O sacrum convivium

It may come as no surprise to know that Olivier Messiaen, too, was influenced by Indian music—in addition to the musical cultures of Japan, America, Indonesia, the medieval church, electronics, and birds. He spent his early years learning the secrets of organ and composition from some of the greatest figures in French music—Widor, Dukas, Dupré. His mature style of composition remains one of the most rhythmically complex in the Western tradition, and that penchant may have been an early stimulus to explore the theory of Hindustani music. A primary source was the 13th-century rhythmic treatise Salgîta-Ratnâkara by Carnagadeva, which outlines numerous talas. Messiaen studied the treatise in order to understand its fundamental principles, but he was also interested in learning how to adapt and alter basic tala structure. As in tonight’s piece, the tala forms the starting point for rhythmic variation, addition, subtraction, and reordering of components.
Messiaen’s choral motet, O sacrum convivium! (O sacred and holy feast) dates from just before the Second World War. The text is the Magnificat antiphon for second Vespers at the Feast of Corpus Christi. Messiaen’s setting opens as a slow, intense, and occasionally chromatic meditation on the Eucharistic text; he achieves a sensual, even physical, sound by placing each voice part at the bottom of its range. Expansive sonorities based on augmented 5ths and various qualities of 7th and 9th chords form linchpins at crucial moments in each phrase. A recurrent rhythmic pattern provides consistency in the face of increasingly daring vertical dissonances. The mantra-like repetition builds to a highpoint at “gloriae.” Simplicity in texture serves the expressive purpose well, as the composer’s deep-seated spirituality and humility in the presence of the Holy Eucharist emerge in grounded, poignant gestures of neo-Baroque homophony.

(c) Jason Stell