“…Many gods and many voices”:
Contemporary Music and the Physical-Spiritual American Landscape
Master’s Thesis in Musicology University of Amsterdam Student: Student Number: Supervisor: Second Reader: Sara Constant 11103817 dr. M. Beirens prof. dr. J. J. E. Kursell
“…Many gods and many voices”1:
Contemporary Music and the Physical-Spiritual American Landscape ABSTRACT
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This thesis investigates intersections of spirituality and ecology in contemporary classical music inspired by the American landscape. Using Olivier Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles… (1974), John Luther Adams’ Dream In White On White (1992), and George Crumb’s American
Songbook VII: Voices from the Heartland (2010), I address how recent musical depictions of the
natural landscape of the United States represent a shared position within humanity’s changing conception of the natural world. Through these three case studies, I suggest how this music is the product of dramatic shifts in American understandings of nature, spirituality and nationality over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Locating these three works within a
growing discourse of the Anthropocene, I demonstrate how they represent the musical
crystallizations of a highly variable, yet strongly felt, environmental crisis, during a time when national(ist) perspectives on that crisis are in a state of particularly violent flux.
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1 Excerpt from T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” (from his series of poems Four Quartets), in which the imagery is inspired largely by the water and scenery at Cape Ann, Massachusetts (see T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 [c1943]), 36).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ... iv
INTRODUCTION: 0.1 Many Natures... 1
0.2 Scope and Methodology... 3
0.3 Chapter Overview... 6
CHAPTER ONE: CONTEXT 1.1 Defining Landscape... 8
1.2 American Landscape Ideology... 11
1.3 Positioning American Landscape Spiritually... 18
CHAPTER TWO: OLIVIER MESSIAEN AND DES CANYONS AUX ÉTOILES… .... 24
CHAPTER THREE: JOHN LUTHER ADAMS AND DREAM IN WHITE ON WHITE... 44
CHAPTER FOUR: GEORGE CRUMB AND VOICES FROM THE HEARTLAND... 60
CHAPTER FIVE: MUSIC(OLOGY) IN THE ANTHROPOCENE... 85
CONCLUSION: MUSIC AND/AS PLACE... 91
BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 96 !
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1 Messiaen at Cedar Breaks, Utah, May 1972... 28
Figure 2.2 The 12 movements of Des canyons aux étoiles…... 30
Figure 2.3 Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah... 32
Figure 2.4 Formal overview of Cedar Breaks et le Don de Crainte... 32
Figure 2.5 Andrew Shenton’s analysis of Messiaen’s langage communicable... 36
Figure 2.6 Cedar Breaks bassoon line, mm. 20-32, mm. 67-78, mm. 131-148... 37
Figure 3.1 Formal overview of Dream In White On White... 48
Figure 3.2 Dream In White On White, mm. 18-19... 52
Figure 3.3 Dream In White On White, mm. 53-58... 53
Figure 4.1 Overview of the American Songbook series... 65
Figure 4.2 Detail of Figure 4.1 for Voices from the Heartland... 69
Figure 4.3 “The Kanawha River at Dusk,” mm. 1-9... 72
Figure 4.4 The first four vocal lines of Sweney and Stites’ “Beulah Land,” mm. 1-12... 79
Figure 4.5 The first four vocal lines of Crumb’s “Beulah Land,” mm. 1-7... 80
INTRODUCTION 0.1 Many Natures
In his 1854 novel Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes that “we can never have enough of nature.”2 Indeed, across much of human culture—the classical music tradition included—the natural world has proved a seemingly limitless source of inspiration. To say that nature, in one guise or another, has always served as a ubiquitous theme in the arts would be an
understatement. And yet, ‘nature’—the idea of a distinction between human life and the non-human world—is itself a non-human invention,3 and one that has been far from consistent across people groups and periods of time. In spite of its apparent ubiquity, defining what we mean when we talk about ‘nature’ is a near-impossible task.
In light of this, Alexander Wilson suggests that it is perhaps better to think not of ‘nature’ but of there being “many natures”4—multiple, overlapping conceptions of environment that are both reflective of, and prescriptive for, the sociocultural situations of the people who create them. For Wilson, recognizing the complex ways in which nature and culture feed and inhabit one another—and to an extent, are one and the same thing—opens up possibilities for
uncovering new layers of meaning. Though admitting the socially-contingent origin of the ‘natures’ around us means relinquishing a heavily-embedded way of thinking, it also allows the opportunity to come to a more nuanced, honest understanding of human conceptions of place.
2 Henry David Thoreau, Walden: or, Life in the Woods (New York: Cosimo Inc., 2009 [c1854]), 205.
3 William Cronon (1995), in Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the
American Environmental Movement (Washington: Island Press, 2005), 43-44.
4 Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the
The United States at the turn of the twenty-first century represents one such place, where cultural manifestations of nature signify a social situation of increasingly urgent concern.
Writing about North America at the end of the twentieth century, Wilson suggests that “today nature is filmed, pictured, written, and talked about everywhere… [and] those images and discussions are increasingly phrased in terms of crisis and catastrophe. But the current crisis is not only out there in the environment; it is also a crisis of culture.”5 This feeling of
environmental crisis felt in turn-of-the-century America points to rapidly-shifting understandings of place, which themselves are inevitably intertwined with other powerfully-embedded markers of cultural identity—among them, nationality, community, and faith. And, just as these shifting worldviews are filmed, pictured, written, and talked about, they are also composed, performed, and heard, in ways that reflect musically this state of decisive—even violent—flux.6
This thesis will investigate intersections of spirituality and ecology in contemporary classical music inspired by the natural landscapes of America. Using Olivier Messiaen’s Des
canyons aux étoiles… (1974), John Luther Adams’ Dream In White On White (1992), and
George Crumb’s American Songbook VII: Voices from the Heartland (2010), I will address how recent musical depictions of U.S. landscape are products of a unique historical era in humanity’s changing conception of the natural world. In these three case studies, I will suggest how this music constructs and comments on dramatic shifts in understandings of nature, spirituality, and
5 Ibid. This sentiment is later echoed, with ecomusicological implications, in Aaron S. Allen, “Prospects and Problems for Ecomusicology in Confronting a Crisis of Culture,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 64.2 (2011): 414-419.
6 My use of the terms ‘America’ and ‘American’ throughout this paper is meant to describe a culture situated specifically in the United States of America, but whose influence is present throughout North America (and around the world). I hope to convey with these terms a sense of both national and international identity, in which ‘America’ stands in as a synechdoche for ‘United States of America’, as well as for the U.S. influence on both musical culture and more broadly-defined social behaviours at an international level.
nationality in contemporary North American culture.7 Locating these three works within a growing discourse of the Anthropocene, I will demonstrate how they represent the musical crystallizations of a highly variable, yet strongly felt, environmental crisis, during a time when national(ist) perspectives on that crisis are being constructed with an increasing sense of urgency.
