“Are you fans of Olivier Messiaen’s music?” Someone asked.
“We don’t know, we’ve never heard him before,” the woman with stringy gray hair and, and saucer glasses replied.
“It’s weird music, but I hope you like it.”
And so it went as people mingled, chatted at hushed volumes, and waited for St. James organists Joseph Adam and Clint Kraus to begin the first recital in a planned series of all Olivier Messiaen’s complete organ music to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the composer’s birth.
Organ music is a challenging classical genre. The music isn’t portable the way other keyboard music is. You need a large, stationary, instrument that is usually part of a church or concert hall. Even when a hall has an organ, performances of solo organ music are uncommon. The exception, of course, being orchestral music that includes organ. The coming Mahler Eighth Symphony and Camille Saint Saens’s Third Symphony are good examples. When organ music is played alone, most people probably want to hear and even expect to hear music by JS Bach.
Of course, the narrow expectation of Bach passes right by the large organ repertoire, much of it sacred and liturgical music. Lost is the organ music of Messiaen – one of the 20th Century’s leading musical voices. Messiaen’s organ music is spiritual, moving, surprisingly organic and a fitting musical complement for Seattle’s St. James Cathedral. His sound is dense and his ideas complex (like a cathedral), but at the core of it all is the composer’s simple love of God and his Catholic faith.
In his early twenties, Messiaen was appointed the Organist titulaire of the Church La Trinite. The composer would work at the church for the rest of his life. The post was the composer’s musical and spiritual home. Charles Tournemire, another church organist, said of Messiaen “the musical value and the future of this Christian organist are of the highest order: a transcendent improviser, an astonishing performer, and a biblical composer. With Messiaen, all is prayer.”
The first thing that surprised me about hearing Messiaen’s organ music in St. James Cathedral is its size. The cathedral organ is split across the east and west ends of the cathedral, in effect surrounding parishoners. The Apparition of the Eternal Church groped from the organ like a series of cathedral columns. Thick masses of sound filled the cathedral, given the impression of in imposing, immovable behemoth. I had chosen my pew carefully. I wanted to be in the middle of the nave and not in one of the transepts. Nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared for the sensation of being surrounded by the music. Multichannel stereo systems don’t have anything on St. James.
Kraus, also played the composer’s disliked Dyptique and the clever Monodie – which features a disorderly melody, rising, falling and leaping all over the place. Kraus played it as if it were a contiguous tune.
After a short intermission, where I retreated to quiet of the south chapel, a humble space worthy of Messiaen-style reflection, I moved to a seat near the baptismal fount. Closer to the front doors of the cathedral, I also was hoping that I would be able to get more space between the music and myself. The move was marginally successful. Adam’s playing of Les Corps Glorieux hung in the cathedral with an enveloping weight. Messiaen balanced the divine size and mystical colors of the fourth, fifth, and sixth movements with quiet, introspective periods. Messiaen did this in Dyptique where the same melody is treated hurriedly and then slowly. Messiaen may not have liked the piece, but I bet most of the people at St. James last night preferred the work’s obvious melody and structure. Les Corps ends with quiet contemplation on the Holy Trinity.
St. James acoustics amplified the meditative nature of the music on Friday’s program. Colors, chords, and musical lines lingered in the air long after Adams and Kraus stopped playing. It reminded me of musical incense. Catholics use ample amounts of incense; it’s a smell I loved as a kid and one my nose always picks up, no matter how long ago its fragrant properties were spread in the church.
Sacred music and sacred spaces go together. This is just a fact. You can transport masses, cantatas, and other types of church music into the concert hall, but the Godliness is diminished. Messiaen spent his entire adult life as a church organist and as a biblical composer. For me, the Rubik’s Cube that is Messiaen’s music is both appealing and frustrating.
Peel away Messiaen’s own modes of limited transposition, Hindu inspired rhythms, the composer’s bird song fetish, and what listeners are left with is music that is ideally suited for the cathedral. Messiaen’s musical symmetry is as ordered as the predictablity of St. James cathedral floor plan. His abundant palette of sound colors is as brilliant as a Rose Window. And, the composer’s purity of intent is as simple to comprehend as the Ultimate Sacrifice Jesus made for all of God’s creation. It is “weird music” to quote the earlier conversation, but only because it is so simple.
