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Olivier
Messiaen's Chronochromie
-- a program note --
Olivier Messiaen
was born on 10 December 1908 in Avingnon, France and died in Paris on
27 April 1992. He started composing Chronochromie (on commission by
Heinrich Ströbel) in 1959, completing the score the next year. It
received its world premiere on 16 October 1960 in Donaueschingen,
Germany, the Südwest-funk Orchestra under the baton of Hans
Rosbaud. It is scored for a ‘grand orchestre’ consisting of piccolo,
three flutes, 2 oboes plus English horn, 2 clarinets, sopranino and
bass clarinets, 3 bassoons, 3 trumpets plus piccolo trumpet, 4 horns, 3
trombones, tuba, strings and a percussion section consisting of
glockenspiel, xylophone, marimba, 25 tuned bells, 3 gongs, 2 cymbals,
and tam-tam. It is interesting to note the absence of piano in the
score to Chronochromie, as the instrument was a fixture in much of his
other work.
Olivier Messiaen was known throughout his long life
as a composer, organist, educator, ornithologist, and theorist.
He influenced some of the most well-known (and asthetically opposed)
composers of the 20th century, from Boulez to Bernstein, Knussen to
Stockhausen, while creating a body of work altogether unique to
himself. Messiaen’s music is permeated by his own artistic
philosophies, religious convictions, and personal interests, disparate
influences combining to produce an artistic whole which frequently
defies definition by western musical standards. If Messiaen’s music
seems ‘universal’, ‘timeless’, ‘elemental’ or ‘hypnotic’, it is due in
large part to the extensive extramusical influences which he employed
as compositional tools, many of which reach their apex in Chronochromie.
Messiaen’s musical output can be divided (as can the
works of Beethoven and Stravinsky) into three periods, of which it can
be said that Chronochromie closes the second. Messiaen’s first period,
lasting from his first explorations of composition through the war
years including the creation of the Quatour pour la Fin du Temps
(1941), establishes many of the compositional techniques which would
later become the trademarks of his style, including the use of
asymmetrical Greek and Hindu rhythms and temporal relationships, his
self-titled ‘modes of limited transposition’ (scales which will, upon
transposition to another note, soon yield the same collection of
pitches), and the prevalence of rhythmic and melodic symmetry as an
element of form and structure. The Quatour of the 1940’s also saw
Messiaen’s first identified use of birdsong as a structural and melodic
element, a technique which would pervade nearly all of his works from
that point on (collected and showcased extensively in Le Merle Noir
(1951), Oiseaux Exotiques (1956) and the massive Catalogue d’Oiseaux
(1958).
It was in the 1950’s that Messiaen started to write
increasingly experimental music, responding to the artistic aesthetic
of the age and criticisms by his students of some of his more
traditional works. These years of his ‘second period’ saw the creation
of such iconoclastic and enigmatic works as the Etudes de Rhythme for
piano (1950), and the above mentioned birdsong works. The musical
language of these works is distinct, utilizing juxtapositions of wildly
contrasting blocks of material (Reveil des Oiseaux, 1953), a lack of
development and reliance on serial techniques to shape form
(Cantéyodjayâ, 1950) and the employment of birdsong as
primary melodic material.
All of this sets the stage for Chronochromie
(1959-60), which can be seen as not only a culmination of Messiaen’s
experimental techniques of the 1950’s but indeed their apotheosis (as
seen by his third period, which begins almost directly after
Chronochromie and is marked by a more sensual, almost romantic approach
to creating atmospheres of sound and a lessening of importance on
formal structure).
The word Chronochromie is of Messiaen’s own
devising and comes from two Greek words Khronos (time) and Khrôma
(color); thus the title can be interpreted, The Colors of Time, or
Time-Color as a single concept. The work is divided into seven
sections, which are separated by measured durations of silence
(movements technically follow attaca, but due to these silences it may
seem there is a break in between). The sections are labeled:
Introduction, Strophe I, Antistrophe I, Strophe II, Antistrophe II,
Epode, Coda, suggesting some influence of Messiaen’s earlier interest
in Greek poetic forms and rhythms.
As the title may suggest, Chronochromie is primarily
about the coloring of time, or more accurately, of duration.
Messiaen manages to accomplish this by creating rhythmic
‘duration-rows’ (like the pitch tone-row, which uses a set of elements
in a specific order with none repeated) using 32 durational values
interverted in distinct orders. In the two Strophe movements, Messiaen
overlaps 3 of these interverted rows, giving the resulting orders of
durations to pitches or chords in distinct instrument groups (usually
divisi strings or the gamelan-like percussion section). Because
ultimately all 3 ‘rows’ contain the same total durational value, they
all end at the same time, and this marks the end of the movement.
Messiaen uses these rows sparingly in the other movements, but it is in
the Strophes that we see the entire structure of the section defined by
these rows or ordered duration.
The resulting overlays of durations are delineated
sonically by shifting timbres, changing harmonies in the strings, and
the appearance of certain kinds of birdsongs (hence ‘coloring’ the
‘time’). That these durations may be made evident to the ear by these
changing timbres and harmonies, especially when 3 orders are occurring
at the same time, may have been an ambitious aim on the part of
Messiaen (who did believe his audience would hear the rhythms thus
highlighted), but the result is a kaleidoscope of changing tonal colors
amid movements which are surprisingly, if somewhat enigmatically,
logical in the their construction even if the underlying structures are
not perceived consciously.
Thus in Chronochomie Messiaen builds on his
techniques of rhythmic duration exemplified in his earliest pieces, the
serial ordering of elements as seen in his experimental works of the
1950’s, and the element of birdsong as a melodic or structural element
which began in the 1940’s with the Quatour pour la Fin du Temps. This
last element, that of birdsong, will be made most evident in the
penultimate Epode section, which consists exclusively of varied
birdsongs for 18 solo strings. This unique moment creates a texture at
once as complex as the preceding Strophes and as open as free
improvisation, cleansing the aural palate before the concluding Coda.
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