In this research, I hope ultimately to respond to a twofold question: first, how might these compositions, as representative of a range of contemporary classical music, deal specifically with representations of physical-spiritual American landscapes; and second, what might these
approaches suggest about larger trends in thinking about landscape and environment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Relying on these three case studies as a varied sample of contemporary ‘American landscape’ music, I use a close-reading of excerpts from these three works as a springboard for a discussion of what spirituality and nature might mean in America on a broader scale. In doing so, I hope to reveal not only how these compositions are products of their time, but also how they might be seen as both reflective and creative of a paradigmatic shift in the cultural consciousness of the United States—the consequences of which may still be felt, musically and otherwise, for years to come.
0.2 Scope and Methodology
At the broadest level, I hope to situate this study within the growing discipline of ecomusicology. Following Aaron S. Allen’s definition of the field as “[a study of] the relationships of music, culture, and nature; i.e…the study of musical and sonic issues, both
7 In the context of this paper, by “contemporary North American culture” I intend to refer to those signifiers of American/North American society most prevalent in (inter)national media and on the world stage—a culture which, though indicative of potentially nationwide modes of thinking, is nonetheless unavoidably rooted in the beliefs and lifestyles of a mostly-white, mostly-non-Indigenous, mostly-urban population, and as such is by no means exhaustive.
textual and performative, as they relate to ecology and the environment,”8 I believe that the issues central to ecomusicology figure strongly in this research, and form a central influence in this study. On these grounds, I draw on several of the ideas articulated in the Ecomusicology Colloquy of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (Summer 2011)—in which Allen’s definition as well as related articles are published—throughout this thesis.
I selected the repertoire for the three case studies based on their unique engagement with issues of landscape on both spiritual and physical levels. My primary criteria for selecting these works were their existence within the ‘contemporary classical’ canon of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the presence of a unique approach to American natural
landscape. Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles… was selected for its both geological and Christian interpretation of canyons in Utah, and represents a (relatively) earlier perspective on American landscape by a non-American composer. John Luther Adams’ Dream In White On
White was selected on the basis of his longstanding engagement—as both environmentalist and
composer—with the Arctic as place, as well as his many writings on the spiritual nature of the landscapes of the north. Finally, George Crumb’s Voices from the Heartland was selected as a recent, and perhaps less explicitly-discussed, example of ecology and spirituality in music, in the context of nostalgia, song, and myth in Appalachia.
Keeping in mind the breadth of potential music/nature relationships within contemporary music, I strive to use a close-reading style that I feel best represents not only the issues
discussed, but also the unique ‘internal ecology of elements’ within each composer’s work. In the Messiaen example, my analysis focuses mainly on an interpretation of compositional
8 Aaron S. Allen, “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology,” Journal of the American
technique in Movement 5, Cedar Breaks et le Don de Crainte, which contains a reasonable sample of his style throughout the piece as a whole. Dream In White On White—which is both shorter and more minimalistic in approach—is considered in its entirety, with an emphasis on its surface harmonic and timbral qualities (rather than large-scale harmonic structure) that I believe is well-suited to music composed in this style. Of Crumb’s Voices from the Heartland, I analyze two songs in detail—“The Kanawha River at Dusk” and “Beulah Land”—the former of which is atypical of Crumb’s style throughout the song cycle but which I believe suggests a particularly relevant relationship between music and place, and the latter of which constitutes a more conventional, but nonetheless significant, text setting.
In light of the scope of this study, several important contributions and themes within ecomusicological research are not pursued in detail. With the focus of this research on concert-hall music within the contemporary classical canon, soundscape composition and acoustic
ecology—though certainly relevant—do not form a significant part of this paper. In avoiding this field of research, I hope to differentiate the genre of soundscape composition from my own focus on representations of sound- and landscapes within music written for the concert stage. For more information on soundscape composition and acoustic ecology, the writings of R. Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerkamp serve as useful guides.9 Finally, though issues of race and gender inevitably figure into my analysis and methodology, an in-depth discussion of these issues remains unexplored, for the purpose of narrowing the scope of my close-reading. For further reading, Denise von Glahn’s work on gender and nature within American music is of particular
9 Please see R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the
World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993 [c1977]), and Hildegard Westerkamp, “Linking
relevance here.10 Though such issues are omnipresent—and particularly relevant in the context of the history of the United States—and I attempt to address them wherever appropriate, the scope of this study prevents them from receiving the attention they are due, and for that reason additional reading is recommended.
0.3 Chapter Overview
This study examines contemporary musical approaches to American landscape in five main chapters. Chapter 1 provides a historical context for musical representations of American landscape in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell and Daniel Grimley, I define the social and cultural implications of the term ‘landscape’ and suggest an approach to landscape with a musicological focus. I then provide a brief history of landscape in the United States, in two parts. The first part comprises a chronological account of American landscape ideology from white settlement to present day, while the second looks at landscape within the context of the history of religion in America.
Chapter 2, the first of three case studies, comprises an analysis of Messiaen’s Des
canyons aux étoiles…. Beginning with a brief introduction to Messiaen’s compositional style, I
look first at the work as a whole and then more specifically at its fifth movement, Cedar Breaks
et le Don de Crainte. Following the work of Sander van Maas and Andrew Shenton, I examine
how Messiaen encodes Christian and nature symbolism into his musical description of Utah, and search for an engagement with concepts of landscape and preservationism within his music.
10 Please see Denise von Glahn, “American Women and the Nature of Identity,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 64.2 (2011): 399-403, and Denise von Glahn, Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World (Bloomington: Indiana
Chapter 3, my second case study, analyzes John Luther Adams’ Dream In White On
White. Situating this piece within Adams’ work as an activist and composer in the Arctic, I
investigate how issues of environmental presence and absence figure into Adams’ representation of a ‘white’ Arctic landscape. Relying on Adams’ own writings as well as the essays in Bernd Herzogenrath’s (ed) 2012 collection The Farthest Place, I construct a reading of Dream In White
On White that addresses its response to the contemporary discourse on environmental crisis.
Chapter 4, the third and final case study, addresses the seventh volume of George
Crumb’s American Songbook series, Voices from the Heartland. Following the work of Victoria Adamenko and Robert Cook, I analyze elements of myth, nostalgia and ecology in Songs 4, “The Kanawha River at Dusk,” and 7, “Beulah Land,” and suggest how Crumb’s song cycle
contributes a unique perspective on nature in America.
Finally, in the closing chapter and conclusion, I build on current literature about composing and listening to classical music during times of environmental crisis. Locating the three case studies as products of the Anthropocene, I address the position of contemporary music(ology) within the emerging ecological concerns of the early twenty-first century. Ultimately, by suggesting how Messiaen, Adams, and Crumb’s compositions are all coded in various ways as ‘ecological,’ I respond to the question of how their otherwise-idiosyncratic approaches might be indicative of larger cultural trends, as well as what listening to nature, in a musical sense, might mean in today’s world.
