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CANYONS, COLOURS AND BIRDS:
On 5 August, 1978, nine milesfrom Parawan, Utah, the White Cliffs, also known as
Lion's Peak, were renamed in honour of the French composer Olivier Messiaen. Mount
pine; geological features spectacularly eroded promentaries of red and white sandstone-
is now a state monument commemorating Messiaen's visit to the canyons of Southern Utah.
This visit in 1973 inspired his latest symphonic work, From the Canyons to the Stars.
Utah. The project was undertaken by onefamily with frontier roots in Parawan and
family members scatteredfrom New York to Paris, Mexico City and the Antarctic, all
involved with Mount Messiaen. When the Edison Whitakerfamily heard of Messiaen's
canyon symphony and his description of Southern Utah as the most mystical landscape he had
ever encountered, they wrote to the composer asking if he would agree to Parawan's
naming something in his honour. Messiaen responded with delight that anything in his
name would be a great honour, even a side street or a nature pathfor bird watchers. Julie
Whitaker in New York handled negotiations with Messiaen's impresario and then flew to
Paris with the news that a mountain outside the town had been made available for renaming.
Ed and LeMar Whitaker convinced their neighbours in Parawan, none of whom had heard
of Olivier Messiaen before, to contribute time and money to a dedication ceremony and con-
cert. Lyman Whitaker returned home from a construction project in the Antarctic to cast a
bronze plaque and build a sandstone monument at thefoot of the mountain. Linda Whitaker-
Verdu in Mexico City arrangedfor a performance of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of
Time. After the clarinettist broke a finger two weeks before the dedications Lowell and
Naomi Farr, two well-known Messiaen interpreters in Salt Lake City, agreed at last
moment's notice to perform the cycle Songs from Heaven and Hell in Parawan. The
cert hall. The governor of the State officially proclaimed 5 August 'Olivier Messiaen and
the Beauty of Southern Utah Day'. Messiaen himself, not scheduled to arrive in America
When Messiaen began the tour celebrating his 7oth birthday, hisfirst stop was Boston.
I was able to give him a first hand account of his Parawan birthday party as well as
photographs and rocks from his mountain. In this interview, originally conducted for
Decade magazine, he discusses the role of the Utah canyons, colours and birds in his
@? 979 by Decade
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CANYONS, COLOURS AND BIRDS
3
symphony From the Canyons to the Stars. This symphony was the work chosen and
Io December, I978. Olivier Messiaen is eager to visit his mountain in Utah as soon as
possible. As he explains in the interview, 'I now have the obligation to present myself
Harriet Watts
H.W.: What madeyou choose southern Utah as the source of inspirationforyour last
symphony?
Miss Alice Tully from New York and Miss Tully wanted to commission a work
from me for the American Bicentennial. I had no time and I said that I would be
unable to accept her offer, but then she invited me to dinner. In the course of
the meal, she told me how much she loved animals and that she travelled to
India for the sole purpose of shaking the paw of a lion. Well, at first I laughed at
this story, but then afterwards I recalled the account of the 'Chevalier au Lion' of
Chretien de Troyes, a French romance of the Middle Ages, and after having laugh-
ed, I cried. I said to myself, that woman is amazing, to go all the way to India just
to see a lion and shake its paw, that's marvelous, and I accepted the commission.
over a long time, I looked at my geography books, at all the books I have at home,
over 7,000, and into a special series of books I own, Les Marveilles du Monde. This
series has everything, the Sphinx of Egypt, extraordinary things, and I said to
myself, the grandest and the most beautiful marvels of the world must be the
canyons of Utah. So, I'll have to got to Utah. At that time I was in the process of
called up my impresario, Mr. Breslin, and I said to him, 'I want to go to Bryce
must beautiful thing in the United States.' 'Oh?' 'So', I said, 'You'll have to
find a way for me to get there'. He was horrified: 'But it's so far away'. I said
'Well, it's either that or the Islands of Hawaii'. 'Oh, no, that's even further',
These impresarios are remarkable; he was surprised, but in less than an hour,
I had the tickets to Salt Lake City and a reservation for a rental car to drive to
Bryce Canyon. We arrived, the car picked us up, and off we went to the Canyon.
