Underrated Classical Musicians 3/7/20

It's been almost 90 years since Messiaen wrote L'Ascension. It's very difficult to call Messiaen underrated, but Messiaen is, in so many ways, the key to the whole thing - the dividing line between mainstream classical music on the one side and the avant-garde on the other. If you get the public to accept Messiaen, the doors of perception are opened, and there's practically nothing they can't understand. 

Messiaen is two years younger than Shostakovich, five years older thanBritten, and it never ceases to amaze that the age difference between them and avant-garde composers like Berio and Ligeti is hardly even twenty years. But they all experienced the same twentieth century zeitgeist, and consequently cannot help but share some of the same Weltanschauung. 

The truth is, French music had been waiting for a genius like Messiaen for centuries. As many great composers as there were in 19th century France (and there were dozens...), none of them were a genius on Messiaen's level - not even Debussy or Berlioz. Like Bartok, his music is an entire re-synthesis of the way we think of music, and we're still catching up to them both. 

It's not just that the entire postwar avant-garde wouldn't be possible without his modernist ideas on polyrhythms and harmony (many of which he taught them in his classroom at the Paris Conservatoire), or his post-modernist ideas of how to use musical influences from all around the world, all that's just the beginning of Messiaen. What makes Messiaen so rewarding is not just how he pushed the frontier forward, but how he reordered the horizons that already existed. Like Mahler before him, Messiaen both is and is not of the avant-garde. Even now, thirty years after his death and ninety years after he began his career, there are still modernist elements that strain the comprehension of every generation who's yet heard him, and I'm not going to pretend I completely understand them yet, but there are so many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of beautiful moments in his music that exist entirely within a traditional musical framework, and yet are done in a way no other composer has.

Messiaen may be a composer of the past, but he is the composer of our musical future. In this era when religion, both Christianity and Islam, are clearly on the rise again, when the internet turns music into a deluge of globalized influences, when so many birds whose songs Messiaen catalogued in his music stand on the verge of planetary extinction, Messiaen is, as much as any artist in the world, a source who can explain the 21st century to us. In fifty years, if there are still orchestras (and I sadly sometimes wonder...), Messiaen may be played as often as Mahler is now. There is just so much to learn from him, and we have only begun.