Messiaen & "Futurama" & 'Turanga Leela'

Last week was the centenary of the birth of leading 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen.

And apparently Matt Groening and the "Futurama" crew have joined in on the celebration. In the recent "Futurama" movie "Bender's Game" it's revealed that the character Leela's family name is Turanga, meaning her full name is 'Turanga Leela'. This refers to Messiaen's most well known orchestral piece, The Turangalila Symphony. This symphony features the 'sci fi'-like sounds of the early French synthesizer, the Ondes Martenot. As the clip below reveals, early Hollywood sci fi scores like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" may very well have been inspired by the music of Messiaen, so a tribute in "Futurama" is entirely appropriate.



Clip description: "Scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still rescored with the music of Olivier Messiaen. The original score by Bernard Herrmann is great of course. But it does seem likely that Messiaen's Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine (1942) could have been an influence on Herrmann and other composers of scifi soundtracks in the 50s and 60s. In this case, I felt that the highly contemplative nature of Messiaen's music gave a greater feeling of reverent mystery and made Klaatu seem a higher being, and the light more mysterious, even in B&W. Herrmann's score has a lot of mystery and strangeness and a Javanese style of sound, but nonetheless seems a bit more earthbound in comparison."

thanks to The Beat for pointing the Futurama/Messiaen connection out.

Messiaen's bird music

No more embarrassing drunken experiments for now. *blush*

I spent one of the (probable) last summer days today riding around in the countryside on my bicycle, while I was listening to Olivier Messiaen's piano music inspired by bird song - turned down so low that the sounds of the countryside and the real birds were still getting to me too in between the often thinly spread piano notes.

One of the weird aspects of delving into some of the more far out 20th century classical music is the phases you often have to get through where you at first feel like shouting "The emperor has no clothes!" and "That's just random noise!" and "A cat walking across the keyboard could have played that!", and then suddenly you get to a point where you start to recognize the alien beauty of it all.

Messiaen's bird music is a case in point. At first it does sound somewhat random, but before you know it you get into it, and you start to think about the wonders of nature, and about the genetic relationship between birds and humans, and about whether bird song and human music serve some of the same functions.

After the second world war, Messiaen became an older guru for young radical composers (Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez etc) gathering every summer in the town of Darmstadt in southern Germany. While most of the time was spent discussing advanced mathematical methods for composing music, at some point Messiaen started praising bird song and arguing that birds are the greatest musicians of all. And then he started releasing music based on field research into bird song. It all seemed to fall somewhere between a dadaist prank and something artistically fairly sensible, considering that most humans find bird song quite beautiful.

Here are som youtube clips.

Messiaen discussing bird sounds:




More info here:



And some of his bird music:

Latry & Messiaen

And now I'm listening to the box-set of Olivier Latry playing the complete organ works of Messiaen. This shit is insane. I know it's supposed to be devotional music, but some of it is just cascades of crazy dissonantic chords played on the Notre Dame organ, one of the best sounding organs in the world. Definitely an experience, especially on a stereo set with proper bass.

Here are recordings of Latry playing Messiaen on another organ:





And here's Latry improvising on the Notre Dame organ

Olivier Messiaen and the Ondes Martenot

In my personal journey through 20th century classical music I've now started to seriously explore the works of Olivier Messiaen. I've never really gotten around to listening to his stuff before, mainly because the only things I knew about him were that A) he was a Christian and wrote a lot of devotional music, and B) he became obsessed with the sounds of birds and tried to emulate it in his music. It sounded a bit... uh... well... gay.... anyway, after spending a couple of days exploring his stuff I can already say that it's actually quite magnificent. And some of that devotional music... it's quite insane... Messiaen believed that not only regular minor and major chords should be used in the church... according to him, crazy dissonantic chords could be used too. And some of that stuff is awesome.

But never mind the dissonance for now, whats even more cool is that Messiaen also wrote some pieces for the early French proto-synthesizer, the Ondes Martenot.

The Ondes Martenot was an early electronic instrument that was invented in 1928. It sounded somewhat similar to the slightly more well known Theremin (used in the Beach Boys "Good Vibrations" and lots of old sci fi soundtracks). In recent years the sound of the Martenot has reached a large audience thanks to Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, who's used it on Radiohead albums since "Kid A", and also used it on the acclaimed soundtrack for "There Will Be Blood".

But Messiaen was one of the first composers to champion the instrument.

Here are two clips of a group of people performing his "La Fête des Belles Eaux" written for six Martenots.





Here is a clip that demonstrates how the instrument works:



And here's another clip, an excerpt from the large orchestral work, the Turangalila Symphony: