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.

In The Action Image of Society: On Cultural Politicisation (1970), Alfred Willener defined the uprisings of 1968 as a “process” that unites jazz musicians, poets, painters and political dissenters, each expressing “a revolutionary desire for social emancipation … the emancipation of the non-formal.” This chapter takes off from Willener’s observations to explore how propositions emerging across mid-century American avant-gardes might potentialize new models of community. It focuses upon Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (1960), as a means of framing performativity as the subject of study and its means, standing as both metaphor and enactment. Such aesthetic experimentation implicitly swarms outward to underscore the techniques of the 1968 uprisings, which are removed from established Third International forms of resistance. Its participants, as a consequence, are positioned on the edge of becoming otherwise, threatening the stability of given social codes and producing vital new modes of sociability and encounter.

Ostensibly, Schumann’s Piano Concerto has its origins in the single-movement Phantasie in A minor for piano and orchestra composed in 1841, which later became the Concerto’s first movement. Broadly understood, however, the work’s genesis spans some fifteen years, encompassing both Schumann’s fledgling attempts to compose in the genre and his developing critical engagement with the concerto idea, expressed in a series of articles for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which documented his views on concerti of his time and set out his own generic agenda. Beginning with the unfinished F major Concerto of 1831, Op. 54’s prehistory takes in the aborted Konzertsatz in D minor of 1839 and also runs parallel with the genesis of Clara Wieck’s Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 of 1833–5, a work with which Schumann was closely involved. Chapter 2 narrates this prehistory, paying attention not only to the compositional genesis of Op. 54 and the process by which it absorbed the Phantasie of 1841 but also to Schumann’s critical relationship with his predecessors and evolution of an alternative concept of the genre, which emphasised the integration of soloist and orchestra and the features of the three-movement cycle into a single-movement sonata form.

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.

The final chapter has two objectives. It first of all traces the performance history of Schumann’s Concerto in the decades after the composer’s death, focusing on London, Vienna, Leipzig, New York and Manchester, and the advocacy of particular pianists, primarily but not exclusively Clara Schumann. It examines critical responses to the work and the ways in which opinion changes over time, evolving from outright hostility and complaints about audacious modernity in the 1850s and 1860s to canonical acceptance and hagiography by the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter’s second objective is to evaluate the work’s compositional reception by exploring the uses of Schumann’s formal and expressive techniques in subsequent concerti, including both canonical music by Brahms, Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov and lesser-known examples by Scharwenka, Beach, Stanford and MacDowell.

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.

The final chapter examines Hensel’s own creative response in the medium of chamber music: the D minor Piano Trio, written over a decade later and (unlike the quartet) published soon after her untimely death. The trio is formally more restrained than the quartet, yet has numerous points in common. I then discuss the quartet’s modern reception since its rediscovery in the early 1980s, before outlining the bigger ‘take away’ points of this study. Hensel’s quartet points to a fascinating and almost unknown avenue of early Beethoven reception. It also shows – for better and for worse – the interaction between two prodigiously talented siblings, and how music, its internal allusions and resonances, could function as a means of intimate communication between close family and friends. This recently discovered work reveals not only the voices that were all but silenced but of paths not taken by music history, of avenues left unexplored or not fully developed.

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….