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CHAPTER ONE: CONTEXT 1.1 Defining Landscape
Just as Alexander Wilson writes that there are “many natures,”11 there are also many different understandings of landscape, each of them with highly complex—and often highly-charged—cultural histories. In attempting to determine how composers as distinct as Olivier Messiaen, John Luther Adams and George Crumb each encode suggestions of an American landscape into their music, it is first necessary to recognize the cultural implications of landscape as a concept—a concept which, like that of ‘nature,’ has the tricky capacity for implying many different things at once.
At first thought, landscape might be loosely defined as the visible features of a specific area, with the added implications that those features are typically ‘natural’ (rather than man-made), and that they are appraised in terms of their aesthetic qualities. More so than ‘nature,’ ‘landscape’ implies a specific human interaction; for land to become a landscape, there must be someone looking at it. While ‘nature’ suggests a more vaguely-invented relationship between humans and the non-human, the term ‘landscape’ suggests a relationship encoded in the politics of seeing and surveying—a relationship, therefore, that is automatically artistic and
automatically political. At the same time, however, the assumed ‘naturalness’ of landscapes— that they somehow constitute nature-utopias, untainted by the human narratives of ownership and power that exist in the ‘real world’—clouds over these politics in potentially dangerous ways.
In his 1994 text Landscape and Power, W. J. T. Mitchell presents a critique of landscape painting from an ideological, political perspective. In this text, he not only exposes the
Eurocentric, imperialist implications of landscape painting as a genre, but also extends his critique to the idea of landscape as a whole. According to Mitchell, popular understandings of landscape in art “elide the distinction between viewing and painting, perception and
representation,”12 such that it becomes easy to forget that the mere perception of a landscape, before it is ever put into music, painting or words, is already a cultural artifice—and one that privileges certain peoples while disenfranchising others. In his text, Mitchell makes clear that before landscape is the subject matter of an art form, it is first “a physical and multisensory medium (earth, stone, vegetation, water, sky, sound and silence, light and darkness, etc.) in which cultural meanings and values are encoded, whether they are put there by the physical transformation of a place by landscape gardening and architecture, or found in a place formed, as we say, ‘by nature.’”13 There is always a power dynamic embedded in the actual perceiving of landscape by the viewer who controls what and how they see, and who, in that sense, ‘owns’ their view. In this way—much like attempts to define the idea of ‘nature’—landscapes in their broadest sense tell us only very unreliably about the ‘land itself,’ but say a great deal about the human viewer’s own viewing position.
The question, then, is how to understand the representation of landscape—where
representation is necessarily preceded by and elided with perception—in the context of musical composition, where representing a subject matter and actively creating it are similarly easy to confuse. Following the work of W. J. T. Mitchell and others, musicologist Daniel Grimley proposes an alternative etymology of ‘landscape’ that perhaps better highlights its application in
12 W. J. T. Mitchell (ed), Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8. 13 Ibid, 14.
music.14 Grimley connects Mitchell’s breakdown of landscape ideology with Kenneth Olwig’s definition of a Scandinavian ‘landskab,’ related to the Danish verb ‘skabe’ meaning “to work or create.”15 Grimley argues that understanding ‘landscape’ in combination with ‘landskab’ might better encompass the performative nature of music, especially where that music deals directly with the concept of place:
Landskab refers to ground that is cultivated, shaped, furrowed, or grooved (like the surface of a gramophone record). ‘Field’ here is understood not as a ‘field of vision’ but a zone of activity, shaped and encoded through practices of
occupation—it is more properly a phenomenological category...and a space of legal or political dominion. Music emerges as fundamentally performative—it refers to that which ‘takes place.’16
Here, Grimley emphasizes the creative nature of landscape ideology, in a way that brings the relationship between landscape and the arts full circle. Following Mitchell, Grimley
emphasizes a definition of landscape that is first about perceiving, but where perceiving itself is fundamentally a creative, performative task. While the music written about a particular place may not physically cultivate that land, it does, quite literally, cultivate that landscape and in turn our cultural attitudes towards the land itself—which makes the conversation about musicalizations of place a potentially valuable discussion to have.
In the context of this thesis, I hope to understand landscape not only as the natural features of the United States but also as an ideological, phenomenological, and indeed, performative, process. While ‘land’ seems somehow more concrete—it can be bought, sold,
14 Daniel M. Grimley, “Music, Landscape, Attunement: Listening to Sibelius’s Tapiola,” Journal
of the American Musicological Society 64.2 (2011): 395. Daniel Grimley is also notable here for
his work as Principal Investigator for the interdisciplinary research network Hearing Landscape Critically, whose meetings took place over four years between 2012 and 2016. More information on this project can be found online at https://hearinglandscapecritically.net/.
15 Kenneth Olwig (2008), in Grimley, “Music, Landscape, Attunement,” 395. 16 Ibid.
and legally and visually defined—‘landscape,’ in the way that Mitchell and Grimley define it, represents all of those vaguer, larger issues of cultural and political identity that are difficult to put clearly into words. When describing how Messiaen, Adams and Crumb represent the American landscape, I hope to refer to the ways in which the music itself, as well as its subject matter, are both inevitably implicated in this complicated cultural-political tangle.
Understanding why the concept of landscape can present difficult ideological and musical issues is the first step towards pinpointing how this music might speak to the specificities of turn-of-the-century American culture—and how that culture’s phenomenological approach towards the natural world might matter to us in substantial ways.
1.2 American Landscape Ideology: From Westward Settlement to Global Crisis
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One would be hard-pressed to find a nation that did not associate its national identity to some extent with the features of the land upon which it was built. The United States’ relationship within the land (and landscapes) of the North American continent, however, has undergone periods of particularly turbulent change. In the short history of America as a country (short, of course, only from a white settler/non-Indigenous perspective17), its people have interacted with the land in hugely fluctuating ways, all of which contribute to the eventual environmentalist “crisis of culture” that Alexander Wilson locates at the turn of the twenty-first century.18
17 I use these terms throughout this chapter to denote, rather than the specific groups of
Europeans living on settlements during the colonization of the Americas, a more broadly-defined history and culture of non-Indigenous Americanness, which itself is typified by structures which privilege and emphasize racial whiteness. In this sense, I use ‘settler’ here as a means of referring to the fundamental non-Indigenousness of the peoples typically referred to as ‘American.’
