[silence] Messiaen & Cage

[Thomas Moore]

On 3/29/07 1:42 PM, "Ralph Lichtensteiger" <lichtconlon@t-online.de> wrote:

> dear all,
> did john cage ever comment on O. Messiaen's music? in his writing or
> interview?
> 
> they had strong similarities:
> nature - sound (birds, gurgle shells, environmental sound etc.)
> mysticism, spirituality, and philosophy - concept of art, life and music
> investigation in sound, new concepts of the orchestra (orchestration)

Ralph, this is a very interesting question.

Sometime around 1990 I talked with John over dinner about Messiaen (or tried
to, at least!). At the time I was playing solo piano concerts of Cage and
Messiaen, and I thought their music, while from very different aesthetics
(as other replies have already articulated), made for a beautiful program
together: all the pieces I was playing seemed to have an element of
"timelessness" to them. (Or, in another sense, they were all about time.) I
was curious to know what he thought of Messiaen, and tried to coax him into
talking about his impressions of Messiaen or his music, but it was
immediately clear that John had no interest in taking the conversation in
that direction.

So I described the concerts I was doing -- pieces of his (Etudes Australes,
etc.) and from Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux, and spoke about how, as you
describe, both composers shared a love a nature (mushrooms on one hand and
birds on the other), etc., and for me especially a sense of duration, of
time (or non-time). That is, in Messiaen's music (post mid-50s) I often feel
like there is an attempt take us outside of normal time -- one musicologist
(sorry, don't remember who) beautifully said something to the effect that in
Messiaen's music there is nowhere to go: we are all already here in eternity
together. And in John's music there is also a similar emphasis on
time/duration. In the Catalogue d'oiseaux, as with the Etudes Australes and
many other pieces by John, there is no progression toward anything: we and
the music are just moving through time together, and the music just "is," it
isn't going anywhere. But at the same time there is a (sometimes complex)
durational structure through which we are traveling. I'm not articulating
this very well as I write this email just now, but maybe you can sense what
I'm trying to say. In any case, John listened to all this with something
that rested somewhere on the border between politeness and curiosity, but I
don't remember that he said much of anything in response. So that was the
end of that. Hopefully someone else had more success. Frankly, I was left
with the impression that John thought of and heard Messiaen's music so
infrequently that he just didn't have much to say on the subject, but I
certainly didn't sense any negativity. He wasn't at all dismissive.

There is a new (2005) book on Messiaen by the brilliant pianist Peter Hill
and Nigel Simeone. (Peter Hill's recording of the Catalogue d'oiseaux is
extraordinary.) While I haven't read it, I do remember thumbing through the
book and seeing a passage toward the end about John visiting Messiaen in
Paris -- it must have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s -- and it sounds
as if Messiaen was genuinely thrilled to see John, and that it had been many
years. (Possibly the passing of time had diminished whatever antagonism (to
which Joe Galvan alludes in his reply) had cropped up between John and
certain European composers in the late 50s and later.) I will have to track
this down again.

Regards,
Tom Moore

-- 

Thomas Moore
Director, Arts & Culture
UMBC
410-455-3370
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~tmoore/music.html

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