Friday, December 7, 2018

Messiaen: Vingt Regards - III. L'échange


Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

In Cole Philip Burger's dissertation, Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus: Analytical, Religious, and Literary Considerations,  he says in regard to this movement, 

One theory defines Messiaen's structures along side his rhythmic innovations, similar to other composers before the Second World War.  Another hypothesis is to see the stasis of forms in conjunction with his aim to reflect the timelessness of a never-ending God.  This connection between form and religious considerations also relates to the notion of éblouissement also calls upon the transcendent and evokes the unimaginable.  The Vingt Regards includes contemplations of the immaterial, like the heights, time, and silence, as well as the ineffable, like the Exchange [this movement] and the Awesome Unction. 

Earlier in the dissertation he points to the definition that Messiaen gave to the term as:

. . . éblouissement (dazzlement), an inner blinding that embodies the synthesis of music and religion

If there's one thing the composer did, it was to try to explain in detail his mystical experience and its expression of his music while indicating that a lot of that can't be explained in words but is something that can only be experienced.  Though Messiaen, himself wrote notes on these pieces.  Of this one he said:

Toute la pièce est écrite en crescendo, selon le procédé de «l'agrandissement asymétrique»: les mêmes fragments, juxtaposés ou superposés, se répètent: à chaque terme, certains notes montent, d'autre descendent, d'autres restent immobiles.  C'est un commentaire de cette antienne du Missel: «Ô commerce admirable! Le Créateur du genre humain, prenant un corps en un âme, a daigné naître de la Vierge, pour nous faire part de sa divinité.»

The whole piece is written in crescendo, according to the principle of "asystemetric (?) enlargment":  The same fragments juxtaposed or superimposed, are repeated: at each term, some notes rise, others go down, others remain motionless.   It is a commentary on this antiphon from the Missal "O admirable commerce (exchange?) The Creator of human kind, taking a body in a soul, deigned to be born of  the Virgin, to make us a part of his divinity." 

The passage from the antiphon is probably more helpful than the musical analysis, Messiaen, in a line of French composers going back to at least Couperin (if not Machaut) weren't shy about giving instructions as to how their music was to be played but I don't think anyone did it in more detail or at times as opaquely as he did.  It's not something that can be put into words easily or fully. 

2 comments:

  1. "Dazzlement" puts me in mind of the glory described by the Hebrew scriptures; the emanation (not really light, but close) coming off the Almighty, an expression (as best can be managed) of God's ineffability.

    Hmmm....now I need to listen to these pieces again.

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    Replies
    1. Every time I come back to these that experience seems to deepen. The experience of mystery isn't the same thing as the understanding of the experience. I think that's one of the things that a mystic like Messiaen must learn but which modernist pretensions can't deal with. Reading what Hans Kung wrote about the beginnings of modern science in Descartes' belief that the results of mathematics were applicable to the far different world of physical objects, I wonder if that article of faith has more than a little to do with the inability of scientism to understand that all human thought and experience is limited. I wish I had the time to look to see if Descartes ever dealt with or articulated anything like the idea of "mathematical objects" and the fact that those aren't like physical objects which, assuming we have some access to something like their concrete nature, aren't known to us in solely imaginary forms.

      I have to say that, while I think Rahner's rejection of Christian Platonism is a good corrective, he adopted too literally Heidegger's views. Trying to make Christianity Aristotelian instead of Platonic seems to me to make a different version of the same mistake. Though, since I'm getting a lot of that second hand from Rahner's English speaking students, some of the fault might not be his.

      I wish I'd started reading this stuff when I was in my teens and 20s. I'd trade a lot of the time I spent with philosophy and politics for having read more theology. And almost all of the time I spent reading ideological stuff, though that was helpful to see through it, eventually.

      I've got a seriously ill relative I've got to spend time with on top of having this lingering cold, the reason I'm not writing much this week.

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