From the time of the earliest European settlers in the United States to well into the Romantic era (broadly speaking, from the early seventeenth century to 1880), the American landscape, and its perceived ‘wildness,’ was central to the formation of a national white settler-identity.19 Largely due to the fiction that the North American wilderness was left essentially untouched and undeveloped by its Indigenous peoples—what geographer William Denevan calls “the Pristine Myth”20—early white inhabitants in America saw it as land in its uncultivated, natural state, and as a New World that could provide safety and refuge from Old World corruption.21 To this end, in a departure from the emphasis on husbandry in earlier European representations of landscape, many settlers in America “inverted the traditional pattern, praising the uncivilized, primeval quality of untamed nature and stressing its regenerative effect upon civilization.”22 One study by Barbara Novak, which refers to the mid-nineteenth century as a formative moment for American landscape painting, describes how the painting of wilderness during this time created “a moral and social energy,” and served as a projection of the
uniqueness of the American people.23 In the same vein, understanding the North American ‘wilderness’ was crucial for white invader-turned-settlers’ own sense of national belonging in a land already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. Thomas Dunlap points to the late nineteenth century as a decisive shift in representations of nature and landscape in America, where settlers, after a period of extensive westward expansion, “began to examine more consciously what effect
19 Please see footnote 17.!
20 Please see William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82.3 (1992): 369-385.
21 Eric Kaufmann, “‘Naturalizing the Nation’: The Rise of Naturalistic Nationalism in the United States and Canada,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.4 (1998): 669-670.
22 Ibid, 668.
23 Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [c1980]), 6.
the land had on them, to incorporate the land into their culture, even to call themselves ‘natives’ and find other names for the people they had dispossessed.”24 In this colonial history of the United States, nature ideology quickly became a key tool for settlers to not only differentiate themselves from the difficulties of the Old World, but also to prove their rightful ownership over the Indigenous land they invaded—a phenomenological tool for re-identifying their stolen lands as a proper, unifying ‘homeland.’
These dual aims are branded by Eric Kaufmann as the twin processes of “nationalizing nature” and “naturalizing the nation.”25 For Kaufmann, American identity balanced upon two sets of iconography: first, the images of the settler’s cabin, the Yeoman, and America as the land of plenty, which sought to depict a settled, nationalized wilderness; and second, that of the “leather-clad, nature dwelling hunter of the ‘wild’ western frontier,” who represented the wild regions of the country as a source of energy, purity and potential.26 Kaufmann argues that together, these two sets of images solidified white settlers’ layered relationship with the
American landscape, as something that on the one hand could be owned, and on the other hand, could be discovered.
The Romantic tendencies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (roughly 1880 to 1900) served to both draw American settlers towards the notion of a truly American wilderness and distance them from it. Writing about the United States from 1880 to 1920, Thomas Dunlap suggests that “North American nature literature depicted a realm that was outside human society but one humans needed and hungered for. Nature was both a refuge and
24 Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United
States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 97.
25 Eric Kaufmann, “‘Naturalizing the Nation,’” 667-668. 26 Ibid, 669.!
the gateway to transcendence. Wilderness, vaguely thought of as areas of ‘untouched’ Romantic scenery, was its centre.”27 In a broader sense, during an era following the Industrial Revolution and urbanization of the United States, the romanticizing of the ‘pure’ American landscape gained new traction. Perhaps most emblematic of this trend is what Lawrence Buell calls “the single most iconic work of environmental literature in U.S. settler culture history”—the unofficial national anthem of the United States, “America the Beautiful,” whose lyrics were written in 1893 and begin with:28
O beautiful for spacious skies For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!29
That this song—which Buell also refers to as “the ne plus ultra of nature escape writing”30—has at its core a romanticized claim of ownership over the American landscape is clear. However, as Buell adds in his analysis of later verses, which describe utopian American cities “undimmed by human tears,”31 the song’s conception of landscape is twofold, pointing not only to a patriotic unity-through-nature but also to the potential of nature to redeem an increasingly ‘un-natural’ civilization. Written at the onset of an increasingly urban era, “America the Beautiful”
27 Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora, 106.
28 Incidentally, the lyrics themselves, written by Katharine Lee Bates, were purportedly written while Bates stood on Pike’s Peak, Colorado and admired the view. For more information, see Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the
U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2001), 9-10.
29 The original 1893 poem uses slightly different lyrics; those cited here are from the best-known version and can be traced to an amended version of the poem published by Bates in America the
Beautiful and Other Poems (New York: Crowell, 1911).
30 Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 10. 31 Ibid.
intentionally pits the majesty of the landscape against the suffering of the city. Like other nationalist conceptions of nature during its time, it establishes a Romantic, patriotic idea of a nature that can be relied upon, at a historical moment when human civilization failed to inspire.
The early twentieth century (from around 1900 until the Second World War) brought with it another shift in American conceptions of landscape and environment, in the guise of resource management. After the exploitation of natural resources during the rapid development of the nineteenth century, the scientific community during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt warned of dwindling water and timber supplies, leading to the first mandates for federal land management based on responsible usage.32 Also around this time was the establishment of the country’s first environmental organizations, including the 1892 founding of the Sierra Club by naturalist John Muir.33 These trends towards resource management point to a significant swing in the power dynamic between an (urbanized, white) American society and its nature, where for the first time the country’s people were not only tasked with the settling of the landscape but were also charged with its care. At the same time, this new culture of resource management serves as proof of the American populace’s growing alienation from their natural environment; as
Alexander Wilson suggests, it is only because nature is seen as separate from human society that we are able to discuss matters of its protection.34
Classical music from this time reflects both the increasingly urban life of Americans, as well as the trend towards the recognition of American natural monuments and resources. The prewar era saw the premieres of George Antheil’s film soundtrack Ballet Mécanique (1924) and
32 Douglas Strong, in Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing
Attitudes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990 [c1957]), xvi.
33 Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 56. 34 Wilson, The Culture of Nature, 25.
John Alden Carpenter’s ballet Skyscrapers (1923-1924), both of which revel in the sounds of big-city life. The music of Charles Ives, another prominent American composer at the time, serves as a similar reflection of place. Ives was perhaps best-known for his liberal use of hymn and folk song quotations in his music, which—while perhaps not as definitively ‘urban’ as the work of Antheil and Carpenter—evoke the human sounds and songs of American communities rather than soundscapes of the natural kind.35 At the same time, the first half of the twentieth century also spurred musicalizations of natural American monuments—a trend related to the spirit of preservationism and ‘back-to-nature’ mentality characteristic of this era. This was when Ferde Grofé wrote his Grand Canyon Suite (1931), and Aaron Copland his famous ballet-turned-orchestral-suite Appalachian Spring (1943-1944). And while in the case of the latter, Copland’s own intentions were not necessarily to describe natural and pastoral qualities of the Appalachian and Adirondacks mountains, it was certainly understood this way in its reception—and remains widely-recognized today for its ‘quintessential Americanness’ as a result.36
It was in the postwar era of the mid- to late-twentieth century (1950s to 1970s) that the contemporary American environmental movement began to materialize. Emerging from the 1950s, jump-started by the publication of Rachel Carson’s pivotal 1962 text Silent Spring, and culminating in the creation of several environment-based government policies in the 1970s (including the 1970 founding of the United States Environmental Protection Agency [EPA]), the American environmental movement revolved around issues of pollution and human health.37
35 J. Peter Burkholder et al., “Ives, Charles,” Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2013, accessed June 16, 2016,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2252 967.
