One of the foremost composers of the twentieth century, Olivier Messiaen wrote widely on his music and on his beliefs. This is the first edition of his early journalism and provides both the original French text and an English translation. The writing in this volume dates from the 1930s, before the composer gained the international reputation that he and his music now enjoy. The pieces he wrote range from reviews of individual performances to essays on particular works or composers and articles that discuss more general themes such as sincerity of expression in music. Many of the articles included in this collection are new to the Messiaen bibliography, and others are available here for the first time in English. A number are, as Broad describes them, 'quietly shocking' in that they force us to reappraise certain aspects of the composer such as his role in La Jeune France, and his wider participation in the debates of his time. This edition, therefore, represents a new source for understanding Messiaen and provides a fascinating glimpse of the composer in the early part of his career.

Olivier Messiaen: A Research and Information Guide, Second Edition presents researchers with the most significant and helpful resources on Olivier Messiaen, one of the twentieth century's greatest composers. With multiple indices, this annotated bibliography will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field. The second edition has been fully revised and updated.

French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908 1992) is probably best known for his Quartet for the End of Time, premiered in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. However, Messiaen was a remarkably complex, intelligent person with a sometimes tragic domestic life who composed a wide range of music. This book explores the enormous web of influences in the early part of Messiaen's long life. The first section of the book provides an intellectual biography of Messiaen's early life in order to make his (difficult) music more accessible to the general listener. The second section offers an analysis of and thematic commentaries on Messiaen's pivotal work for two pianos, Visions of Amen, composed in 1943. Schloesser's analysis includes timing indications corresponding to a downloadable performance of the work by accomplished pianists Stphane Lemelin and Hyesook Kim.

Drawing upon extensive archival research, interview material, and musical analysis, Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919–1939 presents an innovative study of women working as professional musicians in France between the two World Wars. Hamer positions the activities, achievements, and reception of women composers, conductors, and performers against a contemporary socio-political climate that was largely hostile to female professionalism. The musical styles and techniques of Marguerite Canal, Jeanne Leleu, Germaine Tailleferre, Yvonne Desportes, Elsa Barraine, and Claude Arrieu are discussed with reference to significant works dating from the interwar period. Hamer highlights the activities of Jane Evrard and her Orchestre féminin de Paris as well as the reception of the Orchestra of the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique, a contemporary pro-suffrage organisation that was dedicated to defending the collective interests of musiciennes and campaigning for their employment rights. Beyond women composers and conductors, Hamer also sheds light on female performers and their contribution to the interwar early music revival.

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.

This book charts Messiaen's transformation of birdsong into music and its development into a major work of the twentieth century.

This edited volume explores the dialogue between art and music with that of mystical currents at the turn of the twentieth century. The volume draws on the most current research from both art historians and musicologists to present an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mysticism’s historical importance. The chapters in this edited volume gauge the scope of different interpretations of mysticism and illuminate how an exchange between the sister arts unveil an underlying stream of metaphysical, supernatural, and spiritual ideas over the course of the century. Case studies include Charles Tournemire, Joseph Péladan, Erik Satie, Hilma af Klint, Jean Sibelius, František Kupka, and Wassily Kandinsky. The contributors’ unique theoretical perspectives and disciplinary methodologies offer expert insight on both the rewards and inevitable aesthetic complications that arise when one artform meets another. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, musicology, visual culture, and mysticism.

This edited volume of case studies presents a selective history of French music and culture, but one with a dynamic difference. Eschewing a traditional chronological account, the book explores the nature of relationships between one main period, broadly the 'long' modernist era between 1860–1960, and its own historical ‘others’, referencing topics from the Romantic, classical, baroque, renaissance and medieval periods. It probes the emergent interplay, intertextualities and scope for reinterpretation across time and place. Notions of cultural meaning are paramount, especially those pertaining to French identity, national and individual. While founded on historical musicology, the approach benefits from interdisciplinary association with philosophy, political history, literature, fine art, film studies and criticism. Attention is paid to French composers’ celebrations and remakings of their predecessors. Editions of and writings about earlier music are examined, together with the cultural reception of performances of past repertoire. Organized into two parts, each of the eleven chapters characterizes a specific cultural network or temporal interplay, which may result in synthesis, disjunction, or historical misreading. The interwar years and those surrounding the Second World War prove particularly rich sources of enquiry. This volume aims to attract a wide readership of musicologists and musicians, as well as cultural historians, other humanities scholars and concert-goers.

The rich variety of aesthetic and cultural influences experienced by the French composer Olivier Messiaen helped foster the creativity that gave him a multi-dimensional presence in twentieth-century music. This book explores the ideas that animated Messiaen's thinking, and provides fresh perspectives on the culture that surrounds his music.

In this comprehensive study of Olivier Messiaen's magnum opus, Saint François d'Assise, Vincent Perez Benitez examines the opera from both theological and musical-analytical perspectives to ask how Messiaen expresses his Catholic theology through his work. Benitez combines a close reading of the opera score with accounts from Messiaen's associates, studies of Messiaen's birdsong notebooks and other primary documents, and an examination of the religious, musical, poetic, and visual arts literature with which the composer was familiar to explore how the opera's harmonic language and sound-color relationships motivate its musical meaning and expression. Through his analysis of these diverse sources and comparisons of Saint François d'Assise with other works such as Berg's Wozzeck and Wagner's Parsifal, Benitez places Messiaen's compositional practice within larger musical perspectives and historical contexts.