Infinitely Slow

Wednesday marks the centennial of the birth of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), the "great" figure of French concert music in the 20th century. (Pierre Boulez, with his own legendary profile as a conductor, theorist, educator and groundbreaking composer, can't seem to touch his former teacher. Still being alive, well and working doesn't help.)

Messiaen, who experienced mild synaesthesia, devised a complex, symmetric system of harmony that was analyzable but that also invoked colour schemes (e.g. "blue-orange chords"), at a time when composers had rejected harmony altogether. He used Hindustani taals (cycles of beats), symmetrical and additive rhythmic structures, and sometimes incredibly slow tempos to change up the perception of time in his music. Most famously, he catalogued birdsongs and incorporated their transcriptions in all of his compositions from the early 1950s onwards.

During the long, stormy, snowed-in winter of 1992-93, I listened repeatedly to a recording of le Maître playing his own pieces for solo organ on the instrument they were composed on - the Cavaillé-Coll at Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where he was the organist for over sixty years. I was a student living in a third-floor bachelor apartment with a turret, a little nook that looked south on St. George St., the road directly in line with the CN Tower. Captured with the limited technology of the 1930s, the recording had a claustrophobic yet ethereal ambience that was somehow appropriate to that setting.

His colours were hypnotic. There was hardly much rhythm to these droning pieces in the way one generally thinks of rhythm. But there was powerful harmonic rhythm and movement. Melody seemed to be only an outgrowth of the harmonies. (This recording was made before his use of birdsongs - the ultimate melodies.) Just the way the music continually and gracefully returned to the tonic - the chord of rest - while still having all the way-out trappings of modernism, seemed daring, alien, abstract. There were a million other chords happening, but he always came back to the fundamental.

More than any other figure within the Western canon, Messiaen - a devout Roman Catholic throughout his life, which points up the irony in his name and the word canon - held the torch of spirituality high in the 20th century, when religion had all but vanished from "serious" music. By the time of his death, there had been a renewed interest in the sacred, as evidenced in works by Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, John Tavener, Steve Reich and others, and by new music audiences craving something richer than pure intellectuality.

In quiet moments over the years I have often turned to one of several recordings of I own of Quatuor pour la fin du Temps ("Quartet for the end of Time"), composed for violin, cello, clarinet, and piano while Messiaen was a POW at Görlitz. The premiere was given on broken down instruments (the cello was missing a string) in a freezing stalag, with the composer at the piano in clogs. No one will ever top this premiere for poignancy or pluck - or, period.

Note that "the end of Time" is not only an overt religious reference, but a metaphor for Messiaen transforming the use of time in music. The tempo of the Quartet's fifth movement is marked infiniment lent. Chords linger and change almost without notice, sometimes pungent, then full of light.

The final movement is among the most transcendent music that I know. I am not a religious person, but Messiaen's work succeeds in bringing a sense of the eternal to the moment.