The author, Marco Amadeus Jimenez, researching at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF)
I spent the month of July in Paris as an Undergraduate Research Fellow, researching the influence of Indian classical music, specifically the 120 desitālas, on 20th-century composer Olivier Messiaen’s body of work. Much of the previous research done on Messiaen’s music has focused on the influence that birdsong, Gregorian chant, Catholicism, and the historical context of the 20th-century had on Messiaen’s music. One key area of scholarship, however, which has been critically neglected, is an exploration of the influence of Indian classical music on Messiaen’s music.
When Messiaen was asked about the influences most important to his music, Messiaen himself cited the 120 desitālas, or rhythmic patterns, that appear in the treatise Saṃgītaratnākara, written by the 13th-century Indian theorist Śārṅgadeva. While in Paris, I conducted my research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), where I had the opportunity to flip through hundreds of pages of Messiaen’s manuscripts. I cannot express how overawed I was to not only see these manuscripts, but to also flip through many of them, spending hours poring over a given manuscript. One of the most amazing facets, for me, was the insight that these manuscripts gave me into Messiaen’s compositional process—I was able to see which sections he crossed out, which dynamics he revised, which fingerings he edited, and which parts of the music he deemed most “essential” to the composition.
To wit, one of my favorite moments at the BNF was having the opportunity to look at Messiaen’s sketches. Unfortunately, these sketches are in very poor condition, and I was only able to view the electronically scanned-and-digitized versions, which can only be viewed on the BNF’s computers in their reading room. These sketches provided a cornucopia of information and insight into which elements of Messiaen’s music he himself deemed most important—one could see, by seeing the compositional progression from Messiaen’s sketches to his autograph manuscript, which elements of the piece he began with, and which elements of the piece were added on later. As a composer and performer, I found this enormously insightful, but as a researcher, I was very gratified that the experience of looking at Messiaen’s sketches and manuscripts reinforced my central thesis; that Messiaen’s usage and treatment of the desitālas in his oeuvres is a comparatively under-researched aspect of his music, and deserves more attention.
I found the “smoking gun” of my project, rather serendipitously, when leafing through the 500+ page Turangalîla-Symphonie that Messiaen annotated. The version I studied was a draft of the score, printed in ink, with Messiaen’s annotations in pencil. (His annotations, which included extensive written notes, editing several dynamics, and fixing several small errors in the engraving, would eventually make it into the published version of Turangalîla-Symphonie.) The most exciting part, however, was when I stumbled upon Messiaen’s notation, in pencil, of a desitāla, superimposed above the rhythm notated in the score. (This, for what it’s worth, did not make it into the published score—this seems to have been strictly for the composer’s private use.) This notation occurred several times throughout the massive score, where Messiaen would notate, in pencil, above a given rhythm and its corresponding barlines, the desitāla from which the rhythm came. This confirmation of my project’s central thesis was a very exciting moment for me, and is exemplary of the sorts of “eureka!” moments that attract me so strongly to researching, and that are themselves so emblematic of the joys of researching.
It was a great privilege to research Messiaen during the day, and then, in the evening, to hear classical music performed throughout Paris, in concert halls, cathedrals, and outdoors. I am profoundly grateful to have had the opportunity to experience such a fabulous summer, where I was granted access to innumerable rare manuscripts and documents, while simultaneously experiencing the artistic, musical, and cultural richness of Paris. It was an experience that I will continue to cherish for years to come.