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Indeed, his mosaic forms, coupled with static harmonies derived from his personal system of modes, give even his earliest pieces an original sense of time not as flow but as pre-existing, revealing itself to human temporality in sequences of brilliant unalike instants." Certain portions of this site are restricted to oncampus use only. The symmetry of the octatonic scale is readily apparent in its alternation of semitones (1) and wholetones (2) between successive pitches. There are two fascinating stories connected with the piece-the story of its composition in a prison camp, and the apocalyptic story told by the piece itself. "Essentially, rhythm is change and division. Yet at the very outset the dynamics are skewed – although the violin birdcalls are marked Taken together, the composer's and Loriod's recordings clearly suggest that, despite its formidable challenges, the I'm listing these together, as all three boast a direct, albeit somewhat attenuated, association with the composer. Music is direct communication from artist to listener, soul to soul.
Coinciding with this textural change is a change of modal transposition from t=4 to t=11 of the octatonic scale. We can build any scale or mode beginning on any pitch and still recognize it as the same type as long as we maintain the pattern of of While Messiaen occasionally uses traditional scales like major and minor, he is more interested in a category of scales he calls "modes of limited transposition." In a piece of fabric, threads might differ in color, weight, and thickness, and they can be woven together in various ways; similarly, in a piece of music each part has its own distinctive timbre (tone color), register (highness or lowness), and dynamic (loudness or softness), and it can be combined with others in different ways. This is a step toward the harmonious independence of melodic lines that is the hallmark of counterpoint. Example 7: Cello part from the opening of "Liturgie de cristal" (mvt 1) In the next example, from the sixth movement, the principal melody consists of five pitches of the whole-tone scale beginning on E along with one pitch, B-natural not in the scale but clearly heard as an ornamental tone.Example 8: Principal melody from the opening of "Danse de la fureur" (mvt 6) Messiaen makes extensive use of the octatonic scale throughout his compositional career and particularly in the Quartet. In a passage from "Claude Debussy . "Certain passages from the second movement return. The result, according to Linton, is breaking away from the "neo-pagan hysterics" of others' literal depictions to "a vision of heaven whose anger, violence, vengeance and despair are not so much repressed as irrelevant." As in the whole-tone scale, the preservation of exact pitch content under transposition accounts for Messiaen's conception of the octatonic scale as a mode of "limited transposition." What is the effect of the other two instruments in this passage (cello, playing harmonics and piano; not shown in the notated example)? The abyss is Time, with its sorrows and its weariness. Although Messiaen rarely uses Mode 3 in its complete form, there is a remarkable passage in the first movement in which the clarinet – for once sounding more like a clarinet than a bird – plays an ascending run consisting of forms of Modes 1, 2, and 3 in succession (Example 13b). Musical textures can be thick or thin, simple or complex, and all gradients in between, depending on the number of parts being played and on the way in which they interact. While we can (and should) salute composers' boldness and vision, music that requires theoretical analysis to make sense can seem akin to a joke that has to be explained. Music composed with symmetrical scales often gives the impression of stasis or, at least, depends on factors other than pitch (rhythm, texture, dyanmics) to impart a sense of drama, development, or progression. Music based on major and minor scales, such as the two Beethoven excerpts, conveys a strong sense of forward motion and sounds very dynamic and dramatic. Thus common structures gratify our desire for repetition and resolution, consonant chords observe the natural overtone series, and the acceleration and deceleration of a regular beat follow the impact of emotions on our heart rate. Translated by Anthony Pople. Composers of the 20th century, including Messiaen, often made use of symmetrical scales and other pitch collections in which each of the pitches is more-or-less equal in tonal gravity. Only a small number of very special scales – symmetrical scales – feature this kind of redundancy, and none do so to this extent. On the piano, gentle cascades of blue-orange chords, garlanding, with their distant carillon the quasi-plansong chanting of the violin and cello. 5, fourth movementThe numbers 2 and 1 below the scale refer to the size of the interval (in Now listen to a portion of the main theme from the well-known first movement of the same symphony. Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon, France on December 10, 1908, and so in 2008 we celebrate his centennial. So while Messiaen's texts are enticing and each movement exemplifies a salient aspect of his novel theories and personal esthetics, the lasting and ultimate impact of the Other resources I used (and have quoted here) to supplement those three books: Comparative listening to the two melodies (Exx. The first two form what is known as a Example 12a: "Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of Time," bars 1-12Messiaen's third mode of limited transposition is a nine-note scale that can be generated from a single three-note cell, C-D-Eb (Example 13a). More typically, however, composers use the whole-tone scale briefly; it is a film composers' cliché to to use the whole-tone scale to underscore moments of tense anticipation, premonition of the future, the sprinkling of fairy dust, or the inhabitants of the planet Zargon. Listen for the high, eerie sustained notes that begin right after the clarinet's first phrase; the melody is so high it might sound more like a violin than a cello.