TROOPS AND CANTEENERS!!
Links for the purchase of the music
posted here are found
at the top of the thread!
made on the thread.
Thank you!
Olivier Messiaen lived a very long life (1908-1992). He was a French Catholic mystic, which put him a bit at odds with the church whose organ he played for his entire adulthood (1931-92). In addition to being a church organist at Holy Trinity and a composer, he was an ornithologist, and birdcalls make up a significant part of the music he composed.
There are interesting parallels between Messiaen and Cesar Franck in that both were career church organists. Franck married poorly. Messiaen married well, but his wife lost her memory after an operation and spent the rest of her life in mental institutions. Both wrote a great deal of chamber music and a symphony. Messiaen’s symphony, “Turangalila”, was the source of jokes on the animated series “Futurama” where it was used as the full name of its female cyclops character voiced by Kate Sagal.
In 1940, Messiaen heeded the call of his country and volunteered to become a medical officer in the war with Hitler. He was captured almost immediately at Verdun and spent the next year in a German prisoner-of-war camp before being released. Upon his return, he spent the rest of his professional life teaching, in addition to composing and organ playing at church.
At the POW camp, he wrote a quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet that has become one of the monuments of 20th Century composition. The “Quartet for the End of Time” features all the hallmarks of a Messiaen piece, to include birdcalls, Asian scales, mystical religion, all wrapped up in a mixture of dissonance, occasional atonality, and late romantic visions of the Christ figure. In an era when people pore over the book of “Revelation”, this piece fits in quite well.
I’ll be honest here. This is not for everybody. Some of the eight short movements of this piece are hard on the ear. But some of them will move you to tears. This is an astonishing work of art written by a master.
The first movement features birdcalls (violin and clarinet), and to be honest, it’s one of the toughest movements to listen to. But it lays out his music vocabulary clearly. It’s marked “somewhat moderately”, uses a 3/4 time signature and a key signature of two flats. The piece peters out very quietly in no key at all. Go with it, because it only lasts a few minutes.
Messiaen: “Quartet for the End of Time”, (“Crystal Liturgy”)