notes on Messiaen and the movie

The first and most obvious question people ask about the movie is why I made it. I've already written a bit about that in the inaugural post, so at the risk of repeating myself, I will try to forge a brief answer to the question.

I first heard the piece in March 2003 the same way the cast members hear it, through headphones (I still have yet to hear it performed live). Usually I don't respond strongly to music the first time I hear it, but this was different. This was, as I wrote before, like being compelled by an irresistible force up a stairway to heaven and, at the top of this stairway, being temporarily and ecstatically blinded by a vision of pure, formless white light. The first hearing of the piece, and the next many that followed, were experiences of sublimity and transcendence that I've rarely, if ever, experienced, much less on the first hearing of a piece of music. Like Jasper James says about her experience listening to the piece, I felt like I was going out of my body.

My first thought was to play the piece for Albert Fuller, whose chamber music class I had taken while a violin student at Juilliard. Every week, after our coaching, Albert would invite my piano trio to the brightly lit white formica bar in his cavernous West Side studio, pour drinks, pass around a ceremonial pipe, put on some music, and talk. It was this act of musical and conversational communion that I wanted to recreate with the movie.

The word communion brings up another set of thoughts I have about the movie and about Messiaen, which is that I made the movie in large part to explore how people who were outside the church--either congenitally outside it like me, or exiles from it like Albert Fuller and Michael Warner--would respond to what is a manifestly Christian program and vision. I am not a Christian. I am a secular half-breed Jew who does not believe in the supernatural. And yet, when I listen to Messiaen's organ work in general and this piece in particular, I respond as though I'd devoted my whole life to Jesus Christ and am finally coming face to face with him. This tempts me to call Messiaen a great missionary, and I do, but only in a limited, failed sense. He is a missionary of religious feeling: Through him, I believe I have been made to feel what my more spiritually gifted fellow human beings feel when they contemplate or worship God or set the world on fire in his name. It's scary and powerful and virtually outside my experience as a secular person. But by "failed" I mean that after three years of listening to Messiaen's music I'm no less irreligious than I was before. If anything, I worship Messiaen. But I find his religious beliefs no less absurd than before I started hearing and loving these pieces that express them.

Messiaen was not unaware of this fate that his music met in the modern world. Here's an exchange from a 1983 interview with Almut Rößler:

A.R.: I read in a German newspaper about an interrview which you'd given together with Ozawa. You said something to the effect that the tragedy of your life is, as a believing composer, to write music for unbelieving contemporaries.

O.M.: That's true. I said that the drama of my life consists of four things. Firstly, I talk about birdsongs to urban dwellers who've never heard a bird in their lives. To hear birds, one has to live in the country, to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, if need be, and at daybreak and in the evening twilight to listen to the birds greeting the rising sun. In Paris, London or Berlin, that doesn't work. The second drama consists of my telling peole that I see colors whenever I hear music, and they see nothing, nothing at all. That's terrible. And they don't even believe me. The third drama is that I've worked out a language of rhythm in detail, have researched Greek metres and Indian rhythms, etc., and in that process I've attained a rhythmic language of ever greater freedom, which comes ever closer to Nature, for example, to the undulating motion of the sea, to the wind, to the movements of the clouds, etc. Whenever I talk about Rhythm, most people understand nothing, because to them, (at least to the most primitive of them), Rhythm just means a military march or jazz, which I loathe.

The interview goes on and Messiaen says more about how he finds jazz "repellent" and hates when people associate it with his music, and Rößler doesn't follow up on the question relevant to the movie, which is how this inherently, one could say aggressively sacred music operates on minds and hearts in the mostly godless part of the world I happen to live in. That was my experiment, or my test population, anyway--the experiment was to see if a piece of music, which is time-bound, could express the "eternal," and to see how music, which is pure sound, could express the visual and even the architectural (stairways, churches). And on this point I'm getting closer to saying something relevant to tomorrow's symposium on the convergence of image and sound.

