As a child he studied music at Grenoble and Nantes and in 1919 entered the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Marcel Dupre, Maurice Emmanuel, and Paul Dukas. In 1931 he was appointed organist of the church of La Trinite, Paris, and about this time he began to study medieval music and many aspects of exotic music including Greek and Hindu modes and the rhythms and music of China, Japan, Peru, Bolivia, and Bali. Later he turned to the study of birdsong. In 1936 he founded, with the forward-looking composers Andre Jolivet, Daniel Lesur, and Yves Baudrier, the group Jeune France and in the same year began teaching at the Schola Cantorum and the Ecole Normale in Paris. As a soldier in World War II he was taken prisoner and interned at Görlitz, Germany, where he wrote Quatuor pour la fin du temps, performed at the prison camp in 1941. Repatriated in 1942, he became professor of harmony, and later of composition, at the Paris Conservatoire.
Messiaen sampled music from around the globe, and employed rhythms, harmonies, and melodies from many cultures in his own compositions. He likewise heard and transcribed birdsongs and inserted parts of them into his work.
He experimented with various groupings of instruments, not allowing himself to be confined to the traditional arrangements. Messiaen had a special fondness for percussion. Rollo Hugh Myers gives examples:
His most important works are the Turangalila (“Love Song”) symphony (1948), in ten movements, containing a prominent solo piano part and in which percussion instruments used in the manner of the gamelan of the Sunda Islands are combined with the ondes martenot, and Chronochromie, for 18 solo strings, wind, and percussion (1960). Le Reveil des oiseaux (1953), Oiseaux exotiques (1956), Catalogue d’oiseaux (1958), Sept Haikai (1963), and The Transfiguration (1969) incorporate meticulous notations of birdsong. Important later works include Couleurs de la Cite Celeste, for piano, three clarinets, three xylophones, brass, and percussion (1964), and Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1966).
Messiaen influenced the musical world not only through his works, but also through his students. The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music notes that “his pupils include Boulez, Barraque, Amy, Henry, Stockhausen, and Xenakis.”
The Schüer Duden (1989) notes that he was part of a broader movement among composers to write masses which were suitable for use in the church. Previous composers — Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart — had written masses which were designed for a concert hall. They were too unwieldy for a practical worship event. Messiaen, by contrast, worked in a church on a regular basis, and wrote masses which were user-friendly for actual worship. This did not prevent him from using contemporary compositional techniques.
The fact that he worked in Roman Catholic churches and composed Roman Catholic masses did not limit Messiaen from connecting with other forms of faith, as Patrick Kavanaugh explains:
Although Messiaen’s background was within the Catholic Church, he recognized that God’s truth abounded through all of Christianity. He remarked, “I’m a Christian, we’re all Christians and I think that in the present age of ecumenism — as, furthermore, in every era — we shouldn’t attach too much importance to religious differences.” His emphasis was the central point of all Christian faith, Jesus Christ: “He appears to us — came to us and tried to make Himself comprehensible in our language, in our sensations, in our attitudes of mind. That’s the most beautiful aspect of the God-head: the Mystery of the Incarnation, and that’s why I’m a Christian. In saying this, I’m not thinking about differences between Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Catholics — and a Christian is a person who understands that God came.”
In sum, Messiaen’s music is characterized by adventurous instrumental groupings, influences of musical cultures all around the world, the melodies of birdsongs, and a strong spiritual orientation.
