So, even if sometimes I listen to this work of art on my PC as many other music, I wanted to give it a deeper listening, and when I knew that there was the opportunity to listen to the Quartet live in a concert hall, I bought istantaneously the tickets for me and for a friend who never listened to contemporary music but that was deeply fascinated by the work and its performers.
More prosaically, the Quartet for the End of Time was created by Olivier Messiaen when he was a soldier in the French army fighting against the German Nazis during World War II. Hostage in a concentration camp, he mediated with a party official to leave him free to write some sheet, and since there were three other musicians in the camp, in 1941 Messiaen and his new friends were able to perform for the soldiers and the prisoners.
Messiaen music is full of references to carnatic music, the sacred music of the south of India, but transposed into a system he called ‘modes of limited transposition’ along with other elements taken from his first serial works. Also an ornithologist, he tried to convey the sound of birds into his own music. He said he was able to perceive colors while listening to sounds – a phenomenon known as synesthaesia – and so one of the goals of his music was to allow people to listen to colors: the second Quartet movement, as an example, is intended to give the listener the sensation of yellow and light blue.
As previously written, the music of the Quartet is divided in eight movements, some ensemble music and some solo music – all the instruments except the piano. The four musicians at Teatro Dal Verme yesterday afternoon were flawless, and this helped for sure me and the huge group of other listeners to enjoy the music. Giovanna Polacco is a talented violinist who studied at the Conservatory of Milan. After, she gain an impressive number of awards and played under the direction of Abbado and Karajan for a long time.
And finally, pianist, harpsicordist and orchestra director Antonio Ballista played in the last decades under the direction of Abbado and Boulez among the others, and he can claim to have the major authors of contemporary music writen pieces directly for him: from Berio to Bussotti, from Sciarrino to Sollima. He toured also with Berio, Dallapiccola and Stockhausen, and collaborated to concerts of Boulez, Cage and Ligeti.
A deeply fascinating journey into the idea of time and transcendency, the Quartet is also full of references to contemporary philosophy. But, surprisingly, the way the musicians interacts the one with the other and intertwine the one with the other will be not unfamiliar to the usual reader of this blog. I’m not obviously saying that Messiaen music is similar to jazz, but that even if this is written music there’s almost an interplay in the way the parts are conceived in relation to the full scheme.
While the clarinet solo is what the words say, a solo of clarinet with all the other instrument muted, the solos of cello and violin are provided with a minimum of interaction with the other three players, giving life to some interesting small dialogues or conversations that can be intriguing for a lover of free improvisation. It’s not a surprise that many composers of free jazz or experimental music are taking this type of contemporary music seriously while studying.
In the end, if you take in consideration the last works of Roscoe Mitchell and you think about it as a zen kind of music, with the sonorous masses as statements instead of being the developments of a given theme, something similar can be said of Messiaen music, whose praises to the eternity of Jesus and the consequently reflection on time are very tied to Mitchell’s. Sometimes, the difference between genres are only a matter of temperature. So, my final advice is: enjoy the music, wherever it comes from.
