Olivier Messiaen and the directional meaning of music

Olivier Messiaen is regarded as one of the most important composers of the 20th Century. He is known for creating a synthesis of very varied elements in his music: the use of birdsong in his composition, for taking the inspiration from nature, for creating rhythms based on ancients Greek and Hindu meters, for using compositional tools such as non-retrogradable rhythms (rhythmic palindromes), and modes of limited transposition that for him embodies different complexes of colours, and maybe most important for using theological ideas from his Catholic faith. However, all of this served what we could call the transformative telos of his music, and which he calls the “break towards the beyond, towards the invisible and unspeakable, which may be made by means of sound-colour, and is summed up in the sensation of dazzlement.” (Olivier Messiaen, Conférence de Notre Dame, Descember 4, 1977, in Rössler 57) In a hand-written note for a program booklet, Messiaen writes about this transformation as part of a spiritual illumination as the directional meaning of music: Music is a perpetual dialogue between space and time, between sound and colour, a dialogue which leads into a unification: Time is a space, sound is a colour, space is a complex of superimposed times, sound-complexes exist at the same time as complexes of colour. The musician who thinks, sees, hears, speaks, is able, by means of these fundamental ideas, to come closer to the next world to a certain extent. And, as St. Thomas says: music brings us to God through “default of truth”, until the day when He Himself will dazzle us with “an excess of truth”. That is perhaps the significant meaning – and also the directional meaning – of music… (Olivier Messiaen in Rössler 10) In the following we will try to get a sense of what Messiaen means by dazzlement, how this sensation is connected to a break towards the beyond and what it means that it may be “made by” sound-colour. This will be done by breaking apart many of Messiaen´s statements in order to see a structure or line of progression that belongs to the experience of dazzlement. But what also opens through this explication of the economy of dazzlement is the possibility for refining and tuning the listening and apprehending consciousness towards the conditions for such a passage. This opens the path to a transformative practice that can go a long way towards cultivating dazzlement, tuning oneself as a musician in order to develop a receptiveness of this what Messiaen calls the directional meaning of music.   Dazzlement as grounded in naturally given part of human experience What Messiaen calls dazzlement as a break towards the beyond has its root in two natural phenomena: complimentary colours and natural resonance. For Messiaen these are not peripheral experiences, rather “one does not fully understand music if one has not often experienced these two phenomena: Complimentary colours; Natural resonance of sounding bodies” (Rössler 62): I believe that those are two interconnected phenomena of outstanding importance which are also scientifically verifiable; one sees them and hears them and they´re real and natural… (Rössler 115)) In this sense, the breakthrough has to do with developing a subtle and veiled but nevertheless naturally given part of human experience. Because “these two phenomena are connected to the sensation of the sacred, to … dazzlement” (Rössler 62), the phenomenon of dazzlement can be seen as an experiential category growing out of a naturally occurring gift of human perception. Natural resonance and complimentary colours can be seen and heard as ways to access this subtle dimension of sensing, changing perception from its solidification and objectification of a world independent from the perceiving subject, to a more participatory and feeling way of living inside the perceived. Provided one pays attention to these phenomena and develop this normally overseen and overheard part of perception, dazzlement can be seen as a natural gift that may occur as part of a conscious development of experience.   Natural resonance of sounding bodies and complimentary colours Both the phenomenon of natural resonance and of complimentary colours are well-known phenomena, accessible without any special gift of perceptual capacity. In the Lecture at Notre-Dame Messiaen introduces the two phenomena separately in this way: If I hit, very strongly, the low C on a piano: after a few seconds, I will hear, in clear and successive stages, the first tones which are called the “natural resonance of a sounding body”. If I possess a normal ear, I ought to hear another C, higher than the first (the octave), then a G (the fifth). If I have a more acute ear, I will then hear an E (the third); finally, a trained musician´s ear will hear Bb and D (seventh and ninth). Personally, I also hear the F# (augmented fourth), rather strong, and an Ab (minor sixth), very weak. Then comes a multitude of higher harmonics, inaudible to the naked ear, but of which we can gain an idea from listening to the complex resonance of a tam-tam or a great cathedral bell. (Rössler, 61) What Messiaen refers to as the natural resonance of the C is of course what is also called the partials, or overtone spectrum of the tone C. The partials