As titles referring to compositional genres, Nocturne, Notturno and Nachtsmusik had a particular resonance for nineteenth-century composers sensitive to romantic traditions extending from Schubert and Schumann to reach an apogee in Wagner’s celebration of the ‘fabled realm of night’ in Tristan und Isolde. Though placed there in explicit opposition to the mundane reality of daylight, Wagner (notably in Siegfried) also made much of the glorious effects of the rising sun. The tension between darkness and light as reflecting radically different states of mind as well as different effects of nature, was also a favoured topic for late romantic poets and painters active in the Viennese culture in which Schoenberg came to maturity. Nevertheless, the aspect of romantic sensibility that offset nocturnal unease with a heightened sense of the sublime and the supernatural ensured that examples of Night Music could have a special ambivalence in keeping with their exploratory technical resources.

Messiaen distinguished himself from other interwar French Catholic composers musically and theologically; whereas their neoclassical style was Neo-Thomist, Messiaen’s aesthetic language reflected the emerging ressourcement movement. To combat the modern crisis of faith, ressourcement theologians returned to the Bible and the Church Fathers to revitalize Christianity. This chapter demonstrates Messiaen’s engagement with ressourcement thought, from Catholic Revival#–inspired song cycles to the instrumental works’ spiritual texts. In his selection, editing, and recombination of biblical and liturgical citations, Messiaen embodied the ressourcement ethos: returning to the source of faith to transform the contemporary world.

With Langston Hughes as tour guide, this chapter sounds the (ostensible) paradox of jazz abroad: on one hand, jazz has often been perceived as indubitably, authentically “Black,” a racially encoded expression. On the other hand, jazz’s inherent multivalences oscillate on transnational frequencies that have resonated and continue to resonate with all kinds of people all over the world. The story of jazz abroad, then, is also the story of Blackness on the move, a journey perpetually navigating a course between authenticity and hybridity, individuation and polyvocality, originality and imitation. This jazz dialectic amplifies Blackness as a floating signifier and allows for the performance of fluid, transnational identities that defy homogenizing taxonomies of race, class, culture, or nationhood. And so, jazz– and jazz abroad especially– is (paradoxically) both, a distinctly Black American art form, and at the same time world music long before we had a term for it.

This chapter examines relationships between documentary screen-media and jazz from the 1950s to today. As a mode of production which often lays claim to “truth” and “reality,” documentary’s reflexive relationship with jazz is interrogated for its enduring power to keenly shape ideas about both jazz and documentary itself. Concert-films, meta-narrative documentaries, and biographical film are introduced as key repositories of jazz culture that reflect and codify jazz history and meaning. The use of jazz in nonjazz documentaries is also explored as an example of jazz’s integration into screen-media’s cultural vernacular and the aesthetics of the everyday. Throughout the chapter, attention is given to examples in which ideas about jazz and US democracy are propagated through documentary film practice, reception, and aesthetics.

Although Messiaen wrote extensively about his own music and compositional techniques, the central role of musical borrowing in his creative process has only recently been recognized. This chapter addresses the full range of sources and transformational techniques used by the composer to invent and assemble his musical materials, the evolution of his ‘borrowing technique’ across the course of his career, and the difficulties raised by the potential meanings that may be attributed to some of his borrowings. Attention is given to the contemporary musical practices from which Messiaen’s borrowing technique may have emerged, possible contextual reasons for Messiaen’s ambiguous attitude towardsexplaining his processes, and the rare critical responses to Messiaen’s music that suggest that a handful of listeners during his lifetime understood aspects of this creative technique.

This chapter posits a revealing “census” or reckoning of the ways in which Messiaen has appeared in musicology in France vs. foreign climes and his presence in concert programming. More than twenty-five years after his death, Messiaen’s legacy in France is still a matter of debate. It examines how Messiaen’s work has fared in France since his death, and how institutions and performers have engaged with this work.

Before deciding on his programme, Berlioz was thinking of basing a symphony on Goethe’s Faust. The ‘Sabbath Night’ is inspired by the Walpurgisnacht vision of the beloved transformed into a witch. The movement continues Berlioz’s exploration of new orchestral sonorities to represent his nightmare scenario. Another instrument new to the symphony orchestra is a pair of deep bells; for which, as they would not often be available, he wrote the part to be played on pianos. His handling of the usual instruments, woodwind, brass, percussion, and strings, is no less original. The bells chime, the Dies irae plainchant is played and caricatured. The idée fixe is transformed into a vulgar jig suitable for a witches’ Sabbath, and the ‘Ronde’ begins as an academically correct fugue, its subject combined at the climax with the plainchant.

‘God is simple’, wrote Messiaen; here is an aesthetic model for this composer – sometimes called a theologian – that is present in diverse aspects of his music and that receives attention in this chapter. Simplicity is revealed in different forms and techniques, and in his ‘naïveté. It is so engraved in the composer’s works that it becomes almost a caricature. This chapter examines these ideals in Messiaen’s thought, character, and in the critical reception of his music.