Part of the Rest Is Noise Audio Guide
Zion National Park, Utah. Photo: David Iliff.
Note: The first page number is for the hardback edition, the second number is for the paperback.
The first of the famous "Louanges" from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, songs of praise that have the effect of stopping time in its tracks:
Live performance from the Banff Centre, May 24, 2007, with Matt Haimovitz, cello, and Frederic Chiu, piano. By kind permission of Banff. Recommended recording: Tashi.
For sixty years Messiaen played organ every Sunday at the Église de la Trinité in Paris. Here is a video describing Messiaen's relationship with the church and its organist, and below is amazing footage of Messiaen improvising at the instrument:
An excerpt from a recording of Messiaen playing his early work Apparition of the Eternal Church (see pp. 448-49 / p. 488 of The Rest is Noise):
"Messiaen par lui-même," EMI 67400.
Go here for an explanation of Messiaen's "modes of limited transpositions" (p. 448 / p. 487).
An ensemble of six ondes Martenot (video explanation here) playing the "Oraison" from Fêtes des belles eaux (p. 449 / p. 488), the music that Messiaen later adapted as the fifth movement of the Quartet for the End of Time:
From the collection OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, Ellipsis CD3690
A semblance of cocktail-lounge atmosphere in "Chant d'amour 2" from the Turangalîla-Symphonie (p. 450 / p. 490):
And the beginning of the joyously unrestrained finale:
Riccardo Chailly conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca 436626.
Messiaen had always loved the songs of birds, but in the 1950s he began to incorporate birdsong into his music in a systematic way. At Malcolm Ball's site you can compare Messiaen's musical re-creations of birdsong with the real thing. Here is a passage from Réveil des oiseaux, or Awakening of the Birds (p. 452 / p. 492), heard in a recording of the world-premiere performance from 1953:
Hans Rosbaud conducting the Southwest Radio Symphony with Yvonne Loriod, piano, at the Donaueschingen Musiktage, Oct. 11, 1953; col legno AU-031800.
The opening of the "Zion Park," the final movement of From the Canyons to the Stars, Messiaen's 1974 instrumental cycle inspired by the canyons of Utah (pp. 454-56 / pp. 494-96):
Reinbert de Leeuw conducting the Asko Ensemble, the Schönberg Ensemble, and Slagwerkgroep den Haag; available as part of a six-CD Messiaen set, Naive 782179.
THE AVANT-GARDE OF THE SIXTIES
As the technocratic fifties blurred into the psychedelic sixties, Karlheinz Stockhausen served as a bellwether of changing trends, his aesthetic broadened by the influence of John Cage. Stockhausen's Klavierstück IX (p. 457 / p. 497), written for John Cage's associate David Tudor, begins with a blast of mesmerizing repetition:
The site UbuWeb, a remarkable resource for information on far-out music and art of every description, has some excellent material relating to the madcap, every-which-way sixties avant-garde. You can hear two works by the Argentinian-German experimentalist Mauricio Kagel (pp. 457-58 / p. 498) and also view his mind-bending film projects. Beethoven was never quite the same after Kagel's 1969 film Ludwig Van. Ubu also has MP3s for Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu and various works of Cornelius Cardew.
Samples of works of the mellifluous Italian modernist Luciano Berio (pp. 458, 462 / pp. 498-99, 503): O King, Sequenza III. In the Sinfonia, the Scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony is blended into a psychedelic collage:
Pierre Boulez conducting the ORTF National Orchestra, Erato 45228.
The screaming cluster chord at the beginning of Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (pp. 459-60 / p. 500):
The composer conducting the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, EMI 65077.
In Paroles tissées, Witold Lutosławski (p. 460 / pp. 500-1) combines up-to-date techniques of texture composition with a vocal line that sometimes sounds as though it could have come out of the world of Benjamin Britten:
Louis Devos, tenor, with the composer conducting the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra; EMI 15318.
At this high-tech site you can listen to the complete electronic version of Stockhausen's Hymnen (p. 462 / p. 502), a fantasia on national anthems of the world.
A selection from Peter Maxwell Davies's convulsive and unsettling Eight Songs for a Mad King (p. 463 / p. 503). Boosey & Hawkes has many other samples of Maxwell Davies's music.
In the climactic collage of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Requiem for a Young Poet (p. 464 / p. 505), a quotation from Beethoven's Ninth collides with the Beatles's "Hey Jude," the voices of Goebbels, Stalin, and Churchill, and a chorus sorrowfully pleading for peace:
Gary Bertini conducting the Köln Radio Symphony Orchestra, the North German Radio Chorus, the Köln Radio Chorus, and the Vienna Radio Chorus; Wergo 60180-50.
GYÖRGY LIGETI
The publisher Sikorski has a page devoted to the late, great Hungarian avant-gardist György Ligeti, including a list of upcoming performances around the world. Ligeti has attracted a peculiarly strong following on YouTube: you can see a visualization of the electronic piece Artikulation, a punkish interpretation of the Etude No. 13, video of the Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes (p. 467 / p. 508), a feline Ligeti dance, and, of course, the Requiem in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (above). UbuWeb has a 1993 documentary about the composer.
Ligeti lived through the worst of the century's horrors, first surviving the Holocaust and then confronting Stalinism in postwar Hungary. Of his 1951-53 piano cycle Musica Ricercata, he later commented that the second piece, with its jabbing figures, represented "a knife in Stalin's heart" (p. 466 / p. 507):
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Sony 62308.
After escaping Hungary in 1956, Ligeti exuberantly embraced the myriad possibilities of the European avant-garde. Soon enough, though, ghosts of harmony past crept back into his work, as in this richly harmonized passage from Atmosphères (p. 467 / p. 509):
Jonathan Nott conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, Teldec 8573-88261-2.
The music is notable for the vastness of its sense of space, for the almost palpable contours of the sonic landscape as it unfolds before the ears. This is from Lontano (p. 468 / pp. 509-10):
Jonathan Nott conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, Teldec 8573-88261-2.
Here are two starkly contrasting passages in the tremendous Requiem (p. 468 / p. 509). First, the Kyrie, which demontrates Ligeti's technique of micropolyphony — assembling large masses of sound from multiple layers of microcosmic contrapuntal activity, with many different instruments playing the same material at different speeds:
Then the Lacrimosa:
Jonathan Nott conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and London Voices, with Caroline Stein, soprano, and Margriet van Reisen, mezzo-soprano; Teldec 83953.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SACRED MUSIC
At the end of the "Zion Park" chapter (pp. 469-70 / pp. 510-11) I comment on the generous output of religious or spiritual music in the allegedly godless twentieth century. Here is the beginning of Poulenc's buoyant Gloria:
Leonard Bernstein conducting the English Festival Chorus and London Symphony Orchestra, Sony (out of print).
The austerely contemplative ending of Frank Martin's Maria-Triptychon:
Mattias Bamert conducting the London Philharmonic, with Lynda Russell, soprano; Chandos 9411. Read more about Martin here.
Orchestral chants from Giacinto Scelsi's Konx-Om-Pax:
Juan Pablo Izquierdo conducting the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic & Concert Choir, Mode 95. © Mode Records. Read more about Scelsi in the New Yorker.
The Musician Angel appears before the awestruck saint in Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi (pp. 471-72/ pp. 512-14):
