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 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 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 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 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 Messiaen Studies written by Robert Sholl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of scholarly studies on the French composer Olivier Messiaen, one of the major figures of twentieth-century music, offers new cultural, historical, biographical and analytical perspectives on his musical Å"uvre from 1941 to 1992. The chapters provide fresh insights on the origins, style and poetics of Messiaen's music, and therefore provide an inspiration and foundation for future scholarship. Reflecting and expanding upon the broad range of Messiaen's own interdisciplinary interests, the book will be of interest to students of music, art, literature and theology.
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 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 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 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 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 written by Anthony Pople and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-02 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the popular Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen.
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 Olivier Messiaen written by Vincent Benitez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-13 with total page 542 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 The Messiaen Companion written by Peter Hill and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-issued to coincide with the centenary of Messiaen's birth, The Messiaen Companion was the first major study to appear after the composer's death in April 1992. It was the first book to offer both a complete survey of Messiaen's extraordinary achievements and a comprehensive guide to his music, also examining in detail the enduring inspiration which Messiaen derived from his religious faith and from his lifelong passion for ornithology and the natural world. The contributors, all of whom have made a special study of the composer, include two biographers of Messiaen and a number of the foremost interpreters of his music. Messiaen's influential teaching is recalled in essays by three of his pupils (Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, and Peter Hill), and the composer is also remembered in a remarkable and moving contribution from his widow and devoted musical companion, the pianist Yvonne Loriod.
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 Four Last Songs written by Linda Hutcheon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05-22 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties as their audience’s expectations are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue via the late works of some of the world’s greatest composers. Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Benjamin Britten (1913–76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi’s Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner’s influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a “life review” of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finished his only opera, Saint François d’Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments. With its deft treatment of these composers’ final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges—and opportunities—that present themselves as artists grow older.
