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Olivier Messiaen and the Avant-garde poetics of the Messe de la Pentecôte

This chapter uses a number of rare archival sources, and material unavailable in archives (the composer Charles Tournemire's unpublished autobiography), to frame Messiaen's development and distance from Tournemire in his organ works. In particular it focuses on Messiaen's Messe de la Pentecôte, a work I have played as an organist, as an exemplar of avant-garde radicalism. The article shows how Messiaen attempts to invert the political ramifications of the avant-garde as a sacred cipher of the extraordinary events surrounding Pentecost. Finally, the article argues that traditional understandings of theological beauty (appearance in particular), and what scholars assume from Messiaen's music as theological, need to be reconsidered. The radicalism of Messiaen’s work exposes new layer of beauty exposed in extreme music and theological events.

This work has been cited in Stephen Broad’s Olivier Messiaen: Journalism 1935-39 (Ashgate, 2012).