The style, or perhaps styles — to differentiate those of melody, harmony, and the style oiseau (bird style) — in the music of Olivier Messiaen are distinctly masterful. Though his compositional language is both modern and atonal (often in fact polymodal), it is approachable for listeners thanks to its clearly perceptible organization, especially rhythmic. Within Messiaen’s rich, diverse, and in some respects highly complex writing, this overview highlights the simplicities of the vertical dimension, which are among the most remarkable and unique elements of his style. These traits are most responsible for his success and the universal respect he has earned in the musical world.

Messiaen was professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, which might explain the didactic character of his limpid and airy writing. Notably, he remained a harmonist within a twentieth-century context that could no longer figure out how to find new chords; many composers of the time — the likes of Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi, John Cage, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki, among many others — opted for clusters, causing harmony to implode in favor of timbre. But like Henri Dutilleux — who also took as his starting point the model musician of the French tradition, Claude Debussy— Messiaen found a way to preserve a taste for harmonic play.

And yet, contrary to Dutilleux, who opposed all forms of system, Messiaen appreciated organization, symmetries, and simple procedures, sometimes even used mechanically. Simplicity was perhaps the imperative of a Christian who felt the need to imbue his works with a clear liturgical message (that is, when he was not tempted by mystical Kabbalistic complexities). Simplicity and harmonicism also permitted Messiaen to persist in writing for that celebrated instrument — the piano — abandoned by so many of his contemporaries. His rich pianistic oeuvre may be explained by factors beyond his second marriage to pianist Yvonne Loriod; he remained content with equal temperament to confidently give voice to his captivating chords. For evidence of Messiaen’s powers as harmonist, it suffices to hear the opening of his masterpiece for piano Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus. A harmonic pedal (a note held from one chord to the next), highlighted rather pedagogically in the two upper parts, is at once inventive (on a verticalized mode of limited transposition) without sacrificing clarity. It thus seems to express the clarity of a divine and perfect gaze, as is only fitting for the “Regard du Père” (Regard of the Father), the title of the first movement.

As a harmonist, Messiaen also took it upon himself to rejuvenate the repertoire of an even older instrument: the organ. If the use of new registral “mixtures,” “waterdrop staccatos,” and artificial harmonics may recall Charles Tournemire, the chords remain Messiaen’s own, and justify his 1951 composition of a new Livre d’orgue.

Messiaen’s style reflects his confidence in his own harmonic, and indeed rhythmic, language. His faith in the vertical aspect of music is evident, as in so many passages he wrote in strict homorhythm. It is in this harmonic, vertical, chorale-like, and uni-rhythmic style — as in Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorales — that the brass conclude Couleurs de la Cité céleste (1963), thereby evoking the unitary power of the divine voice. Quite often, it is God who seems to Messiaen to sing in a single voice, in one rhythm across all parts.

It seems only natural that in his early period, which lasted until about 1945, Messiaen would maintain Debussy’s harmonic parallelism. In the conclusion of Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine (1943-1944), the choir recapitulates their verse “Il est parti, Le Bien Aimé, c’est pour nous” in parallel chords with the entire string orchestra — a most impressive effect, especially with the strings’ smooth sonorities. No less impressive are the strings in the finale of L’ascension (1933), which right from the start rise chromatically in one parallel motion. For Messiaen, such a sublime gesture as Christ’s ascension could only be expressed as One rhythm, One breath, One motion; and so once again homorhythm is the expression of the mysterious Trinitarian Unity. Messiaen’s music usually contains a rather minimal program: God and/or birds. For secular ears, the divine program, insofar as it justifies Messiaen’s harmonic language, allows his voice to emerge more clearly than certain others of his contemporaries.

Even when not strictly homorhythmic, the vertical structure — the interaction between different layers, each presenting its own rhythm — remains clear (except in the bird style, to which we will return), especially after the war, when Messiaen definitively cut ties with Impressionistic imprecision. He described himself as a rhythmist. Once again, his confidence, this time in his use of subtle rhythmic modes — Indian (the deçî-tâlas) and medieval — beginning in La nativité (1935), allowed him to develop vertical clarity. Messiaen seemed sufficiently proud of his rhythmic sequences, which, regardless of how complex or interesting, were sometimes simply declaimed by the entire orchestra, with only one or two voices clearly featured.

Messiaen did, however, endeavor to complexify the horizontal parameter of rhythm, primarily to avoid the “vulgar” feeling of the regular bar. In the aforementioned tutti of Trois petites liturgies, thanks to the valeur ajoutée, or “added value,” he creates a lopsided rhythm. This leads to horizontal rather than vertical subtlety.