Messiaen says are audible to him in clear and successive stages are C, C, G, E, Bb, D, F# and Ab. Natural resonance is a well-known phenomenon in acoustics, and the mathematical computation of the relation between the partials was first done by Sauveur around 1700, while they were experimentally observed already in the 17th Century. [Ernst-Jürgen Dreyer, Goethes Ton-Wissenschaft, Ullstein Materialen, Frankfurt, 1985, page 70] After this he goes on to present the phenomenon of complimentary colours. If I put on a piece of white paper a circle of red paint…and I look long and intensely at the line of demarcation between the red and the white: after a moment, the red portion at the edge of the white will become more intensely red, and the white will take on a flaming green, which flashes, fades, flashes again, and gives a bright green of incomparable beauty (a bit like emerald, dioptase or certain opals). If we do the same with blue, we will have a flaming orange. If we do the same with yellow, we will have a flaming pale violet or mauve. On the other hand, a green will give a red, an orange will give a pale blue, a violet will give a yellow. This is the phenomenon of “complementary colour”. This phenomenon, which is also called an after-image, has been known since antiquity [ExperienceColour, ed. Troy Vine, Ruskin Mill Land Trust, 2018, page 24.] One of the first systematic studies of the phenomena was done by Goethe in his Farbenlehre. In the section called Sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe he lists the same complimentary colours as Messiaen mentions; “Gelb fordert Rotblau, Blau fordert Rotgelb, Purpur fordert Grün, und umgekehrt.” (Goethe Farbenlehre, §810). Goethe develops a whole morphology of colour-experience and we will look more into this as part of the practical experimentation with meditative deepening of sense-perception in part II. After having presented the phenomena of natural resonance and complimentary colours, Messiaen goes on to say that “these two phenomena are connected to the sensation of the sacred, to the dazzlement which gives birth to Reverence, Adoration, Praise.” (Rössler, 62) In other words, here he is speaking not yet about the synesthetic experience of sound-colour, but of the two phenomena as such: the experience of the tone as a manifold of partials as given in natural resonance, and the experience of after-images that are revealed when we dwell in the experience of the colour impression as they give rise to their complimentary colours. What is interesting here is the importance Messiaen attaches to the cultivation of these phenomena, and its connection to the concept of dazzlement. They are, according to Messiaen, related to a sensation of the sacred. This is an interesting claim that echoes Goethe who in his Farbenlehre studies the moral qualities and effects of colours as a gateway to even deeper symbolical and mystical experiences. There is clearly a resonance between Messiaen´s claim and Goethe´s descriptions, in that both touch upon a moral dimension of perception. How can we understand this more closely? Entering into the phenomena of natural resonance and complimentary colour in after-images brings us into contact with the world in a deeper, more intimate sense. Perception gains a more participatory aspect. With vision one experiences that the eye itself becomes creative, and in both listening to the overtones and seeing after-images one has to actively engage with the phenomenon while letting the sense-organs work without intellectual interruption. This can have a certain devotional quality. The sense of the sacred that Messiaen points to must in any case be a question of intensity: simply to notice after-images and/or partial tones is not enough. That is just an opportunity to learn to live into these phenomena, to learn to dwell in them. Messiaen´s descriptions is one of taking them in and learning to breathe in the flaming and flashes of colour and the expanding partial tones, as a gateway towards further transformations. This, as will be explored more in depth later, requires a more receptive attitude, an attention in which intentionality and the will of cognition is quasi reversed so that it acquires an active listening-receptive mode. This process requires time. An inner calm of a contemplative presence with a kind of vigil letting come must be developed. In all this we can sense a kind of “tuning” of the soul, a way of being in the process of perception that is receptive to the qualities of the world. The colours begins to affect one in a deeper sense, and sound becomes more and more an envelope, a living multiplicity or layers of sound. (This will be explored further in the part II) A moral aspect of sensation emerges in that the gestures of attention are immediately disclosive or concealing of the perceptual world. The world is no longer given neutrally to me, but responds to the way I approach it. In this process perception gains a deeper feeling quality. This can maybe explain why Messiaen connects these phenomena to a sense of the sacred. Developing a highly active yet receptive and “listening” attitude inside perception changes the awareness in the flow between world and consciousness, and what is usually simply registered and objectified begins to speak and radiate a qualitative dimension.   