At the entrance to Bryce Canyon there is a little inn where one could eat, sleep,
wash up-very small, but actually very clean and there was no problem staying
I had chosen the spring season, for, as you know, I'm an ornithologist and
one can transcribe the songs of birds only in the spring, because it is the season of
courtship, the period in which the males sing in order to assert their territorial
claims, to seduce the female, and to greet the break of day. Well, there were birds
spring, there were no tourists. We were all alone, it was marvelous, an absolute
solitude. Apparently one can traverse the canyon on a horse or a mule, but I
went on foot because it's much nicer that way. One can stop, take notes, make
photos, transcribe bird songs, and there's all the time in the world just to
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TEMPO
I knew that Bryce Canyon was beautiful, because I had read all about it, I
looked at pictures of it, but it was even more beautiful than in the photographs.
It's quite amazing; first, it's so big, immense, it's a landscape of nothing but
cliffs and boulders in fantastic shapes. There are castles, towers, dungeons, there
are turrets, bridges, towers, windows, and then, even more beautiful, there are
the colours. Everything is red, all sorts of reds: red-violet, a red-orange, rose,
dark red carmine, scarlet red, all possible varieties of red, an extraordinary
beauty. I observed all of this very carefully, I wrote it all down, notation after
notation.
My wife took at least 200 photographs, but I was writing it all down, not
only the songs of birds, but the colours of the cliffs, the new shoots of vegetation,
the smell of sage (in French, that's 'armoise', a plant with a very pungent smell,
a bit like thyme or pepper, really strong, a smell that permeates the whole
landscape). And then there were the birds of Bryce Canyon, birds not to be
found anywhere else but there, for example, the western tanager, a little bird
which is red and yellow with a lovely voice, very flute-like which sings a combina-
tion of three notes (tiot, tiot, tiot). Then there's a very large bird which is called
a blue grouse, which goes 'wuh, wuh, wuh', a strange, deep sound which really
fascinated me. And then there was a bird that was beautiful to look at but with
an awful voice, that's just what interested me, it's the clark nutcracker, black and
grey, with an incredible voice, what a racket! If you get three or four of them
together, it's like a whole orchestra, a powerful sound. So, I took advantage of
all these birds and put them into the music, along with the colours.
it's just how I am-whenever 1 hear music, or even if I read music, I see colours.
They correspond to the sounds, rapid colours which turn, mix, combine and
move with the sounds. Like the sounds they are high, low, quick, long, strong,
weak, etc. The colours do just what the sounds do. They are always changing,
but they are marvelous and they reproduce themselves each time one repeats the
same sound complex. It's a theory that's a bit complicated, but I'll explain how
it works. Take a note, any note, and there is a corresponding colour. If you
change the note, even by a semitone, it's no longer the same colour. With the
twelve semitones the colour never remains the same. But once you reach the
octave, you have the original colour again. It recommences with the high oc-
taves and with the low octaves. In the higher octaves, it becomes progressively
more diluted with white, and in the lower octaves, it is mixed with black so
H.W.: Areyoufamiliar with the work of Vassily Kandinsky, with his theory of colour
O.M.: Oh, yes, I know Kandinsky very well, he's a great painter. My two
favourite painters are Kandinsky and Robert Delauney. Delauney was concerned
with what one calls in painting 'simultaneous contrasts', which is to say, if you
paint a green, for example, there is a red which appears behind it; if you paint a
red, a green appears behind it. These are complementary colours which take
H.W.: Well, Kandinsky expressedyour own theories, but in reverse. The soul responds
to the work of art in terms of vibrations, according to Kandinsky, and the vibration
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CANYONS, COLOURS AND BIRDS
O.M.: That's wonderful; just the reverse of what I've said, I'm pleased to
hear that he has a similar theory. Actually there are two other men one could
another painting is called Finale. They are paintings of music. He was a composer
of music as well, but, above all, he was a painter. And he put music into his
paintings. When I was young, I also knew a Swiss painter called Blanc-Gatti. He
had an actual disorder, he was synethesist, which means that he had a derangement
of the optic nerve and whenever he heard sounds, he saw colours. And whenever
circles of colour. Blanc-Gatti was able to survive with this disorder, but through-
out his life, he saw more and more coloured circles. I have one of his paintings
in my house, a painting of an organ. You can see the organpipes, the rose window
in a church, but all around the pipes-I suppose that the organist must have been
playing-there are coloured circles, red, blue, etc., all spinning. It's a strange
phenomenon, but it's an actual disease. I don't have this physical disorder, but I
you can conduct that are related. If you play a very low note on the piano and
wait for a moment, you'll hear the octave, the fifth, the third, the seventh, and
since I have a highly trained ear, I hear the ninth, the augmented fourth, etc. I
hear a whole series of harmonics. And, the second experiment, which resembles
the first: if you look at a colour against a white background, for example, a red
paper against a white paper, at the line of demarcation between the red and the
white, if you watch it a long time with great concentration, you'll perceive the
line of demarcation as much, much redder than the rest, and afterwards, like
electrical emissions, you'll see marvelous greens that leap out all around the
red.
