesthetics of education, the use of music and sound in film, the role of the visual in literary invention, the function of the arts in cross cultural interactions, and the future of Deleuzian analysis as a means of forming an open, reciprocally self-constituting, transcultural global culture.
Download or read book Olivier Messiaen written by Richard D E Burton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 20th century French composer Olivier Messiaen was a devout Roman Catholic and notably claimed that his music was an expression of his faith. Unsurprisingly, many performers and listeners consider Messiaen's strong religiosity central to their appreciation of the composer's music. Music scholars have devoted much energy to exploring how Messiaen's music was an extension of his religious beliefs. Yet, these works tend to discuss Messiaen's Catholicism solely in terms of personal religious identity and ignore the composer's broader connections to the cultural landscape of Roman Catholicism in France. In Olivier Messiaen: Texts, Contexts, and Intertexts (1937-1948) the late French literature scholar Richard Burton examines nine of Messiaen's works in the context of the broader French Catholic intellectual tradition. Drawing on an expansive knowledge of the Catholic literature and the surrealist tradition, Burton reveals that Messiaen's middle-period compositions are filled with intertextual references to the Bible and other theological writings, which Messiaen, given his reputation for falsifying facts, may have gone to great lengths to obscure. As a Catholic, Messiaen is presented as somewhat removed from the ethos of his time and place, taking no part in the social side of Catholicism that found expression in the Pétainist litany of 'Patrie, Famille, Travail'. Rather, Messiaen regarded himself as having a 'vertical' relationship with God, which could make him seem unworldly and even uncaring. With insights into the artistic careers of Messiaen's notable contemporaries and historical perspectives on the breakdown of French politics during World War II, Burton creates a vivid picture of the previously unexamined spiritual and philosophical inspirations behind Messiaen's pivotal mid-century compositions.