Knocking the inner ear: Synaesthesia and the intensive dimension of sensation Now Messiaen goes on to connect sound and colour on this level of complementarity and resonance. In the Notre Dame lecture he says I believe that those are two interconnected phenomena of outstanding importance which are also scientifically verifiable; one sees them and hears them and they´re real and natural (Rössler 115)), and in an interview, he claims that they are in “exact agreement”: I believe in natural resonance, as I believe in all natural phenomena. Natural resonance is in exact agreement with the phenomena of complementary colours. I´ve made several experiments with complimentary colours. I have a red carpet that I often look at. Where this red carpet meets the lighter-coloured parquet next to it, I intermittently see marvelous greens that a painter couldn´t mix, natural colours created in the eye. Likewise, sound generates harmonics. When you hear a gong… Make a long sound on a gong and you´ll hear some fantastic things. It´s a modernism that no modern composer could surpass. [In an interview in the film Olivier Messiaen. La Liturgie de Cristal, directed by Olivier Mille. Juxta Positions, 2002.] In what way are these phenomena interconnected, what does it mean that they are in “exact agreement”. Even if Messiaen does not say it explicitly it is clear that he regards his synesthesia as an expression of this agreement. Messiaen explicitly regards his synesthetic experience not as a matter of physiological response, of neurological interconnection, of a subjective organic conditioning. In calling it an intellectualsynesthesia, Messiaen is convinced that it is a matter of the phenomenon of sound and colour itself, and that what happens in experiencing the phenomenon of after-images and complimentary colours is intrinsically connected to the deeper experience of sound when entering intensively into its natural resonance. Messiaen also suggest that this aspect of perception and experience is going on subliminally all the time, that to some extent it is a universal human experience: “Sight and hearing are linked to each other … I do believe that most men and women have a sense of this correlation, a sort of sixth sense, it´s only less developed, because they don´t give themselves an account of it … they experience it instinctively, it goes on at a subconscious level” (Rössler 78,79). But, even if not a common experience, synesthesia is not such an unusual capacity. Many people have such experiences without necessarily attaching a significant spiritual experience of breakthrough to it. What Messiaen is after when he connects sound-colour to dazzlement cannot have the experience of synesthesia as the essential thing. It appears rather that sound-colour is a possible site or gateway to dazzlement. Dazzlement can be “made by” these phenomena when the sounds strike and knock our inner ear, and these multicolored things move and irritate our inner eye, and establish contact, rapport (as Rainer Maria Rilke said) with another reality: a rapport so powerful that it can transform our most hidden “me”, the deepest, the most intimate, and dissolves us in a most high Truth which we could never hope to attain. (Rössler, 63) Sound and colour strike, knock, move and irritate the inner eye and ear. These descriptions of such strong activity points to a certain intensity in the experience of the subtle dimension of perception. The natural resonance and complimentary colours are here portrayed as gaining a consistency and intensity that this establishes contact with another reality. In this way one should not focus on the synesthesia in itself, but rather as a function of an intensification. Also, even if Messiaen in the quote above implies that it is the synesthetic experience of sound-colour that establish rapport, he also speaks about the purely visual experience of light and colour in stained glass as capable of giving dazzlement. What happens in the stained-glass windows of Bourges, in the great windows of Chartres, in the rose-windows of Nortre-Dame in Paris and in the marvelous, incomparable glasswork of the Sainte-Chapelle?… from a distance, without binoculars, without ladders, without any object to come to the aid of our failing eye, we see nothing; nothing but a stained-glass window all blue, all green, all violet. We do not comprehend, we are dazzled! (Lecture at Notre-Dame, in Rössler, quoted from van Maas, Reinvention, page 33) The fact that dazzlement is here used with regard to the purely visual without the synesthetic experience shows that the essential element lies not in the combination of sense-modalities, but in the intensification. Dazzlement appears to be an experience that can be opened in the midst of the subtle dimension of sensation, not dependent on the experience of synesthesia, even if synesthesia is an expression of the inner relationship between the life of colour and sound. An intensified experience of the subtle aspect of hearing and seeing reveals a dimension to perception that can take the perceiver beyond her normal self and consciousness. This appears to be the essential, also in the synesthetic experience, rather than the correspondence between colour and sound per se. Now this intensification of sensation described