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Music for 18 musicians - Steve Reich
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mojojojo
mojojojo
1947 posts

Messiaen - La Nativite du Seigner
Oct 20, 2006, 09:20
Just had a look and this was on the library shelves. Description I found sounds good.

"According to Messiaen, La Nativité du Seigneur represented a musical coming-of-age for the young composer. The organ became for Messiaen became a self-contained orchestra, capable of endless variety and limitless expression, but also transcended the orchestra in terms of the possibilities of duration, resonance, and timbre. Timbre, in fact, is central to the work, and, as musicologist John Milsom points out, what appears on paper to be music dominated by melodic and harmonic concerns within a carefully constructed contrapuntal texture instead turns into "flashes of color and light...an astonishing display of fireworks" when performed. The work consists of nine "meditations," foreshadowing the symbolic nine-movement structure of the Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité of 1969. Musically La Nativité is significant, for it represents the first explicit use of Messiaen's famous chromatic modes, the "modes of limited transformation" to which the composer draws attention in the work's preface. As a whole, the work is a mixture of the beautiful and the bizarre: the density of timbre is at once breathtaking and overwhelming, and the sheer variety of registration makes for a piece that is not always easily accessible. It represents a step for Messiaen toward the later, decidedly esoteric and atmospheric pieces of the late 1940s and 1950s."

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