Olivier Messiaen’s music, and the whole lineage of “serious” composers he inspired, sucks. It is an emperor-has-no-clothes situation. It all sounds the same. A jumbled mess of aimless plonking and dissonant chords. Strip away the academic mystique, and what’s left? Music that sounds indistinguishable from the background noise of a 1950s B-horror film.You’re not moved by it; you don't enjoy it; you’re just told it’s important, so you pretend to engage with it out of fear of being called unsophisticated. And it’s not just Messiaen. Boulez, Xenakis, Stockhausen are all the same kind of garbage. This isn't music, it's just careerist sound art, written to impress theory professors and smug critics who pretend that alienating the audience is some kind of artistic virtue. If you played this stuff anonymously for anyone outside the bubble, they’d either laugh or walk out. And they’d be right.
>>130203551His birdsong music is one of the most laughable artistic scams ever passed off as genius. We’re told he transcribed birdsong and transformed it into high art. But if you've ever actually heard a bird and then heard one of these pieces, you know immediately: it’s nonsense. These aren't birds. Birdsong is delicate, melodic, subtle. Messiaen’s versions (as always) sound like a toddler smashing piano keys.But of course, the defenders always crawl out with the next line: “Well ackchually, it’s not meant to literally imitate birdsong. It’s about capturing the atmosphere of the places in France where he listened to the birds.” Ah yes because clearly, the French countryside feels exactly like a panicked score from a 1950s horror film. You walk through the Pyrénées and this is what it feels like?And when that excuse starts to collapse, they always retreat to the last defense: “It’s about color.” Of course. The final refuge of the pseud. When all else fails, when the music has no structure, no emotion, no recognizable content, just say "muh color".It doesn’t sound like birds. It doesn’t sound like nature. It barely even sounds like music.
Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps is an amazing work of music. I don't care what you think. Fuck you.
>>130203555And then there’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, the supposed summit of Messiaen’s “religious” vision. This is where the absurdity reaches its absolute peak. We are seriously expected to believe this man was creating sacred music, music about the birth of Christ, no less, while producing two hours of clattering sludge. Imagine, for a moment, God listening to the great Christian music of history. Gregorian chants. Victoria’s Tenebrae Responsories. Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Handel’s Messiah. Mozart’s Requiem. Bruckner’s masses. Centuries of composers striving toward transcendence, beauty, awe, music that actually reaches ordinary human beings and makes them feel something beyond themselves.And then, after all that, someone puts on Vingt Regards.What follows is not reverence, not ecstasy, not divine mystery, but endless spasms of dissonant piano banging. The “mysticism” people claim to hear in it exists entirely in the programme notes. Nobody listening blind would ever identify this as religious music. They’d think it was the soundtrack to an experimental film about psychiatric decline.That’s the core problem with Messiaen: everything meaningful about the music has to be explained to you externally. You are told the chords represent “divine love,” or that a rhythm symbolizes eternity, or that a certain harmonic cluster corresponds to the color orange-gold. But the actual sound itself communicates none of this. Bach doesn’t need an essay to explain why the St Matthew Passion is religious. You hear it instantly. The music itself carries the meaning. Messiaen’s music needs an academic interpreter standing beside it at all times like a museum guide desperately insisting the splattered paint really does represent the anguish of modernity.
>>130203671And the religious aspect somehow makes it even worse. Because there’s something almost perversely arrogant about claiming spiritual profundity while writing music so cold, ugly, and alienating that normal people recoil from it instinctively.I am sure that God sent Messiaen straight to hell for calling that shit religious art.>>130203650You don't like it, and you care. The only reason people listen to this vile garbage is because they care so much what others think
>>130203555>>130203671You can say "nuh uh" all you want (which is essentially all you're doing here), but Messiaen's compositions are like wondrous meditations, whereas the sacred music of Bach and other relatively conventional composers reflects a more deliberate attempt to describe the divine. It's like the difference between someone telling you that God is ineffable, and someone telling you what God is.Sure, Messiaen had ideas about what aspects of his compositions conveyed, but that doesn't negate the fact that the music is rooted in an experimental and, to some degree, improvisational approach. He had a compositional framework in which he operated, but that's not saying much because literally every musician has techniques and preconceptions about how music should be played/written.I honestly feel sorry for anyone who can't appreciate the beauty in Messiaen's work, especially if they're so immature that they'd think it's "degenerate art"
Interesting, a whole thread of butthurt monologues. Or is just pasta? Anyway, Messiaen is based and OP is a faggot. Cope and seethe.
>>130204082It sounds like shit anon. There's nothing interesting about it.
>>130208128It's pasta, i've seen it before. I know /mu/ is dead but OP could have the decency of making a sincere post instead of bait pasta.
>>130208135Nta but it most likely sounds better than whatever garbage you listen to. You're probably just not used to modal/experimental music. That's fine, but don't be uppity about it.
>>130203551yeah but minimalism saved classical music
>>130210519Minimalism fucking sucks and the fact that it exists only further proves how dead classical music is.
>>130210519Saved it from what?
>>130208686It sounds better than Wagner and Beethoven? That's a strong statement anon
>>130203551>just careerist sound art, written to impress theory professors and smug critics That is most classical right there
>>130211965You've never listened to classical musichttps://youtu.be/YjMwDbFng_g
>>130211990Case in point
>>130203551You lost the moment you gave them attention. By the fact you know names etc... you lost pretty hard. >the game
>>130212145Wagner is like the most emotion over wankery composer there is. You're hopeless
>>130203551I like the Turangalila Symphony
>>130211927Fair enough. The rest of my post still stands, though.
>>130211965Let's be honest, you're in no position to make that judgment, as you haven't heard 20 minutes of classical music altogether, let alone most of it.
>>130213890wrong kid, but nice try
You wanted music to have stopped at Wagner, is that it? Is that what we should gather from this thread? Schoenberg is a continuation and honour of the tradition of Wagner and german music as a whole btw.
>>130214442Schoenberg was a hack who wanted to push music forward but couldn't actually innovate. So he came up with a bunch of nonsense and pretended it was an evolution of classical music. Meanwhile Stravinsky was actually pushing the boundaries of classical music, because he was actually talented. Shostakovich was good as well. Their music was modernist, but not soulless.>inb4 Stravinsky later embraced serialism>inb4 Schoenberg was a good composer of Romantic music
