Messiaen'S Gagaku Luigi Antonio Irlandini GAGAKU IS THE FOURTH and central movement of Messiaen's Sept Haïkaï for orchestra, written in 1962 after a honeymoon trip/concert tour to Japan. Messiaen spoke in interviews about both his travel and the composition in a natural, unpretentious way, firmly connecting the piece with a personal and touristic experience. He saw Japan as a paradise, "a country where everything is noble" (Samuel, 1986). His fascination for the place, culture, and people inspired him to compose a seven-movement piece in the spirit of illustrations or postcards. This is evident from the titles of each movement, which are the names of places he visited. While the first and last movements are respectively entitled Introduction and Coda, the others have the fol lowing titles: no.2: Le parc de Nara et les lanternes de pierre, no. 3: Tamanaka-Cadenza, no. 4: Gagaku, no. 5: Miyajima et le Torti dans la mer, no. 6: Les oiseaux de Karuizawa. Respectively, they refer to the park in Nara with its stone lanterns, Yamanaka lake, a live performance of court music gagaku, the island of Miyajima with its portals in the 194 Perspectives of New Music sea, and Karuizawa, a mountain resort at the foothills of vulcan Asama. The score's subtitle "esquisses Japonaises" emphasizes the unpreten tious sketch nature of the work. Given the haikai in the title, a listener is bound to search for Japanese haiku elements such as brevity, surprise, lyricism, simplicity, syllabic structure, and a connection with nature. Instead, Messiaen's haikai vary from one and a half to five and a half minutes. Although the sensation of time in music is rather psychological than chronometrical, these durations—extended for a haiku, and short for a composer such as Messiaen—not always convey the sense of brevity. His musical language is cold and inexpressive, leaving no room for the surprise element (typical of a haiku). The static blocks of dense and intricate texture lead the listener to experience a feeling of complexity rather than that of simplicity. Traditional haiku structure pattern of three lines each with five, seven, and five syllables has no consequence in Messiaen's pieces, although the absence of this structure finds its precedent in the short free-form haikai of the Soun school (Stryk, 1981). Notwithstanding the all-pervading bird song transcriptions, a connection with nature remains available only to those ears able to recognize them as bird songs, or to those who have a previous knowledge of Messiaen's love of nature. In fact, his compositional method or écriture1 and musical aesthetics are incompatible with the above mentioned characteristics of a haiku. This disconnection with haiku aesthetics seems to indicate that Messiaen never really left his own world—that of European music— and his own self-centeredness. Or would there be a deeper intention hidden? Most written accounts about Sept Haïkaï never go beyond reporting the honeymoon trip as Messiaen's only inspiration or reason for composing this music. History seems to tell us that Sept Haïkaï is clearly born out of a nostalgic impulse in which the culture and aesthetics of far-away and "exotic" Japan represent the sublimated and romanticized condition to which Messiaen yearns to return or connect to. And his connection is only momentary, as a brief touristic visit, almost accidental, for Sept Haïkaï is the first and only reference to Japan in the composer's large oeuvre. Except, perhaps, in the opera Saint François d'Assise, in the way the angel moves: that movement is based on the slow walking of the actor in Nô theater, aiming to awaken in the public the sensation of something alien, that is not from this world.2 There is, however, one of the pieces which allows us to pursue another way of understanding the whole set. Gagaku, the middle piece, is the one haiku where Messiaen transcends the nostalgic Messiaen's Gagaku impulse and redeems his entire set of seven haikai, and he does it by means of religion. By 1950 Messiaen already had an established career solidly grounded in tradition and strongly imbued with Catholic theology. Since his early orchestral work...