For Messiaen, every chord or "complex of sounds" had a color (for Scriabin, western music's other famous synaesthete, keys were colored). Messian's descriptions of these colors are worth quoting at some length:

Take, for example, a complex of sounds which gives a group of colors: ash, pale green, mauve. If we move it higher by changing the octave, it will turn almost white, with some reflections of very pale green and violet. If we move it lower by changing the octave, it will turn almost black, with reflections of very deep green and violet. If, now, we transpose it up one semitone, it will become emerald green, amethyst violet and pale blue. If we transpose it up another semitone, it will give oblique bands of red and white, on a pink background with black patterns. In transposing it a semitone lower, it becomes white and gold; a tone lower we will have colored crystals of burnt earth, amethyst violet, light Prussian blue, warm and reddish brown, with stars of gold.
(from Messiaen's address to the Conference de Notre Dame, 1977)

For me, this description and others like it make the "tragedy" or "drama" of Messiaen's unique aesthetic experience that much more poignant. All these brilliant, elaborate colors and patterns and pictures, and we, his audience, can see none of them! When I imagine a piece like Apparition of the Eternal Church, with its series of ultra-dense chords alternating with the empty flat planes of open fifths, I have to imagine that Messiaen has painted a stairway of wildly colorful steps that nobody but he can see. He spent his life painting for the blind. And I suppose that would have to have been a powerful, negative inspiration to believe in God, to be able to hold out the hope that somewhere, some other being could apprehend one's work and creative expression, that one has not worked for a lifetime in creative isolation, that the act of artistic communion was possible for him in some other realm.

Now, only because it's getting late and I have to catch that flight to Aarhus, and not because I've reached any worthwhile conclusions on the points I've raised so far, I should jot down some other thoughts that have been bouncing around recently.

The extent to which the movie's "experiment" resulted in failure: A surprising number of people did not experience transcendence. I resisted this thread of the movie for a long time and resented it, but ultimately had to yield to the reality that most of my listeners were hearing something closer to the fires of hell than the white light of celestial ecstasy. The worse response, and one I've severely muted in the movie because I find it so dispiriting, is the one that doesn't even recognize any kind of sublimity in the music but experiences it as feeble or cliche, and these responses most often associate the piece with the soundtracks to old vampire movies, or, as Harold Bloom put it, "one of those dreadful Vincent Price Poe movies." Ron Gallman actually had some very cogent things to say about this response which I had to cut and hated cutting, because he articulated so well how Hollywood had co-opted the sound of the organ and brainwashed us into certain associations that for some people tie the music irrevocably to cheap horror. And this brings me to a rather sour point about the convergence of "image and sound"--movies and music, more particularly, which that convergence can be poisonous to great music when the movies in question are bad. The consequences--not just from movies but from television commercials--for Beethoven's fifth symphony--have been particularly devastating in this regard. There is hardly a person living who can hear that piece of music without associating it with automobiles and lightbulbs and whatever else some art-hating Madison Avenue executive was trying to sell at the moment. Also consider United Airlines' rape of George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue will for so many people be forever associated with one of the least pleasant of modern experiences, commercial airtravel. Also consider Ken Russell's kitsch assault on Holst, even passages in Mozart comedies where the action onstage falls so terribly short of the music. Refusal to see Clockwork Orange, despite admiration for Kubrik's use of great music in 2001.

Even the greatest and most powerful music is fragile in this way. So I had a lot of trepidation that in making this movie I was committing the same atrocity I've resented the film and marketing industries for committing against so many great works, and attaching images and ideas to a piece of music that were totally unworthy of its grandeur and greatness. So tomorrow maybe I will talk about the long period of indecision I went through in deciding how, or even if, I should include the music in the movie, and what images I would juxtapose with it. The problem: music, for us non-synaesthetes, invites an array of imaginings that is both limited and infinite. The convergence of image and sound nails music down to a single spot from where it can be extremely difficult to extricate it; the juxtaposition of great music to an image can cancel its relationship to the infinite. The point of the first part of the movie, to have people expose their internal imaginings, and to juxtapose those images, seemed harmless as long as I didn't play the music over it. But when I started attaching concrete images, and texts, to the music, in the second part, I started getting into hazardous, possibly murderous, territory. And there's a point here I'm hesitant to try to make in Aarhus, that has to do with my being able to understand, on this level alone, how Muslims can get so worked up about the depiction of their prophet, a sense of violating that relationship to the infinite through the confining power of an image.

Now I'm off to Aarhus, where I may be crucified for saying some or all of the above.