RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM IN THE MUSIC OF OLIVIER MESSIAEN

From: The American Journal of Semiotics | Date: October 1, 1996| Author: | Copyright information

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes obscured text omitted.)

1. Introduction

The life of the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who died only five years ago, in April 1992, encompassed more than sixty years of creative activity. As Messiaen often pointed out, he never ceased to learn, expanding his own knowledge and understanding as well as the scope of his musical expression and integrating new insights into his compositions. Yet scholars note with some amazement that his musical language remained strikingly uniform throughout his long life. This constancy arises from a central ...

Read all of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research

Related newspaper, magazine, and trade journal articles from HighBeam Research

(Including press releases, facts, information, and biographies)

Messiaen
; Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone Yale University Press, 352 pp. $45 The young Olivier Messiaen was an organ student of Marcel Dupre. One day Dupr was speaking with Messiaen's father, a schoolteacher, about Messiaen's distracted behavior. Messiaen's father...
Messiaen's Cantéyodjayâ: a 'missing' link
; CANTYODJAYA, Messiaen's ii-minute single-movement piano piece of 1948...to place it more clearly within the frame of Messiaen's compositional output and theoretical investigations. Messiaen himself was less forthcoming about the inner...
THE MESSIAEN BOSTON REMEMBERS
; The composer Olivier Messiaen, a dominant figure in music for more...our century, died last week at 83. Messiaen had important connections to the Boston...who later conducted the premiere of Messiaen's opera "St. Francois d'Assise" and...
'Chez Messiaen, tout est prière': Messiaen's appointment at the Trinité
; ...passages in Peter Hill & Nigel Simeone: Messiaen (New Haven & London, 2005). I am...here. BY HIS OWN PRODIGIOUS STANDARDS, Messiaen was a late-starter on the organ. He had...Summer 1929 concours. Dupr later recalled Messiaen's arrival in his class, ending with a...
Ecstacy and agonies of a Messiaen marathon; Christopher Morley reviews the BBC's epic celebration in Birmingham of the 90th anniversary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
; ...life's cruellest ironies that Olivier Messiaen was not permitted to see the second Millenium...location for a host of concerts exploring Messiaen's formidable output. Above all else in...way. Finding God everywhere in nature, Messiaen turns to scrupulously notated birdsong...
MESSIAEN THE THEOLOGIAN
; IN DESCRIBING the music of Olivier Messiaen, we musicians make ample use of words...to determine exactly what it is about Messiaen's music that justifies these adjectives. Certainly, all of Messiaen's music is religious in nature, as the...
Americans, You Have Nothing to Fear; Except Seduction by Messiaen's Vast Symphony Extravaganza
; ...logic: The enemy of your enemy is your friend. Messiaen's "Turangalila-Symphonie" is your friend. "Turangalila...joyful piece of new music written in its time (Messiaen had spent 1940-41 in a German prison camp, but...particularly by composers of sci-fi soundtracks. In Messiaen's hands it is an Ariel ...
Classical: The French connection Poulenc and Messiaen evoke the extremes of 20th-century composition. But do they share more than a homeland?
; ...conflict in distant California. "The rise of Messiaen has been the most important event. In...old called Pierre Boulez. Of course, Messiaen himself had already been around for some...Poulenc, at least, seems to have recognised Messiaen as something of an original, remarking...
For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet.(Book Review)
; For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet. By Rebecca Rischin. Ithaca...assuming that her new book on Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, based...all such commentaries (Anthony Pople's Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps [Cambridge...
4 play Messiaen magnificently
; ...Fine Arts Auditorium, Sunday Olivier Messiaen's impact on music is enormous. The link...Debussy and Maurice Ravel and today, Messiaen has served as the inspiration for scores...A prolific composer in every genre, Messiaen, who died in 1992 at the age of 84, left...