Messiaen-the-harmonist’s vertical rhythmic structure is always impeccably orderly. He — sometimes naïve, perhaps — seemed to believe that his precious non-retrogradable rhythms (i.e., palindromic rhythms, such as sixteenth-note, quarter-note, sixteenth-note) would be perceived and enjoyed as such. But what more immediately attracted the public was how impeccably he articulated and presented his designs. Above all, his inclination toward verticality often led to pleasantly dynamic, lively, and rhythmic writing — what Boulez would call a temps pulse (a pulsed time, or beat), when the pulsations were irregular.

The confidence Messiaen placed in his compositional language stemmed also from his confidence in his famous “modes of limited transposition,” which he himself named, classed, and used in almost all of his works. They are emblematic of the subtle technical solutions he devised amid often more radical twentieth-century composition. These modes are not the natural or diatonic modes, “overused” in tonal music; nor are they the purely chromatic and “overly simple” twelve tones of dodecaphonism. He found a middle ground. In the tutti discussed above in Trois petites liturgies, each chord comprises a verticalized “Mode 2,” which he described as an “impressionist chord with added notes” (à la Debussy or Maurice Ravel). Likewise, one of the most interesting archetypes of his piano writing, the chord clusters, or “rocket-like groups,” often use modes of limited transposition. The piano, typically used to provide harmony, executes three or four degrees of a verticalized mode in rapid-fire parallel chords, expanding modern virtuosic horizons. Modes 1 (the whole-tone scale already used by Debussy and many others), 2 (the octatonic scale relished by Ravel, Debussy, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), and 3, 4, and 5 (more unique to Messiaen) may be superposed, a complex technique that nonetheless remains polymodal.

In addition to being a harmonist and a rhythmist, Messiaen — who enjoyed being rooted in history — was of course also a melodist. In the term’s most traditional sense, he wrote lines that were singable and recognizable (to the extent that such a complex notion as melody may be defined in so few words). His melodies favor the tritone — which is perhaps not so original for the mid-twentieth century, by which time modern composers had already embraced that interval. But most of Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition contain the tritone, and in his particular mystic sensibility, the diabolus in musica becomes instead a principle of absolute good, insofar as it is absolutely symmetrical, the center point of the octave. Messiaen thus joined Béla Bartók and so many others in sharing a taste for symmetry.¹ Rather more originally, Messiaen adapted numerous plainchants into veritable modern melodies, with their perfect fourths and fifths becoming their center, the tritone. The melodic structure, motion, rhythm, and shape of the plainchants are preserved, though modernized. Another example is Messiaen’s sole and monumental opera, Saint François d’Assise (1975-1983), which contains leitmotivs in the Wagnerian sense, and the theme associated with Saint Francis is virtually just the tritone itself. Skilled in the marriage of the ancient and modern, Messiaen continued to use recognizable themes at a time when Dutilleux was mainly writing motifs that were deliberately difficult to identify. Messiaen’s melodies were perceived as non-tonal because of the persistence of tritones, though they were real melodies all the same.

Blind faith in the novelty of his melodies allowed Messiaen to write monody as spare as that of medieval plainchant, with each part intoning the same line in unison or at the octave. The opening of Et expect resurrectionem mortuorum (1964) is monodic for a prolonged period before becoming choral (though still homorhythmic). Might the middle section of Regard de la Vierge, a movement of the Vingt regards sur l’Enfant Jésus, affirm by means of unisons the simplicity of the Virgin Mary? In the fourth of the Cinq Rechants (1948), Messiaen does not shy away from repeating melodic tritones in the initial monody. And, one element that contributed to the fame of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941) — beyond the dramatic context of its composition in a prisoner of war camp — is its fourth movement, a rondo whose refrain is entirely monodic.