here also has to do with the dissolution of form. In the example with the stained glass this is evident. Colour becomes no longer part of an objectifying perception that sees and identifies figures and forms, but an immersive experience of colour as such. Instead of comprehension and rational thought, a dazzling coloured light pervades consciousness. In his analysis of Messiaen´s attempt to “reproduce experience of dazzlement in his music” (32 Reinvention), Sander van Maas has identified a musical situation that is similar to this excess of intensity whereby form dissolves. In his lectures Messiaen has mentioned some passages in his oeuvre where dazzlement is sought to be composed, where it is expressed compositionally. What according to van Maas characterizes these passages is “a heterogeneity and massiveness that cannot be captured by a single aural “gaze””, such that the listener is no longer intentionally directed towards music as an object, but finds herself immersed in sound. This breakdown of the intentional listening has its objective correlate in the dissolution of themes, figures and forms as the content of music: dazzlement has little to do with the representation of religious ideas by visual or musical means. The music of dazzlement certainly possess many pictorial features, but its most important religious moment lies in the very erasure of these figurative elements (the apparent content of the passage), in a way similar to the erasure of the figures in the stained-glass windows.” (Reinvention, 59) … There is thus a double breakdown that belong together. On the subjective side a breakdown of intentionality, of thinking and sensation as intentionally structured subject-object consciousness. This is correlated with a dissolution of figures and forms on the objective pole. These two sides of deactualization of the cognitive structure following the intensity of the subtle aspect of sensible experience lead to the central moment of breakthrough, the transformative reversal at the heart of dazzlement.   Blinding, excess, breakdown, dissolution This moment of dazzlement as a passage or breakthrough is presented by Messiaen as an inner blinding. We move from a breakdown of form as what carries or frames colour and sound, from a striking and knocking, moving and irritating of the inner eye and ear, to the pure intensity of sound and colours. This excess provokes what is the heart of transformation in dazzlement, namely an inner blinding which opens a newsight; first a dissolution of the I which then leads into “in a most high Truth which we could never hope to attain”. In the Notre-Dame lecture Messiaen refers in passing to a saying by the Dutch mystic Jan can Ruusbruec when he characterizes the excessive experience of being dazzled: “Contemplation sees something, but what does it see? An excellence above all, which is not one thing, nor another” (Rössler 64). This lack of form and distinction is part of the elevation beyond “words, thoughts, concepts” (Rössler 64) beyond comprehension, as a passage into an experience of spiritual life and light. A seeing which sees nothing but an excellence, nothing but a truth into which one is dissolved.[1]  The same breakdown of sensing and comprehension is found in Sander van Maas analysis of the passages where Messiaen composes dazzlement. Van Maas describes how the overwhelming force of sound where several layers of complex musical streams are superimposed upon each other makes the ear loose itself and effectively break apart. In the midst of the dissolved aural “gaze” the ear finds itself immersed and transfigured: At once dissociated from and opened up to the music, the broken ear experiences the situation as a “source”, as an “emanation of vitality”, as an “unstoppable outpouring of life force”. This emanation or outpouring momentarily defies experiential and conceptual difference between, among others, the object of listening and the listener. It makes both participate in a force that overflows the clear definition of music as an object that is being listened to by an ear that is directed towards it by a listener (cognition). Sander van Maas, “A Transfiguration of the Ear” in Missing Links Arts, Religion and Reality, Jonneke Bekkenkamp et al. (ed), LiT Verlag, Münster, 2000, page 167 Whether this analysis shows an image, a musical imitation of dazzlement, or if it in fact establishes a passage, is in each case a question to be answered from inside the experience itself. But van Maas ´analysis points out a number of characteristics that defines dazzlement and can let us understand it better. The dissolution of the intentional structure of consciousness makes way for an immanence in which ear and music are mutually given to themselves as part of the overflow. This broken ear listens no longer only to sound, but also to the inaudible forces that themselves compose a new ear. Listening begins to take place also on a supplementary dimension to normal listening in which the emanation of vitality is found. This transfiguration of the ear may be coupled to Deleuze´s notion of an impossible ear. Not only is music´s task to render audible inaudible forces, like the force of time, but in music it´s no longer a matter of an absolute ear but rather an impossible ear that can alight on someone, arise briefly in