From Color and Sound:
“I am affected by a sort of synesthesia, more in my mind than in my body, that allows me, when I hear music and also when I read it, to see inwardly , in my mind’s eye, colors that move with the music’ and I vividly sense these colors, and sometimes I’ve precisely indicated their correspondence in my scores”
“I do indeed try to translate colors into music’ for me, certain sound complexes and sonorities are linked to complexes of color, and I use them with full knowledge of this”
“Since birth I’ve been devoted to violet... I don’t like yellow very much”
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“There was a time when painters, composers, poets, and philosophers said to themselves: only intellectual values are worthy of interest. I am totally opposed to that kind of reasoning. I don’t need to be “interested”. Nothing “interests” me. I only want to love and to be loved, and that’s completely different.”
C.S.: “When you set “interesting” works against those which touch you, I wonder if some readers might think that you take exception to works that strive too hard to convey a message.”
O.M. “Not at all. I myself have composed some combinative works. I did research, always doing my best not to damage the sound quality.
C.S. “You mean that a work can be interesting, but, by itself, this quality isn’t enough?
O.M. “Indeed, a piece of music must be interesting, it must be beautiful to hear, and it must touch the listener. These are the three different qualities”
“ I was very annoyed over the absolutely excessive importance given to a short work of mine, only three pages long, “Mode de valeurs et d’intensites” because it supposedly gave rise to the serial explosion in the area of attacks, durations, intensities, timbres – in short, of all its musical parameters. Perhaps this piece was prophetic and historically important, but musically it’s next to nothing. “
“What endured and what still endures is natural resonance. The tonic triad, the dominant, the ninth chord are not theories, but phenomena that manifest themselves spontaneously around us and that we cannot deny. Resonance will exist as long as we have ears to listen to what surrounds us. On the other hand, the serial system sprang from a human brain; that’s why its best servants have been those who transgressed it, like Boulez.”
On orchestration: “My method of orchestrating is rather peculiar. Let us say that, by availing myself of a timbre or group of timbres, I transform them as timbres by the sounds used and by the sound complexes used. A common chord written for a group of wind instruments doesn’t sound like a more complex chord, and the timbre of wind instruments can be completely transformed by a more complex chord, for it must not be forgotten that teh timbre is the result of a choice of harmonics. If you add or subtract harmonics, it is obvious that the timbres will be very different.”
Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus (1944), Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus
XV - Le baiser de l'Enfant-Jésus, The Kiss of the infant Jesus
Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen\][
Saint François d'Assise (1983)
Commissioned in 1970 by Paris Opera
Felt the Passion or the Resurrection was too heavy a lift, he chose St Francis
Hallé Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano
Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, (1941)
VI. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes, Dance of the furour, for the seven trumpets
Inspired by the book of revelations, written in a German prison camp
Clarinettist : Barnaby Robson
Violinist : James Clark
Violoncellist : David Cohen
(soloists, Philharmonia Orchestra)
Piano: Matthew Schellhorn
