Revelation! (Part II)

Hello everyone! I'm back with more information! (:

Olivier Messiaen was very devout in his faith, and was always concerning himself with spiritual issues. Raised a Catholic, many of Messiaen's works are inspired by theological thinking. Quatour pour la Fin du temps, known in English as Quartet for the End of Time, is a chamber piece composed by Olivier Messiaen in 1941 for a quartet consisting of a Bb clarinet, a violin, a cello and a piano. There are altogether 8 movements in this whole work, and it lasts for about 50 minutes in total. Why 8 movements? There is actually a rationale for this. Messiaen said, "Seven is the perfect number, the six days of Creation, sanctified by the Divine Sabbath; the seven of this rest is prolonged into eternity and becomes the eight of everlasting light, of eternal peace."

In the description of the first movement, Liturgie de Cristal, Messiaen commented, "Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven." Hence, in this first movement, music theorists have interpreted that the clarinet and violin are imitaing the blackbird and nightingale respectively, and the cello and piano representing Heaven.

Let's look at the parts of the clarinet and the violin. The clarinet imitates the song of a blackbird, which is the one commonly seen in Singapore I think. However, it doesn't really sound like one right? As Pople explains it, the clarinet part is "more as a literal attempt to transcribe elements of the blackbird's characteristic song within the limitations of the instrument chosen", for example the trills and the different pitches. The nightingale, then, is imitated by the violin.

Now, let's take a look at the music of the cello and the piano. These 2 parts actually play very important roles, and are very interesting in terms of its construction too, contrary to what I thought initially. The cello part is a fifteen-note melody consisting of 5 pitches (C, E, D, F# and Bb, which is a whole tone scale without the Ab) repeated over and over again throughout the whole movement. As it repeats, the note value of each note remains the same, even though the positions of the notes in relation to the barlines change. For the piano part, it is made up of a cycle of twenty-nine chords.

Hence, because of this continuous and unchanging aspect, these two parts come to represent Heaven, as mentioned earlier. Their parts are constructed in such a way that they seem to be without a beginning or an end. For example, when this first movement reaches the end, the cello part is interrupted midway through its 8th repetition.

Also, Messiaen was actually making use of concepts regarding prime numbers to make sure that the piano's rhythmic and harmonic parts do not 'match' the sequence carried by the cello (except on a larger scale), i.e. they do not have the same point of resolution. Thus, it would seem like the parts are playing different things and don't match. However, beneath this mesh of sound, there is still an underlying regular 3/4 meter.

This is actually characteristic of Messiaen's works as he liked to use beats of irregular length (with an underlying regular meter) in his music, to great effect. Due to influences from his teachers such as Marcel Dupre and Maurice Emmanuel, who introduced to him ancient Greek meters and rhythms, Messiaen developed deep interest in this area. Another great influence in this development of Messiaen's works is through the study of classical Indian rhythms. (A website on Olivier Messiaen; this webpage shows his rhythmic influences). In this movement, we can find tools such as non-retrogradable rhythms, derived from the ancient Indian rhythms.

The complex use of rhythmic devices in this movement demands a high standard of technicality and accuracy from the players. However, we can also say that it provides more leeway for errors without spoiling the overall effect of the piece, since a 'normal' audience would most probably not recognise it (unless it's a super unpardonable mistake, or the audience is someone who is familiar with the piece, then it's a different matter). Heh.

I'll end off with this last bit of interesting information. The first performance of this piece is done in the prison, while Messiaen is still in captivity, in front of 5000 other prisoners. Apparently, the piece was very well-received as the audience could identify with it somehow, and they were deeply moved. About twenty years later, Messiaen recalled that he had "never ... been listened to with such consideration and understanding".

Anyway, there are so much more about this piece than what is being shared here. Go check it out k! I hope I managed to get you all excited about this piece. (:

Bibliography
Pople, Anthony. Messiaen: Quatour pour la Fin du Temps. (Cambridge University Press, 1998)