The Rest Is Noise Series: Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties

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This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you’re attending concerts in the episodes

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In his 1944 textbook Technique of My Musical Language, Messiaen notated what he called “the chord of resonance,” in which eight distinct pitches from the natural harmonic series sound together (C, E, G, B-flat, D, F-sharp, G-sharp, B-natural). Strongly dissonant in effect, it still has the C-major triad at its base—a “natural” foundation for an abstract form. Mahler placed a chord very much like this one at the roaring climaxes of his unfinished Tenth Symphony.

Technique of My Musical Language also set out a system of “modes of limited transpositions,” analogous to the modes of ancient Greek music (Aeolian, Dorian, Lydian, and so on). They are based on the composer’s study of early-twentieth-century music, especially Stravinsky and Bartók, as well as of folk and traditional music from Bali, India, Japan, and the Andes. The first mode is Debussy’s whole-tone scale. Mode 2, made up of alternating semitones and whole tones, is the octatonic scale, on which Stravinsky built the Rite. Mode 3, in which one whole tone alternates with two semitones, slightly resembles the scale commonly associated with the blues. Mode 6 happens to be the same as the slithering clarinet scale that begins Salome. The three remaining modes are more eccentric scales of Messiaen’s devising. What they have in common is that they are symmetrical in shape, dividing neatly along the fault line of the tritone. The diabolus in musica sounded divine to Messiaen’s ears; it was the axis around which his harmony rotated. Messiaen’s modes generate a fabulous profusion of major and minor triads, as Paul Griffiths points out in his study of the composer. But they do not—indeed, cannot—produce standard chord progressions of the kind that are found in hymnals. Instead, the harmony skids from one triad to another, following the sinuous contours of the modes. Messiaen called these effects “rainbows of chords.”

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