Spiritual-temporal imagery in music of Olivier Messiaen and Toru Takemitsu

Abstract

The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu has stated that he was so moved by Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time that he asked Messiaen for permission to use the same instrumentation in a piece of his own. The work which grew out of that encounter, Takemitsu's Quatrain II, displays traits which can be traced to Messiaen's music and the procedures Messiaen advocated in his treatise The Technique of My Musical Language.

This analysis explores philosophical and technical parallels in the music of Olivier Messiaen and Toru Takemitsu which bear on their treatment of musical time. Takemitsu's music, like that of Messiaen, is essentially metaphorical, and while the musical metaphors derive from very different cultural and spiritual traditions, they give rise to temporal and pitch structures which function similarly.

KEY WORDS:

• Toru Takemitsu
• Olivier Messiaen
• Odilon Redon
• Eihei Dōgen
• octatonicism
• silence