Messiaen’s cahiers de notations des chants d’oiseaux tell us a great deal about how he fashioned works such as Oiseaux exotiques and Catalogue d’oiseaux from birdsong notations made in the wild and from recordings. Of what benefit can they be to performers? This chapter shows how insights the cahiers give into Messiaen’s imaginative world can influence performers’ approaches, offering perspectives on Messiaen’s perceptions of the ‘artistry’ of the birds, which are not always apparent from the published scores.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s fascination and engagement with Australia. In particular, it focusses on Messiaen’s engagement with notable figures in that country, and some of his activities on his visit to Australia in 1988. In particular, it discusses Messiaen’s engagement with Australian birds (especially the lyrebird), and with Australian composers and musicians.

Messiaen’s use of orchestral colour is integral to the projection of his distinctive sound world. This chapter charts his development as an orchestrator, starting with his inheritance from the French tradition, not least his composition teacher Paul Dukas, as well as figures such as Stravinsky and Bartók. It outlines how Messiaen removed key traces of the nineteenth-century orchestral sound world from his palette and introduced new instruments and new approaches to the orchestra, including distinctive new combinations of ensembles. It discusses the exceptional challenge posed by Des canyons aux étoiles…, and considers the exceptional refinement of the music of his later years.

By the mid-1930s, Messiaen’s Catholic faith was already emerging as a defining feature of his compositional persona. At the same time, Messiaen was becoming increasingly attracted to the music of André Jolivet, whose innovative language influenced many of his own technical processes. Cementing their friendship through discovering a shared interest in the importance of spiritual concerns, Messiaen and Jolivet joined with Daniel-Lesur in 1935 to found the avant-garde chamber music society La Spirale, the organisation that paved the way for La Jeune France. This essay discusses the activities of La Jeune France and considers their aesthetics and ideals in the context not only of similar initiatives in the field of the visual arts but also the Catholic revival that took hold in 1930s France.

Although it is a truism of understanding Messiaen to assert that Roman Catholicism was profoundly important to him and his music, it can be difficult to understand what this actually means in the face of two millennia of the church’s unfolding history with its countless controversies between theological schools, monastic orders, and religious politics. This chapter explores how Messiaen’s musical theology was colored by the remarkable legacy of St. Francis of Assisi. While attending to ways that Messiaen’s towering achievement, the opera Saint François d’Assise, expresses the Franciscan spirit, it also asserts that the Franciscan influence can also be discerned in Messiaen’s representational subject matter (particularly his bird style and his several works on the Nativity of Jesus), as well as in his focus on color, joy, and an unsettling inclusivity.

This chapter explores Messiaen’s relationship with Charles Tournemire, particularly focusing on how Tournemire understood Messiaen and how this relationship was seminal and fruitful to both composers. Of primary importance is the role of organ improvisation and the type of apocalyptic Catholicism espoused by Tournemire as a context for Messiaen’s art.

This chapter identifies certain interesting threads of development in Messiaen criticism from a wide range of published sources, as the challenge of responding to the remarkably original and forthright character of Messiaen's compositions was confronted in the highly unstable context of musical life between 1930 and 1990. This chapter acts to confirm perceptions about Messiaen's central position during those decades, within France and beyond it, and to explain the continuing interest in his life and work during the years since his death.

This chapter provides a neuropsychological account of Messiaen’s well-known sound-to-colour synaesthesia. It offers an overview of the perceptual, cognitive, and neurological mechanisms underlying the condition, with reference to Messiaen’s own experience and to scientific understandings of this phenomenon.

Matthew Schellhorn, who attended lessons with Loriod in the 2000s, discusses her background and her personal and artistic involvement with Messiaen. He examines her as an artist in her own right, discussing her discography, her own compositions, and her activities as a teacher, and thereby brings her character into focus.

Messiaen distinguished himself from other interwar French Catholic composers musically and theologically; whereas their neoclassical style was Neo-Thomist, Messiaen’s aesthetic language reflected the emerging ressourcement movement. To combat the modern crisis of faith, ressourcement theologians returned to the Bible and the Church Fathers to revitalize Christianity. This chapter demonstrates Messiaen’s engagement with ressourcement thought, from Catholic Revival#–inspired song cycles to the instrumental works’ spiritual texts. In his selection, editing, and recombination of biblical and liturgical citations, Messiaen embodied the ressourcement ethos: returning to the source of faith to transform the contemporary world.

Although Messiaen wrote extensively about his own music and compositional techniques, the central role of musical borrowing in his creative process has only recently been recognized. This chapter addresses the full range of sources and transformational techniques used by the composer to invent and assemble his musical materials, the evolution of his ‘borrowing technique’ across the course of his career, and the difficulties raised by the potential meanings that may be attributed to some of his borrowings. Attention is given to the contemporary musical practices from which Messiaen’s borrowing technique may have emerged, possible contextual reasons for Messiaen’s ambiguous attitude towardsexplaining his processes, and the rare critical responses to Messiaen’s music that suggest that a handful of listeners during his lifetime understood aspects of this creative technique.

This chapter posits a revealing “census” or reckoning of the ways in which Messiaen has appeared in musicology in France vs. foreign climes and his presence in concert programming. More than twenty-five years after his death, Messiaen’s legacy in France is still a matter of debate. It examines how Messiaen’s work has fared in France since his death, and how institutions and performers have engaged with this work.

‘God is simple’, wrote Messiaen; here is an aesthetic model for this composer – sometimes called a theologian – that is present in diverse aspects of his music and that receives attention in this chapter. Simplicity is revealed in different forms and techniques, and in his ‘naïveté. It is so engraved in the composer’s works that it becomes almost a caricature. This chapter examines these ideals in Messiaen’s thought, character, and in the critical reception of his music.