36 Neil Lerner, “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood,” The Musical Quarterly 85.3 (2001): 477-515.!
Unlike the resource management mandates of the early twentieth century, the 1960s and 1970s shifted the focus of public policy from conservation to environment, reflecting what Douglas Strong calls a “change in values from an earlier utilitarian concern for the efficient management of physical resources to a concern for environmental quality as it affected humans and other living things.”38 Once again, American national culture was dosed with a sense of its own, very human vulnerability in the face of a potentially-dangerous natural world.
In the increasingly urban, technological United States of today, the environmentalist rhetoric of the mid-twentieth century develops a newly global emphasis. Contemporary environmentalism, according to Lawrence Buell, is largely dictated by the alienating effect of urban place—where in an era of “accelerated mobility and displacement,”39 the so-called “triumph of the techne” has been overcome by new realizations of how important for humans nature, in the guise of ‘environment,’ really is.40 These realizations are coupled with a global rhetoric that stresses both the interconnectedness of everything on Earth and the planet’s limited capacity for coping with human impact, wherein human wastes “do not disappear but enter cycles and eventually return to us.”41
It is roughly here, at this crisis point, that American culture currently stands. The last 50 years of American landscape music—Des canyons aux étoiles…, Dream In White On White, and
Voices from the Heartland included—provide hints of such a crisis, and of the period of cultural
questioning that comes along with it. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, after centuries of shifting national(ist) perspectives on landscape and environment, nature has come to represent
38 Ibid, xix.
39 Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 74-75. 40 Ibid, 56-57.
41 Willett Kempton et al., Environmental Values in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 40.
an increasingly acute vulnerability—both the planet’s and our own. As we link human causation to global environmental crises which are now (at least partially) beyond human control, the fictitious separation between human politics and the nature-utopia of the American landscape has continued to dissolve. In recognizing that landscape, environment, nature, and the Earth can be seen as vast and finite at the same time, contemporary Americans are faced with the alarming realization that, as Buell says, quoting Wallace Stegner, “we may love a place and still be dangerous to it.”42 How this national sense of place, and the dangers involved, manifest musically at this time is a subject for further discussion.
1.3 Positioning American Landscape Spiritually
As with many—if not all—American cultural traditions, landscape in the United States is inseparable from a discussion of spirituality, particularly spirituality as it manifests in organized religion. In their comparison between religion in America and Europe, Peter Berger et al. characterize America by the overarching theme of a “freedom to believe”—as opposed to the more secular “freedom from belief” seen in much of recent European history.43 As such, even though the history of religion in the United States is complex, highly varied, and certainly not exempt from conflict, the concept of freedom serves as a defining feature of American national identity—what T. Jeremy Gunn calls “a cornerstone…of the American founding history and its values, [and] a deeply felt and inspiring notion for most Americans.”44
42 Wallace Stegner, in Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 77.
43 Peter Berger et al., Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 28.
In light of such an emphasis on a “freedom to believe,” the pluralism of religion and the scope of the power structures concerning spirituality in the United States—even when limited to the history of landscape—is overwhelmingly vast and varied. Where landscape itself is
concerned, however, it is useful to discuss three important features of American spirituality: the predominantly Christian perspective during the nineteenth century, when American landscape painting as a genre first grew to prominence; the trend towards relative secularization in the United States over the course of the twentieth century; and the general position today of certain Indigenous spiritual worldviews, as well as American ‘nature religions,’ as perspectives
increasingly seen in (white, settler)45 America as alternatives to Christian views on nature. Seen through the lens of these three moments, contemporary ways of thinking about spirituality in American landscape—exemplified in the positions of composers like Messiaen, Adams and Crumb—can be traced as products of shifting approaches to religion, in a country where the idea of religion has significant national(ist) implications.
According to Barbara Novak, the American nineteenth century was a time when “nature couldn’t do without God, and God apparently couldn’t do without nature.”46 Building upon existing Christian descriptions of nature as a utopia free of sin, the nineteenth century was defined by what Novak calls a “Christianized naturalism,” where landscape-as-spiritual-inspiration served as a common thread tying together otherwise-opposed Christian
denominations.47 As a result, American nature was presented alternately as an array of Christian archetypes: a ‘Primordial Wilderness’ to be feared and tamed by settlers; a ‘Garden of the World,’ which spoke to Christian values of order and American agrarian goals; and an ‘Original
45 Please see footnote 17.!
46 Novak, Nature and Culture, 3.
Paradise,’ reminiscent of Adam’s innocence before the Fall.48 Within this culture of Christian nature symbolism, landscape painters—who during this time began to develop a uniquely ‘American’ style—served as key spiritual figures. Novak writes that “since artists were created by God and generously endowed by him with special gifts, [His/nature’s] powers of revelation and creation were extended to them too.”49 As such, the Christian position in the nineteenth century found symbolic meaning not only in landscapes but also in specific artistic depictions of those landscapes—a blurring of the lines between perception and creation that would affect American landscape ideology for centuries to come.
The mid-nineteenth century was also the heyday of American Transcendentalism. Led by such figures as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, the
Transcendentalist movement was devoted to exploring new religious and intellectual thought— particularly in terms of redefining a human relationship with nature.50 Borrowing from the European Romantics, the Transcendentalists believed that “regular contact with nature (by which was generally meant: living in or visiting rural and pastoral settings) was essential for regaining human innocence and originality that was corrupted by civilization.”51 Nature in America was adopted by the Transcendentalists as a means for stimulating improvement and self-awareness. In this line of thinking, the work of the Transcendentalists did not differ so
extensively from Christian ideologies of the time: while the former emphasized the act of being ‘in nature’ rather than nature’s symbolic significance, both equated “the pursuit of nature [with]
48 Ibid, 4.
49 Ibid, 8. I use both [His] and [nature’s] here to illustrate, as Novak does, the blurry distinction between the two during the nineteenth century, and the frequency with which God and nature were used together or interchangeably in the literature of this time.
50 Rebecca Kneale Gould, “Transcendentalism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature,
Volume 1, ed. Bron Taylor (London: Continuum, 2008), 1652-1653.
a pursuit of the self, or of knowledge of the divine,”52 and in doing so relied heavily on the American landscape’s capacity to provide spiritual and intellectual guidance.
