Olivier Messiaen (b. 1908, Avignon, France; d. 1992, Paris)

Messiaen was a noted French organist, composer, composition teacher (his best-known students include Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen), and author. His book The Technique of My Musical Language describes his unique approach to music and composing. His music is noted for its difficulty, repeated ostinatos or melodic fragments, and closely spaced chords that move in unique progressions.

At age eleven Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied for eleven years and won an array of prizes. He enlisted in the army in 1939 and became a prisoner of war in 1940. While in the prison camp he composed his monumental Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), which he performed for his fellow prisoners. Repatriated in 1942, Messiaen began to teach at the Paris Conservatory.

Messiaen’s compositional output is diverse. His one opera, St. François d’Assise (St. Francis of Assisi) is massive in scope; it requires an orchestra of 120 players and a chorus of 150 singers, in addition to the soloists.

Messiaen was a musical ornithologist, and his later works are noted for the use of bird calls as exclusive melodic material. He wrote that “somewhere in the woods, in the fields, in the mountains, by the sea, among the birds . . . is the home of music,” exhibiting a poetic attitude toward the music of nature. He is often called the father of twentieth-century European avant-garde music, in part because of his influence on his many students who became innovative composers.