Olivier Messiaen

Abstract This chapter seeks to understand Messiaen’s music and aesthetics as spectralist through the writings of Hugues Dufourt and Gérard Grisey, and through a Lacanian framework. To understand Messiaen’s music as spectral is to listen to a reciprocal relationship between past and future, and to appreciate the way its religious-modernist fantaisie works on the listener. This chapter examines Messiaen’s output through a number of discourses and follows the trajectory of his compositional development. Initially, it connects Messiaen’s religious-modernist aesthetics with synaesthesia and color in his earliest music, to the organ, and to religious mysticism. It then uses a range of discourses, including symbolism and the occult, the materiality of sound, and the philosophy of listening to examine spectralist thought in works from the 1930s, his ‘experimental’ period (1949–52), to the emancipatory colorist aesthetics of Couleurs de la Cité céleste (1963). The last two sections, on birdsong and meaning in his opera Saint François d’Assise (1975–83), examine liminal concerns of glory, listening, narrative, and meaning in Messiaen’s form of spectralism. The conclusion briefly discusses an arena of mutual critique between Messiaen and the école spectrale.