The twentieth century, marked by an increasing pluralism and urbanization of American culture, gave rise to emerging themes of secularization. In fact, for Berger et al., secularization in America became “constructed…as a master narrative, intrinsically connected to the process of modernization.”53 Berger et al. go on to clarify that secularization does not necessarily refer to a reduction in the level of religiousness among religious people, nor that religion in the twentieth century became relegated to the private sphere; rather, secularization was embodied by an increasing presence of non-religious institutions, as well as increasing differentiation between types of religious practice.54 For both Christian and non-Christian institutions during this time, the idea of nature offered a foil to the modern city that simultaneously extended and reinforced existing frameworks for thinking about landscape. While secular and scientific exploration brought Americans into close empirical contact with the natural world, the urbanization process built new barriers between humans and the environment, wherein nature was often still viewed as a phenomenon ‘out there’ in the American wilderness.
In the mid-to-late twentieth century—roughly aligned with the birth of the American environmental movement (1950s to 1970s)—mainstream American culture began to turn away from the Abrahamic religions, and towards alternative models for nature worship. Bron Taylor writes of 1960s America as a time “characterized by growing receptivity to the religious beliefs and practices of Indigenous and Asian peoples.”55 For Taylor, this growing focus on
52 Ibid, 1654.!
53 Berger et al., Religious America, Secular Europe?, 31. 54 Ibid, 32-33.
55 Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 11.
Western spirituality stemmed from an increasingly pluralistic society, within which Christian models for interacting with nature were posited as not only anthropocentric but also as environmentally harmful.
Within this incorporation of non-Western spirituality into the white,
newly-environmentalist American mainstream, two related processes emerge as particularly relevant to a discussion of religion and nature. The first is the incorporation of Indigenous spiritual views into environmentalist stances, originating largely from the belief that paganism and animism within Indigenous communities allow them to live ‘in harmony with nature.’ On one hand, such a focus asserts an Indigenous cultural presence that had previously been erased from American historical narratives. On the other, the adoption of Indigenous animism into the American
mainstream constitutes an appropriation and deformation of Indigenous philosophies,56 and often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the patronizing primitivism in early twentieth-century European art.57 The second process is the formation in the 1960s of modern ‘nature religions’— what Bron Taylor calls “green religion” and “dark green religion.”58 Though the former argues that environmentally-friendly behaviour is a religious obligation while the latter relies on a definition of nature as intrinsically sacred, what both religions have in common is a reverence towards nature rooted in modern opposition to environmental destruction, and in the idea of environmentalism as a viable form of worship. In both these new nature religions and the
appropriation of ecological perspectives from Indigenous and non-Western cultures, mainstream
56 Bron Taylor, “Earthen Spirituality or Cultural Genocide?: Radical Environmentalism’s Appropriation of Native American Spirituality,” Religion 27.2 (1997): 183.
57 Roger Cardinal, “Primitivism,” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2013, accessed June 23, 2016,
http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/subscriber/article/grove/art/T069588.! 58 Taylor, Dark Green Religion, 10.
environmentalism serves as a springboard for significant spiritual changes, which themselves function in ways that both challenge and reinforce existing social hierarchies.
While, as author Arnold Krupat attests, there is “no such thing as American culture or history as a totality,”59 it is still possible—in broad, incomplete terms—to unpack what the idea of nature (and the related of idea of landscape) might mean in a spiritual sense during the time of such composers as Messiaen, Adams and Crumb. One can trace in the last two centuries the United States’ shift from a predominantly Christian country to a modernized, somewhat secularized and pluralistic society. At the same time, the prominence of early
European-American ideals, and the hierarchies they imposed, have persisted. Today, the nature/spirituality relationship has become stretched in two opposite directions at once. Modernization and the dissolution of traditional Christian nature relationships have distanced many Americans from a personal understanding of what nature broadly, and what landscape specifically, might mean for them. Conversely, those same processes have led to alternative routes for finding sacredness in nature, as well as secularization processes that suggest how, in a world where many choose not to believe in an afterlife, this Earth is potentially all we have. When examining the music of this time—particularly the contemporary classical music similarly tied up in a Eurocentric Christian tradition—understanding the complex religious history of the American landscape, and of what that landscape has meant to its people on a spiritual level, is a potentially useful starting place, and a consideration of no small import.
! !
59 Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 4.!
CHAPTER TWO: OLIVIER MESSIAEN AND DES CANYONS AUX ÉTOILES…
!
Few composers are as recognized for their use of natural and religious symbolism as Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). Born in Avignon, France, Messiaen quickly became known for his unique compositional style, based around his own individual organization of modes and rhythms, and has since risen to prominence as an influential compositional voice of the twentieth-century musical canon.60 And as both a devout Catholic and avid ornithologist,
Messiaen’s religious mandate as a composer, and his reliance on tropes of nature and birdsong to realize that mandate, have become distinguishing features of his work.
The religious content of Messiaen’s music is often explicit. Almost exclusively writing music with Christian subject matter, Messiaen kept the musical rendering of Catholic stories, and the expression of faith more generally, at the heart of his compositions. The titles alone of some of his best-known pieces—Quartet for the End of Time (1940-41), The Transfiguration of Our
Lord Jesus Christ (1965-69), Saint Francis of Assisi (1975-83)61—reflect the impact of Messiaen’s Catholic faith on his music. Both when speaking more vaguely about his music-making process and specifically about the organization of his highly individualized
compositional techniques and methods—his use of what he deemed “modes of limited
transposition” and “non-retrogradable rhythms,” for instance62—Messiaen himself was quick to admit his ultimately theological intentions:
60 Paul Griffiths, “Messiaen, Olivier,” Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2011, accessed May 30, 2016,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/subscriber/article/grove/music/18497. 61 These are English translations of the original titles, which in the original French are as follows:
Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940-41), La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ
(1965-69), Saint-François d’Assise (1975-83).
62 For more detail, please see Olivier Messiaen, The Technique of My Musical Language (John Satterfield, trans.) (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1956 [c1944]).!
The first idea I wanted to express, the most important, is the existence of the truths of the Catholic faith…I was born a believer, and the Scriptures impressed me even as a child. The illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest, and no doubt the most useful and most valuable—perhaps the only one I won’t regret at the hour of my death.63
!
Messiaen’s fascination with the natural world is symptomatic of this highly spiritual worldview. While viewing nature as an antidote to twentieth-century urban life was hardly uncommon during his time, Messiaen’s fierce Catholicism permeated his perspective on nature and gave it a foothold in his work. Understanding the beauty of the natural world as direct examples of “the work of God,”64 Messiaen’s frequent quotations of natural soundscapes in his music served as a means for him to engage with spirituality on Earth in a uniquely potent way.
