MESSIAEN Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time)

• David Halen, violin
• Diana Haskell, clarinet
• Peter Henderson, piano
• Melissa Brooks-Rubright, cello

In 1940, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was interned in a German prisoner of war camp, where he discovered among his fellow prisoners a clarinetist, a violinist and a cellist. The success of a short trio he wrote for them led him to add seven more movements to this Interlude, and a piano to the ensemble, to create the Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen and his friends performed it for 5000 fellow prisoners on January 15, 1941. The title is a reference to chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation. The score is inscribed “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse who raises a hand towards Heaven saying: ‘There shall be time no longer.’” The ‘end of time’ can be seen and heard in a number of ways. There is the theological aspect: Messiaen’s lifelong devotion to the Catholic faith. There are the circumstances of Messiaen’s imprisonment: the end of time is not an abstract concern to the prisoner of war. Finally, there is the structural aspect. The techniques employed by the composer actively conspire to negate a conventional sense of time in the experience of music. As Paul Griffiths has noted, the ‘end of time’ is achieved sonically through a number of innovative musical means:

[…] by strongly repetitive forms, circling through the same events; by the “modes of limited transposition” [Messiaen’s term] which dissociate diatonic chords from their normal functions; by processes of potentially enormous duration (e.g. movement I. “Liturgie de cristal”); and by extremely slow tempos (the two “Louanges”, movements V and VIII).1

For Messiaen, these areas, the theological and the musical, were inseparable. As the composer said, “Without musicians, time would be much less understood.”

The initiating force of the exhibition Art and the Spiritual is the perception of Ando’s space as contemplative, meditative, and spiritual. The exhibition explores the nature of belief, faith, ritual and aesthetics through a wide range of artifacts and art objects that derive from different contexts – secular and religious, western and non-western, contemporary and historical. Messiaen’s composition provides an interesting and provocative parallel. His works that incorporate religious or mystical themes are not merely musical tone poems on the subject but an attempt to realize his understanding of nature and the divine in the basic structures of his music.

We reach here the generating thought behind performing Messiaen’s work in the space of the Pulitzer and within the context of Art and the Spiritual. Like the exhibition, the Quartet dissolves common cultural boundaries in its palette of constituent parts. Beyond the means highlighted above, these include transcribed birdsong, rhythmic processes derived from Indian classical music and forms of mystical symbolism, both numeric (organization of rhythm, melody and harmony) and coloristic (Messiaen saw chords as colors and annotated his scores with detailed descriptions describing their emotional and mystical significance – a result of his rare and individual condition of synaesthesia).

1 Paul Griffiths: Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (Cornell, 1985)