Where it is not monodic or homorhythmic, Messiaen’s music has the quality, discussed above, of maintaining organized rhythmic layers, which, when the tempo is sufficiently lively, give the music a dynamism. This beautifully lively vertical organization is further elevated by orchestral sonorities that are themselves neat and precise. This is especially the case from the Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946-1948) onward, as Messiaen increasingly renounced the woolliness of strings. Instead, his works foreground percussion instruments. These sometimes generate an exotic effect, in part inspired by Indonesian gamelans. Percussion are used less for their power (as with Igor Stravinsky, Varèse, or Bartók) than for their clear attack. Marimbas, xylophones, and vibraphones appear frequently, as in the work of Pierre Boulez. The piano, too, is almost always present in the orchestra² — it is, of course, the instrument of his beloved wife, but it is also has a precise sound and “makes the orchestration sparkle,” as Messiaen put it. As for the famous ondes Martenot, its continuity of sound (in contrast to the percussion) serves to underscore orchestral crescendos (as in Trois petites liturgies). Used in such a way, it takes on the role of the harp glissandos or the wind machine in Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé (1912). In general, such precise sounds (to which even the ondes may contribute) are those of the post-war orchestra, especially from Réveil des oiseaux (1953) onwards. These works no longer privilege the strings, and sometimes avoid them altogether. Messiaen thus definitively abandoned Impressionism. In addition to the percussion instruments, the winds are the beneficiaries here — and not least because they easily evoke the sound-world of birds.

At the opposite extreme to Messiaen’s univocal and vertical technique is his style oiseau. This version of Messiaen is a polyphonist and contrapuntist (except when the bird is alone, as is often the case). The style oiseau emerges with Le Merle noir (1951). In almost all his subsequent works, it alternates with the harmonistic style, as in Réveil des oiseaux (1953) for orchestra, Oiseaux exotiques (1955) for orchestra without strings, and Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956) for piano. One recognizes this style by the rapid atonal monodic passages written for piano. What Messiaen may lose in univocality and accentuation when several “instrumental birds” sing at once leads to several important gains. The style oiseau allowed Messiaen to justify atonal melody by affirming its origins in nature — in the throats of these “little servants of immaterial joy” (in his enthused terms). He thus prevented modern music from losing sight of its powerful mythic origins in birdsong, as already observed by Lucretius. It was also an occasion to find natural precedent for such techniques as the Stravinskian ostinato and the rhythmic modes with added value, both of which were to be found among birdsong. Messiaen could thus perceive them as natural, or even of divine essence.

Though Messiaen’s style oiseau often excludes the strings, they nevertheless return in full, luxurious force in Éclairs sur l’au-delà… (1988-1991). The lyrebird, imitated at various points throughout the work, will forgive Messiaen for featuring the strings in the fifth movement, Demeurer dans l’amour. Composed in sustained notes, the strings seem all the more pleasant, even sensual, after their long, relative disgrace. Here is a third Messiaen — not the dynamic rhythmist, nor the ornithological contrapuntist, but the ecstatic harmonist of profoundly languorous strings. This Messiaen, if not the most prolific, is the one that posterity has most appreciated, given how these effects resemble popular “dream” music. The dynamism and the active rhythms disappear entirely, as do the percussion and wind instruments, leaving only the strings for the length of an entire movement, as in the Adagietto of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. A chord containing a tritone (C-D-F#-A) is drawn out, then slowly evolves, an affirmation of time which, in paradise, no longer exists in the same way as on Earth. One could already find the premonition of such a moment in the finale of L’ascension (also expressed by these “eternal strings”), in the finale of the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, and in the strings of the Jardin du sommeil d’amour from the Turangalîla-Symphonie. While Demeurer dans l’amour downplays rhythm and orchestration, it highlights the work of the harmonist, the melodist, the inventor of modes of limited transposition. Also and above all, it presents a clearly illuminated program. The spirituality expressed by these effects of zen relaxation soothe even the atheist listener, who might sense a profundity or sincerity in the composer’s inspiration, or at least intense release, anti-stress, and positive values compatible with our own practical era.

If Scelsi also gave his works somewhat mystical programs, Messiaen exalted the same spiritual light, but without locating it in distant Buddhist philosophies. Just as he remained a harmonist and melodist, he stood at odds with his prosaic and scientistic era. His enlightened philosophy recalled more that of a Saint Hildegard of Bingen of the twelfth century than that of someone in the twentieth. One can refer to the sublime titles of his compositions, which are works of art in their own right. Messiaen sometimes appeared anxious to conform to trends devised by his own students. He composed Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949), perhaps to assuage the Darmstadt School, and Timbres-durées (1952) to venture timidly into magnetic tape. But he ultimately showed that traditional views were all the more stunning for their concern for the most profound internal renewal. It is in his selection of the right materials and his heightened awareness for what to renew and preserve — content over form, in an era that valued the opposite — that Messiaen was, without doubt, a singular spirit.

^{1. More often, the Hungarian composer preferred mirror symmetries, while the Frenchman preferred retrogrades, which are less perceptible due to the irreversibility of time.↩}

^{2. Piano is exceptionally not used in Et expect resurrectionem mortuorum, Chronochromie, and Éclairs sur l’au-delà*.↩}