Messiaen’s debt to Indian and Greek music – in particular, to the 120 desitalas systematised by the thirteenth-century theorist Sar?gadeva – is well known. The composer’s encounter with the ‘rythmes hindous’ in an encyclopedia entry led him to breakthroughs in his compositional technique from the 1930s, as he derived innovative rhythmical principles and, later, mystical associations from the rhythms over the course of his career. This chapter proposes new and broader perspectives on this subject, situating Messiaen within a history of early-twentieth-century French musical and musicological engagement with Indian music theory – a lineage including composers like Tournemire, Roussel, and Emmanuel – and complicating existing accounts of Messiaen’s rhythmic experimentation by using newly available sketch materials.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s engagement with Japan. French artists’ fascination with Japan has a long history, dating back at least to the Paris World Exposition of 1867, and in return many Japanese artists – including composers – have discovered a reciprocal affinity with aspects of French aesthetic sensibility. It was therefore entirely to be expected that Messiaen, as a French composer with a long-standing interest in Eastern cultures, would succumb to this same fascination after his visit to Japan in 1962, which resulted in the composition of his Sept Haïkaï – and that his work would also exert a profound influence on several Japanese composers of the postwar generation, above all Toru Takemitsu.

Acknowledging Messiaen’s occasional but consistently appreciative references to theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, especially with respect to the theological aesthetics as presented in The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit), this chapter provides a theological and Trinitarian description of Balthasar’s notion of doxa, or “glory,” which may well have influenced Messiaen’s compositions. For Balthasar, “glory” as a theological concept is neither merely aesthetic nor religiously triumphalist, but remains tangled together with transcendental beauty in Western metaphysics, theophany, kenoticism ( “ self-emptying”), a cruciform Christology, eschatology, and apocalyptic thought.

Messiaen held the titular position as organist at L’église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris for more than sixty years. He recorded most of his own works on this instrument, so this chapter begins by noting the importance of these recordings, and in particular the way they proscribed a “manner of performance” for his organ works that would be dominant for more than fifty years. It then discusses recordings by other organists on other instruments, and how they differ from the composer’s recordings. The discussion focuses on those who have recorded the entire repertoire, but also considers notable recordings of single pieces.

The Paris Conservatoire played a pivotal role in shaping Olivier Messiaen’s music and career. His compositional technique resulted from his student years there, and he later found creative stimulation and financial stability in the same institution as the teacher of hundreds of future composers and musicians. Indeed, Messiaen spent most of his adult life at the Conservatoire. This chapter examines Messiaen’s relationship with the Paris Conservatoire and focusses on the way it shaped French musical culture, the institution, his students, and Messiaen's musical style.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s long involvement with the USA. It discusses commissions, his relationship with notable figures, his teaching there, and the genesis and performance of both the Turangalîla-Symphonie and Des canyons aux étoiles…, including Messiaen’s admiration for the mountains in Utah. It also explores Messiaen as a performer of his own music in America (he premiered the Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte-Trinité), the commissioning and performance of the Livre du Saint-Sacrement, and the orchestral éclairs sur l’Au-delà….

This chapter draws on the author’s experience as a musicologist, philosopher, and ornithologist to examine different perspectives on birdsong in Messiaen, including verisimilitude, ecology, and Messiaen’s practice of notation. It places Messiaen’s birdsong in the context of his thought and examines the meaning of this important formant and creative source in Messiaen’s work.

The spectralist composers in Messiaen’s class of 1971#–2 are an important part of Messiaen’s legacy. This chapter addresses how Messiaen’s work was essential to the creative thinking of Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey. It focusses on what these composers absorbed from Messiaen and how they qualified, extended, and enriched his legacy. In particular it understands these composers through the lens of an ecology of listening in which the concerns of the listener are an active formant in the compositional thinking.

This chapter details and expands current research on Messiaen’s response to, engagement with, and inculcation of Surrealism in his music. In particular it examines the poetic and ethnological context of Messiaen’s work, and also introduces a discussion of the occult and psychoanalytical trauma as Surrealist contexts for Messiaen’s work in the late 1940s.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s relationship with the composer Jacques Charpentier, his student and the only guest (apart from Charpentier’s wife) at Messiaen’s second marriage in 1961. Using previously unpublished documents and photographs, it shows how Charpentier borrowed and extended ideas of Indian music from Messiaen and through his own studies of Karnatic music.

This chapter details the history of Messiaen’s family. It examines Messiaen’s relationships with his parents, Pierre Messiaen and Cécile Sauvage, his two wives, Claire Delbos and Yvonne Loriod, and his son Pascal. It reveals that Messiaen’s private life was complex and sometimes difficult, but also that these relationships had a profound effect on his understanding of himself as a composer, his compositions, and the performance of his music.

Messiaen’s music is rhythmically and harmonically complex. It reflects, as he affirmed, the miraculous beauty of God’s Creation. By the early 1940s, he had developed a musical language of religious symbolism comprising a variety of components. The building blocks on which this language is based and the contents their inventor intended them to represent were clearly defined, and hardly changed in the course of the composer’s long life. This article gives an overview of this symbolism and discusses the prevalent devices Messiaen used, along with the religious concepts informing each of them.

Messiaen is famous for the length of his tenure as titular organist at Sainte-Trinité, which lasted from 1931 to his death in 1992. This chapter explores his appointment, details of his duties, and notable events during his career. It discusses the relationship between him and other prominent organist-composers during this period, including Franck, Tournemire, and Langlais. It deals in detail with the Cavaillé-Coll Grand Organ in La Trinité and how this may have influenced not only his organ compositions, but also his other works; it also refers to the importance of the recordings he made on the instrument, playing his own works.

This chapter examines the way in which the idea of a European avant-garde is formed in the wake of Messiaen’s thought and the ways in which this reflexively informed Messiaen’s own work. It focuses in particular on the theoretical achievements of Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis and how formed a new ways of thinking about music.