For Messiaen, birds constituted the clearest embodiment of this spirituality. The
composer doggedly transcribed and catalogued birdsong throughout his adult life, writing entire pieces devoted to instrumental renditions of bird vocalizations and otherwise inserting bird quotations into much of his work.65 He thought of birds as symbols of freedom and oneness with God, equating their song and flight to the spirits of angels or resurrected souls.66 In her analysis of Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise, Siglind Bruhn even situates birds as Messiaen’s “superlative musicians,” through which “music is revealed as the medium that ideally weds the celestial to the terrestrial dimension.”67 In other words, for Messiaen birds are representative not
63 Olivier Messiaen, Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel (E. Thomas Glasow, trans.) (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1994), 20-21.
64 Ibid, 46-47.
65 For examples, see Griffiths, “Messiaen, Olivier,” and Rob Schultz, “Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen,” Music Theory Spectrum 30.1 (2008): 89-137.
66 Griffiths, “Messiaen, Olivier.”
67 Siglind Bruhn, Messiaen’s Interpretations of Holiness and Trinity: Echoes of Medieval
Theology in the Oratorio, Organ Meditations, and Opera (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press,
only of nature, but also of what nature sounds mean on a theological level—they are what Ryan Taussig calls “not simply a part of the natural world, but…central musical figure[s] in that world—they are God’s musicians.”68 In this way, nature for Messiaen serves not only as a spiritual inspiration but also as a musical conduit—connecting, in Christian terms, the earthly work of man with the divine Creation of God.
In his work on the religious impetus of Messiaen’s musical worldview, Sander van Maas unveils a distinct, and ultimately twofold, reasoning behind Messiaen’s compositions. In one sense, Messiaen was spurred by a drive to musically document the wonders of Creation and narrative pillars of the Catholic faith. His cataloguing of birdsong and of tireless interpretation of Biblical themes are testament to such a drive. More than that, however, Messiaen’s music reveals his reverence for the experience of faith itself, and the determination to (re)create such an
experience for his listeners. The existence of this deeper emphasis on experience in Messiaen’s music is much-discussed in the literature. Indeed, untangling this emphasis constitutes a main focus of Sander van Maas’ book The Reinvention of Religious Music, wherein he argues that “the Christianness of [Messiaen’s] music is not about understanding musical-religious content, let alone about the event or sense of religion, but instead about the structure of musical-religious experience as such.”69 It is in the context of such a compositional mandate—wherein the explicit content of the music serves as the springboard for the performance and (re)creation of genuinely-spiritual experiences—that Messiaen’s own individual views begin to resonate in larger,
culturally-significant ways.
68 Ryan James Taussig, “Sonic Environmentalism: God, Nature and Politics in Olivier Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles…” (M.A. Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2014), 9. 69 Sander van Maas, The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough
In 1970 during a visit to New York, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully to write a piece for large chamber orchestra, in honour of the American Bicentennial. With
purportedly little love for American culture or the large cities of the American east,70 Messiaen turned his gaze westward, looking through his collection of geography books Les Merveilles du
Monde for a suitably American subject:
This series has everything, the Sphinx of Egypt, extraordinary things, and I said to myself, the grandest and the most beautiful marvels of the world must be the canyons of Utah. So, I’ll have to go to Utah…I called up my impresario, Mr. Breslin, and I said to him, ‘I want to go to Bryce Canyon’. ‘What’s that?’ he exclaimed, and I explained, ‘Bryce Canyon is the most beautiful thing in the United States.’71
True to this first impression, Messiaen planned his commission around the landscapes of the American west, and in 1972, he boarded a plane set for Salt Lake City, Utah.72
70 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2007), 494.
71 Olivier Messiaen, “Canyons, Colours and Birds: An Interview with Olivier Messiaen,” interview by Harriet Watts, Tempo 128 (1979): 3.
72 Richard Steinitz, “Des canyons aux étoiles…,” in The Messiaen Companion, ed. Peter Hill (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 460.!
Figure 2.1: Messiaen at Cedar Breaks, Utah, May 1972.73 !
! !
The result of Messiaen’s eight-day trip to the American west is Des canyons aux étoiles… (1971-1974), a monumental 12-movement work for solo piano, solo horn and chamber orchestra. Clocking in at approximately 90 minutes, it is a piece of considerable heft, heavy with references to the natural features of Utah. For Messiaen, the piece reinforced the commonality between his
73 Catherine Massip (ed), Portrait(s) d’Olivier Messiaen (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1996), 18-19.
love of landscape and what he saw as his spiritual duty; he sought to compose a work that rose “from the canyons to the stars and higher up to the resurrected souls in Heaven, so as to glorify God in all His Creation: the beauty of the earth (its rocks, its birdsong), the beauty of the
physical sky, the beauty of the heavenly one.”74 The piece was premiered on November 20, 1974 at the Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall by the Music Aeterna Orchestra, under the baton of Austrian-American conductor Frédéric Waldman.75
The twelve movements of Des canyons aux étoiles… are divided into three parts, containing five, two, and five movements, respectively. The work opens with a desert
soundscape for orchestra, featuring a horn theme, bird calls in the woodwinds, and percussion imitating the sounds of desert wind and sand. Movements 2, 4, 9, 10 and 11—of which the Movements 4 and 9 are for solo piano—are dedicated to transcriptions of birdsong, and function as interludes between the piece’s grander musical gestures. Movement 6, titled Interstellar Call, is written for horn alone. The remaining movements—3, 5, 7, 8 and 12—are monumental sections featuring the entire orchestra, with each inspired thematically by some aspect of Utah’s canyons and skies. In particular, Movement 5 (Cedar Breaks et le Don de Crainte) is inspired by Utah’s Cedar Breaks national monument, a natural amphitheatre carved from a red rock face; Movement 7 (Bryce Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange) is meant to evoke the colours and formations of Bryce Canyon; and the final movement, Movement 12 (Zion Park et la Cité
céleste), uses Utah’s Zion Park as a symbol for celestial Paradise and ascendance into Heaven
(see Figure 2.2).
!
74 Olivier Messiaen, Des canyons aux étoiles…. (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1978), 13. Translation: Ross, The Rest is Noise, 494.
Figure 2.2: The 12 movements of Des canyons aux étoiles…. !
