A Composite Modernist Composer : A Study of Intersections between Composition, Theorizing, and Performance in Olivier Messiaen

Abstract: Different professional roles within music change over time. The evolution of modernism in twentieth century art music elevated the composer to the pinnacle of musical creativity. Accomplished modernist composers came to be regarded as intellectuals, and were expected to hold rational conceptions of their individual styles. An increased focus on intentionality in composition, and on notated scores as representations of fixed works, went hand in hand with a tendency to neglect performance in common discourses on art music. This dissertation investigates such intersections between professional roles in the influential French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908‒1992). The study builds upon a noticeable revival of modernist studies in musicology in the twenty-first century. Scholars working on twentieth century music have typically moved away from a previous reliance on composers’ own conceptualizations of their music, in the act bringing methods and concerns from postmodern musicology into their methodologies. Messiaen has frequently been treated as self-standing figure among twentieth century composers. As a contrast, his self-understanding as a composer is here historicized and investigated as part of typical intellectual predispositions among leading modernists. The study draws on recent musicological advances on composers’ writings and their recorded performances. It establishes a theoretical framework for critical approaches to both kinds of sources, as valuable complements to notated scores in investigations of what here is called composite work ontologies. In methodological terms, the dissertation builds a novel connection between analyses in specialized Messiaen scholarship and methods in textual interpretation that originated in German Romantic philosophy. Messiaen’s writings have recurrently been found wanting in systematicity and in discursive expositions of pivotal concepts and methods in composition. His manner of writing provides an example of a phenomenon that within musicology has prompted calls for a gapology, i.e., studies of discontinuities and omissions in composers’ prose and conceptualization of their own music. A fundamental premise in the dissertation is that both human self-consciousness and communal discourses are to be expected to contain such blind spots. Consequently, scholars often need to reconstruct fundamental thought patterns that operate below the surface level in writings. This understanding and concomitant methods are put to work in two discrete articles, investigating the pivotal impact of plainchant in Messiaen’s aesthetics and the intellectual reception of his music by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Messiaen’s interpretations of his own organ music are investigated in a third article, in which performance analysis is informed by deepened attention to the composer’s ideals of successful interpretations. The methods and theoretical framework formulated in the cover essay are also integral parts of the dissertation’s findings. They propose that a current broader revisiting of musical modernism provides a fertile framework for further work on Messiaen, performance and intellectual ideas operative in his compositions. The hermeneutical stance developed here is intended to serve similar carefully contextualized investigations of the composer’s writings and activities. The first article shows that Messiaen’s musical thought and some of his methods in composition were more thoroughly ingrained in a late Romantic paradigm of expressivity than many scholars have noted. It also reveals how he adopted vital theoretical premises from previous authors, turned them into musical ideas, and continued to adapt his use of them to developments within his own musical style. The second article opens new vistas for more thorough analyses of Messiaenas a composer-performer on the organ. In a novel manner, it suggests the need of considering Messiaen’s distinct ideas concerning the aims of musical interpretation, and their impact on his style of playing. This approach stresses the centrality of communicating the musical ideas and narrative content in individual pieces, to which notated scores are a means. The analysis shows that Messiaen at times perceived such ideas in a piece quite differently in his roles as a composer and as a performer. The third article corroborates previous observations concerning how Messiaen’s verbalization of his own music shaped its reception. At the same time, it highlights the impact of his student Pierre Boulez’s historiography of musical modernism, including the particular historical role it ascribed to Messiaen. The study also reveals how Deleuze and Guattari grasped pivotal aspects of Messiaen’s compositional methods on purely theoretical grounds, in the act facilitating philosophical employments of key musical techniques well beyond the composer’s stated understanding of them.