Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (1941) was famously written for instruments available in his Nazi prison camp. The piece immediately embraces dissonance, with the clarinet often trilling (thus emphasizing) on unusual notes while the piano repeats a strange rhythm. As if the scoring for violin, cello, piano, and clarinet were not odd enough, he often has the very different instruments double each other in octaves, lending an eerie flavor. It is not completely atonal -- it uses the occasional diatonic chord -- but he makes it function very differently than it would in ordinary tonal music. For instance, the piano will play a descending scale of chords through a couple of octaves, then begin again in the high register as if nothing had happened. In another section diatonic chords are repeated while the cello plays a melody in a completely different key. There are not as many dynamic changes as one might expect for the Apocalypse; only in the 3rd movement and the ending are there exciting contrasts.

Messiaen's organ works are famous for very different reasons. The creative influences are similarly drawn from religious and symbolic texts, but instead of highly unusual scoring, pieces like The Ascension (1934) find themselves firmly entrenched in the instrument's repertoire. The tonality is reminiscent of early Copland and late Szymanowski: shifts between tonal and atonal sections are used for dramatic effect. (The effect of a large organ suddenly placed in consonant reverberation is very pronounced indeed!) The dissonant chords usually derive from polytonality or emphasized passing tones rather than the counterpoint of serialists, or in another kind of contrapuntal vein, the Nonet. By polytonality I mean both the explicitly multi-layered chords of, e.g., Ives, and those derived by holding a bass (or simple pedal) underneath changing dissonances. I like this method better than composers whose movement within atonal passages seems to lack the kind of directionality that tonal clues can lend, even when I can more intellectually see the relationship from other points of view.

Choral works complete the best-known areas of Messiaen literature, naturally given his affinity for spiritually-inspired texts. O Sacrum Convivium (1937) it is more tonal than one would expect from his organ works, but still highlights some of his trademark features like repetition and passing harmonies that are embraced alongside their consonant resolutions. The bass part sometimes reminds me of the piano part in the Quartet with its stepwise motion that is constantly reinterpreted by highly chromatic progressions.

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