The Reinvention of Religious Music - Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond. By Sander van Maas.

Abstract

This study of the theological aesthetics of the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) is itself a breakthrough; first because its interdisciplinary nature demands expertise across musicology as well as theology, and secondly, because it confronts the slippage and at times apparent contradiction within Messiaen's own (copiously written) theology and aesthetics, when he speaks as composer, commentator and believer. Thirdly, and most importantly, it ventures into a meeting place of secular aesthetics and an implicitly Christian theology. Van Maas faces these dilemmas squarely and rigorously. This does not result in a tidy synthesis nor, indeed, a clear answer to the book's perhaps rather rhetorical opening question (‘Is what is musically overwhelming also true?’), but it does succeed in taking the theological reader into a more informed and considered listening of Messiaen's music. The central issue can perhaps best be approached through van Maas’ quotation of Messiaen's own claim to a ‘re-invention of religious music’. Messiaen describes a progression towards his own synaesthetic composition; his writing of son-couleur (the musical scoring of what Messiaen as synaesthete experiences as a fusing of the visual and the auditory) is the pinnacle of the development of the sacred in music—surpassing Gregorian chant (liturgical music) and ‘religious’ music (secular music which expresses some element of the divine nature through aesthetic power). This apparent grandiloquence is fairly well justified by its reception by audiences who do indeed testify to a sense of the overwhelming and of dazzlement in the musical saturation of Messiaen's highly complex orchestral and choral work. Van Maas does not take issue with the claim.