someone. In philosophy it´s no longer a matter of an absolute thought such as classical philosophy wanted to embody, but rather an impossible thought, that is to say the elaboration of a material that renders thinkable those forces that are not thinkable by themselves. (Deleuze “Conference presentation on Musical Time, IRCAM 1978”, quoted from Amy Bauer, “Messiaen´s Chronochromie”, in Messiaen Studies, Robert Scholl (Ed), Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007.) The broken ear no longer listens to something, but becomes an impossible ear lodged in the flow of sonic matter itself, as an organ outside the organic hierarchized integration of perception within the organism. In this release of the ear from the flesh, a release of vitality takes place that also raises listening to its transcendent exercise: to that which can only be sensed and heard with this impossible ear, but is inaudible from the empirical exercise where listening is embedded in and mixed with all the other faculties.    The spiritual life of the beyond This passage of dazzlement also means a partial arrival. As a result of the reversal inside the breakdown that takes place at the heart of metamorphosis, Messiaen expresses the possibility of a foretaste of the life of resurrection, of a life of the beyond. This is a spiritual life in which “time is a space, sound is a colour, space is a complex of superimposed times, sound-complexes exist at the same time as complexes of colour” (Rössler 10). In this spiritual life time is “a duration malleable and transformable” and in this unification of time and space one comes close to the next world. These characteristics are of course taken from Messiaen´s Catholic universe. But they can also be read according to a universal spirituality that animates a creative engagement with the perceptible world. As such we can read this trajectory in light of the transcendental empiricism that Deleuze claimed belongs to art when it “leaves the domain of representation in order to become “experience”, transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible.” As we saw in chapter seven, this required that “we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible.” (Deleuze 1994, 56) With Olivier Messiaen´s music of dazzlement we have a case that makes the trajectory of a transcendental empiricism more concrete. Here the creative engagement with sensible material starts with the development of the subtle dimension of sight and sound, of complimentary colours and natural resonance. This reaches a certain intensity and consistency when they strike and knock the inner ear and eye and brings about a metamorphosis of the apprehending intentional consciousness. This leads to a breakdown of the intentionally directed subject that is blinded and dissolved, where the faculty of listening is “borne to the extreme point of its dissolution [where] it grasps that in the world which concerns it exclusively and brings it into the world” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 143). Reversed into the “element of truth”, listening becomes the participation in a resurrected life. In this spiritual life of the beyond time is space, and space is a complex of superimposed times. The encounter with the intensity within the sensible gave rise to a metamorphosis of time. Instead of experiencing time as a given, internal to experience, we become internal to time. Via the intensity within the sensible one enters the synthesis of time as the becoming of the sensation: Chronos is exchanges for Aion, the time of the Event. This is the entry on the Body without Organs and its non-organic life, a life of the world beyond the organism. Messiaen obviously lived quite strongly in the intensive dimension of sensation, and made this the source of his musical creativity – he claimed everything he ever did was based on the fundamental experience of natural resonance and complimentary colours. Now that we have seen how this has its basis in a naturally given aspect of perception, as well as the possibility of being developed and strengthened, the prospect of making music a transformative practice as part of transcendental empiricism may become graspable. This will be explored more in practical detail later on. [1] This point of reversal, where the I is no longer what grasps but is itself grasped, dissolved and transformed, has clear parallels with Foucault´s description of the term, speaking about the reversal of light and darkness in the relation between reason and unreason: «Dazzlement is night in broad daylight, the darkness that rules at the very heart of what is excessive in light’s radiance. Dazzled reason opens its eyes upon the sun and sees nothing, that is, does not see; in dazzlement, the recession of objects toward the depths of night has as an immediate correlative the suppression of vision itself; at the moment when it sees objects disappear into the secret night of light, sight sees itself in the moment of its disappearance.» (Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (1961), translated by Richard Howard, New York: Vintage, 1988, Chapter 4,) Dazzlement is here an inner blinding, an excess that causes what was light to become darkness, but “sight sees itself in the moment of its dissapperance”, making of darkness a new sight. 1 12