O.M.: Yes, it's a colour harmonic. So, if you have a note a fifth above a yellow
note, you'll see a violet; if you have a fifth at blue, you'll see an orange. I've
they all thought I was crazy, but that's of no importance. I do it anyway, because
Bryce Canyon was of special interest to me. That's because it had all those
wonderful colours, and I wanted to put them into music. So, the piece I composed
about Bryce Canyon is red and orange, the colour of the cliffs. I proceeded on
through the canyons. Next I was at Cedar Breaks. The name is very difficult to
translate into French. Cedar is the word for 'cedres', but there aren't any
cedars there. Breaks, well, that's like a 'trou', a hole, I don't know how one
should say that in French, perhaps 'l'abime des cedres' (the abyss of cedars).
slash in the earth, very, very, deep, it is frightening, and the feeling I had there
was religious. I composed a piece entitled, 'Cedar Breaks is the Gift of Fear'.
Fear in a religious sense, not the sort of fear one has of the police, but a fear which
which is sacred, one is subjugated to this feeling, the gift of fear. I felt that
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6 TEMPO
After Cedar Breaks, I continued on to Zion Park. The cliffs there are also
very beautiful, but less red, less fantastic. The atmosphere is more somber,
serene, more sacred, even more celestial. I believe that it is indeed celestial,
because the Mormons, who discovered this place, called it Zion Park. Zion in
the Bible is the synonym of Jerusalem, not of the earthly Jerusalem, but of the
celestial city itself, thus, the gift of heaven. So, I did like the Mormons and com-
posed a piece which is called 'Zion Park and the Celestial City.' My work con-
At Zion, it was still springtime, the season of love and song for the birds. In
Zion there were the most beautiful birds of all. First, and perhaps most important,
there was the cassis finch with a lovely, lovely voice, flute-like with a charming
timbre, a marvelous virtuoso. The bird itself is red. Then there was the grey
vireo which is very imperative, it's the drillmaster of birds (co mo! co mo !) and
then a wonderful singer, the western meadowlark. It has a yellow breast with
a black hood. Its song is incredible, very limpid, with many harmonics. Each
note carries five or six harmonics; it's one of the greatest songbirds of the
United States. There were numerous specimens of all three types, the cassis
finch, the grey vireo, the western meadowlark in Zion Park. After seeing and
taking notes on all this, I composed my work on the canyons. I'd seen the canyons
from two different perspectives. I'd seen them from on high, with the vertigo
of the abyss, that's important, one sees vast black holes against the red of the
cliffs. Afterwards my wife and I went down the trails, very carefully, never leav-
ing the paths and we made our way to the depths, all the way to the bottom.
From the depths of the abyss, we could see the path circling very high above us,
and that is what inspired the title of my work, From the Canyons to the Stars, one
progresses from the deepest bowels of the earth and ascends towards the stars.
From the titles of all the pieces in the composition, you'll see that they're
suggestive of Utah. The first piece is called 'The Desert', a place where one is
all alone, and after that, the second movement is called 'The Orioles', which
refers to the orioles of the United States. The next piece is 'That which is Written
in the Stars'. Written in the stars are those terrible words, Mene Tekel Upharsin
which mean weigh, count, divide. The stars are weighed, counted, and divided.
Afterwards there is a solo bird piece called White-Browed Robin. Then there is
the piece to 'Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Fear', or the reverence for the sacred.
Next there is a piece for solo horn which is called 'Interstellar Appeal', one calls
for help in the midst of the stars, to the void between the stars, and then there is
'Bryce Canyon and the Red-Orange Cliffs', that's the principal piece, the chant
of victory, and then there is another piece to the stars called 'The Resurrected'.
It is situated beyond death and is for those who have been resurrected. It is the
song of the star Aldebaran. It is not the resurrected who sing, but the stars
themselves, because it seems that stars do sing. One can record vibrations from
stars, each star has its own vibration and produces a note.
