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Biography of Olivier Messiaen
Name: Olivier Messiaen
Birth Date: December 10, 1908
Death Date: April 27, 1992
Place of Birth: Avignon, France
Nationality: French
Gender: Male
Occupations: composer
Olivier Messiaen
The French composer and teacher Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), one of the most original composers and musical thinkers of his time, had a strong influence on many of the important composers of the following generation.Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon, France on December 10, 1908. His mother, Marie Sauvage, was a poet, and his father was a well-known translator of Shakespeare's plays into French. They encouraged their musically precocious son, who composed little pieces when he was only 7. The boy heard a performance of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande when he was 10, and it made such a strong impression that he decided to become a composer. He entered the Paris Conservatory the next year and remained there for 11 years, studying theory, organ, piano, improvisation, history, esthetics of music, and composition. He was a brilliant student in all of these fields, and each played a part in his later activities.…showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…et d'intensité (1950; Modes of Duration and Loudness), consists of arrangements of 36 pitches, 24 durations, 7 attacks, and 7 degrees of loudness. This piece was a landmark of "totally controlled" composition, an important musical idea of the postwar period.Messiaen composed another piece based on bird songs in 1972, titled La Fauvette des jardins (The Garden Warbler). In 1983 he saw his first opera, St. François d'Assise, produced at the Paris Opera. He died on April 27, 1992 in Paris. The New York Philharmonic later that year performed a posthumously published work, Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà (Illuminations of the Beyond). Further Reading Studies of Messiaen's life and work are in Arthur Cohn, Twentieth-century Music in Western Europe: The Compositions and the Recordings (1965), and David Ewen, The World of Twentieth-century Music (1968). For a discussion of Messiaen's place in French music see Paul Henry Lang and Nathan Broder, eds., Contemporary Music in Europe: A Comprehensive Survey (1966).
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