Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 10, 2008



Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and numbered Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel and Marcel Dupré among his teachers. He was appointed organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris in 1931, a post he held until his death. On the fall of France in 1940 Messiaen was made a prisoner of war, and while incarcerated he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four available instruments, piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. Messiaen was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941, and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions he held until his retirement in 1978. Messiaen's music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources), and is harmonically and melodically based on modes of limited transposition, which were Messiaen's own innovation. Many of Messiaen's compositions are for the piano, or contain a part for solo piano, inspired by the virtuosity of his wife Yvonne Loriod; they often depict what Messiaen termed "the marvellous aspects of the faith", drawing on his unshakeable Roman Catholicism. Messiaen found birdsong fascinating; he believed birds to be the greatest musicians and considered himself as much an ornithologist as a composer. He notated birdsongs worldwide, and he incorporated birdsong transcriptions into a majority of his music. (more...)

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