You know, there are musicians who have chosen their own star; the
German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has chosen the star Sirius, he prefers
Sirius above all others because it is the most brilliant. For myself, I've chosen
Aldebaran, because it has a nice name, a really charming name. It's an Arabic
name which means the one who follows, Aldebaran, the follower. I chose that
particular star because it has a great velocity, a great light, and because it follows
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CANYONS, COLOURS AND BIRDS
7
Mocking bird', that famous mocking bird which one finds all over the United
heard it in Pasedena, in Santa Barbara, in San Francisco, all over California. Then
there is a piece to a bird called 'The Wood Thrush'. After that, in remembrance
far away' and my reply, 'if it's not Bryce Canyon, it will be the islands of Hawaii',
recalling that reference to Hawaii, I've included a piece on the birds of Hawaii.
It is called 'Omao, Leiothrix, Elepuio, Shamn.' These are all birds that one finds
in Hawaii. And the four names together constitute a verse line, an Alexandrine,
'Omao, Leiothrix, Elepuio, Sham'. Then finally one ends in paradise, like the
Mormons who believed that they had discovered the celestial Jerusalem at Zion
Park. The last piece is called 'Zion Park and the Celestial City'.
H.W.: Did the landscapes in Southern Utah also influence the tempos in the various
pieces of your work? You've often spoken of tempo as an individual and subjective phen-
omenon,for example, time as experienced by the stars, time as experienced by man, time as
experienced by cells. Didyou have a particular sense of terrestial time, of geological time
in Utah?
O.M.: Yes, I think one senses it most strongly in Zion Park, one sees the beds
of strata which correspond to the geological periods. But since I'm not a geologist,
I can't really answer you with exactitude, but in fact, one does see traces of those
different epochs at Bryce Canyon, at Cedar Breaks, but even more in Zion Park,
especially at one mountain called the Great White Throne. Actually, you've
touched on a point which isn't my speciality, but geology does interest me a lot.
H.W.: You've often spoken of the famous glacier in the Dauphine, the Glacier of
Meije, and the inspirationyou have drawnfrom its white light. The light inspiringyou
O.M.: Indeed. The light isn't at all the same, especially since at Bryce one
sees it in two completely different fashions. One sees it from on high and from
below, from the depths and from above at the opening of the abyss. What is
really special at Bryce Canyon is the sunrise and the sunset. They're beautiful
everywhere, of course, with their varieties of rose and red, but in Bryce Canyon
the phenomenon is intensified by the colour of the cliffs, because the cliffs, which
are already red, become even redder with the reflection of the violets and oranges
of the sunrise and also, of the sunset. But the two are different. The nuances,
the intensities are not the same. There are even peaks in Bryce which refer to
I'd like to add one last word concerning the orchestration of this work,
which is long, it lasts an hour and 40 minutes, to be exact. It includes a piano solo,
very important, of course. There are pieces which it plays completely alone.
on a closed note, suppressed notes, all sorts of bizarre things. There's a brass
xylophone and a marimba, a solo glockenspiel, like in the Magic Flute, bells,
gongs, a tam tam, and two very unusual instruments, the neolophone, or a wind
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8 TEMPO
the geophone has a beautiful timbre; it's an immense drum, flat, with a hollow
above and a hollow below the drum head. One rotates the drum very slowly from
left to right and right to left and it produces a noise one hears by the ocean when
a wave is receeding and the pebbles and sand are drawn along behind it-cshshsh
sh sh cshshsh sh sh-that's the sound it makes. Mixed with horn trills, for ex-
ample, it produces an extraordinary effect, one does not really know what one is
Well, I think I've said a lot about this piece, but one last sentimental note.
This work was first performed, of course, at New York in the Alice Tully Hall,
because it was commissioned by Miss Tully. The premiere was under the direc-
tion of Mr. Frederick Waldmann, with his orchestra, the Musica Aeterna. It was
in that lovely small hall, the Alice Tully Hall, decorated with just the right
colours, orange and red. Later it was performed in France, at the Theatre de la
Ville with Marius Constant, and this year it will be performed again on precisely
the tenth of December, that's my birthday, and since I was born at midnight, it
H.W.: One last questionforyou, Monsieur Messiaen. How doyoufeel about having
OM.: Ah, it's just incredible and very touching. When I told my impresario
about it, he was amazed. When I told my publisher M. Leduc in Paris about it,
anywhere with my name; at first he laughed, but then he almost cried. And we
plan to go back there soon. It's a great excuse to see Utah again, and, in any case,
it seems to me that I now have the obligation to present myself before those
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