Part Movement Notes on
Instrumentation Description
Part 1 I. Le désert Orchestral movement Musicalized ‘desert
soundscape’; prominent opening horn theme; wind sounds from the Eoliphone [sic]; bird calls in high
woodwinds and strings; thick orchestral textures
II. Les Orioles Orchestral movement Bird calls (Orioles); delicate orchestral textures
III. Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles…
Orchestral movement Use of ‘langage communicable’; bird calls; thick orchestral textures
IV. Le Cossyphe
d’Heuglin Piano solo Bird calls (White-Browed Robin)
V. Cedar Breaks et le Don de Crainte
Orchestral movement Use of ‘langage communicable’; bird calls; thick orchestral textures; form of Introduction-Strophe-Antistrophe
1-Antistrophe 2-Epode-Coda (see Figure 2.4)
Part 2 VI. Appel interstellaire Horn solo Form of Introduction
(horn effects/bird calls)-(songlike) Section 1-Interlude (effects/bird calls)-(songlike) Section 2-Coda (recapitulation of Introduction material in reverse order)
VII. Bryce Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange
Orchestral movement with piano cadenza
Form of Introduction-Strophe-Antistrophe 1-Antistrophe 2-Epode (piano cadenza)-Coda
Part 3 VIII. Les ressuscités et le chant de l’étoile Aldébaran
Orchestral movement Background of long phrases in the strings; bird calls
IX. Le Moqueur polyglotte
Piano solo Bird calls
(Mockingbird)
X. La Grive des bois Orchestral movement Bird calls (Wood Thrush)
XI. Omao, Leiothrix, Elepaio, Shama
Orchestral movement Bird calls from Hawaii; main theme in the horn
XII. Zion Park et la Cité céleste
Orchestral movement Chorale theme in the brass; carillon theme; bird calls
!
Translatable as “Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Awe,” Cedar Breaks et le Don de Crainte serves as a useful sample of techniques present not only across the twelve parts of Des
canyons,76 but throughout much of Messiaen’s oeuvre. Borrowing its structure from ancient Greek drama, Messiaen composed Cedar Breaks as a traditional poetic ode to the Utah
landscape—comprising an introduction, one strophe with two ‘antistrophes’ developed from the same melodic-harmonic material, and a concluding epode.77 Bookended by birdsong
transcriptions and musical simulations of desert winds, the strophe and antistrophe content is built from bird calls and an invented musical ‘code,’ wherein pitches and rhythms form cryptograms for religious texts.78 According to Messiaen, the movement evokes the “wild beauty” of the Cedar Breaks amphitheatre—a beauty that for him signified a “Divine Presence” and inspired in him a sense of revenant awe.79
76 In the rest of this chapter, Des canyons aux étoiles… and Cedar Breaks et le Don de Crainte are sometimes shortened to Des canyons and Cedar Breaks, respectively.
77 Robert Sherlaw Johnson, Messiaen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 [c1975]), 160-161, 183.
78 Ibid, 183-184.
Figure 2.3: Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah.80 !
!
!
Figure 2.4: Formal overview of Cedar Breaks et le Don de Crainte.
!
Section Sub-section (by
tempo marking)
Description Measures
Introduction Un peu vif Call-and-response
bird calls (Pic flèche rouge)
1-6
Un peu lent Rhythmic unisons; bird calls (Tetras obscur)
7-10
Modéré Eoliphone [sic] and
trumpet glissandi 11-12 Presque vif Driving sixteenth
notes
13-19
Strophe Modéré Langage
communicable
20-32 Un peu lent; très
modéré; lent; un peu vif; un peu lent
Isolated bird calls 33-38
80 Source: “Cedar Breaks National Monument,” Utah.com, accessed June 22, 2016, https://utah.com/cedar-breaks-national-monument.
Presque vif Eoliphone [sic], driving 32nd notes/tuplets
39-41
Un peu vif; modéré; très modéré; presque vif
Isolated bird calls 42-52
Bien modéré Robin calls 53-66
Antistrophe 1 Modéré Langage
communicable
67-78 Un peu lent; très
modéré; lent; un peu vif; un peu lent; un peu vif; un peu lent
Isolated bird calls 79-87
Presque vif Eoliphone [sic], driving 32nd notes/tuplets
88-93
Modéré; un peu lent; modéré; un peu vif; un peu lent;un peu vif
Isolated bird calls 94-114
Bien modéré Robin calls 115-130
Antistrophe 2 Modéré Langage
communicable
131-148 Un peu lent; très
modéré; presque vif; un peu vif; presque vif; presque vif; un peu vif; presque vif; presque vif
Isolated bird calls with some driving 32nd notes (similar to the previous antistrophe, but with more integrated sections)
149-165
Epode Un peu vif Bird calls over wind
sounds; trills in the strings
166-179
Coda (with sub-sections appearing in the reverse order of the introduction)
Modéré Eoliphone [sic] and
trumpet glissandi
180-181 Un peu lent Rhythmic unisons;
bird calls (Tetras obscur)
182-183
Presque vif Driving 16th notes; bird calls
184-191 (end)
!
Messiaen, if nothing else, was always quick to explain his compositional process. In his extensive programme notes for Des canyons, as well his separate writings on composition technique,81 Messiaen outlines both an aim to document nature sounds and a larger goal of using his faith as a symbolic guiding hand in his work. As such, works like Cedar Breaks contain evidence of two methodologies, which themselves go hand-in-hand. In a literal sense, the use of a wind machine instrument, or ‘Eoliphone’ [sic] (see m. 11 [p. 109]),82 and emphasis on
ornamental, birdcall-inspired gestures in the high woodwinds serve as transcriptions of the Utah soundscape. In this framework, it is also no coincidence that the woodwind passages suggestive of the American Robin (m. 53 [p. 119]) imply E major, a key Messiaen has often associated with the colour red and which finds a visual counterpart in both the chest of the robin and the red rocks of Utah’s canyons.83 Elsewhere, the movement’s liturgical structure, as well as themes throughout of upward growth (i.e. the rising orchestral unison chords beginning in m. 20 [p. 112]) and perfect symmetry (i.e. “non-retrogradable rhythms” like those featured in the temple blocks in m. 174 [p. 145]) reflect Messiaen’s religious aim to represent “a miraculously ordered universe.”84 These dual influences, which Ryan Taussig refers to as a combination of “shallow
81 Olivier Messiaen, The Technique of My Musical Language (John Satterfield, trans.) (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1956 [c1944]) is a notable example of Messiaen’s writings on this subject. 82 In this and other movements, Messiaen also uses his own invented instrument, the
‘Géophone’—a large drum filled with pellets that, when swirled, imitates the sound of shifting earth and sand. The instrument that Messiaen refers to as an ‘Eoliphone’ is more commonly spelled ‘Aeoliphone’, or simply referred to as a ‘wind machine’.
83 Messiaen’s own account of how the key of E-major corresponded for him with the colour red can be found in Sander van Maas, The Reinvention of Religious Music, 53. In Messiaen’s own programme notes for Des canyons aux étoiles…, he cites ‘mode three 4’ (his third mode in the fourth transposition) of his modes of limited transposition as corresponding with the colour “orange with red stripes” (Messiaen, Des canyons aux étoiles…, 16.). This mode is used alongside elements of E-major in movement 7 of the work, Bryce Canyon et les rochers
rouge-orange (“Bryce Canyon and the red-rouge-orange rocks”) as a reference to their corresponding colours.! 84 Siglind Bruhn, Messiaen’s Contemplations of Covenant and Incarnation: Musical Symbols of
