Messiaen held the titular position as organist at L’église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris for more than sixty years. He recorded most of his own works on this instrument, so this chapter begins by noting the importance of these recordings, and in particular the way they proscribed a “manner of performance” for his organ works that would be dominant for more than fifty years. It then discusses recordings by other organists on other instruments, and how they differ from the composer’s recordings. The discussion focuses on those who have recorded the entire repertoire, but also considers notable recordings of single pieces.

The Paris Conservatoire played a pivotal role in shaping Olivier Messiaen’s music and career. His compositional technique resulted from his student years there, and he later found creative stimulation and financial stability in the same institution as the teacher of hundreds of future composers and musicians. Indeed, Messiaen spent most of his adult life at the Conservatoire. This chapter examines Messiaen’s relationship with the Paris Conservatoire and focusses on the way it shaped French musical culture, the institution, his students, and Messiaen's musical style.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s long involvement with the USA. It discusses commissions, his relationship with notable figures, his teaching there, and the genesis and performance of both the Turangalîla-Symphonie and Des canyons aux étoiles…, including Messiaen’s admiration for the mountains in Utah. It also explores Messiaen as a performer of his own music in America (he premiered the Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte-Trinité), the commissioning and performance of the Livre du Saint-Sacrement, and the orchestral éclairs sur l’Au-delà….

No work of art, however original, is created in isolation from the life and culture of its time and place. Politically and artistically, Berlioz lived in interesting times. The year of Symphonie fantastique, 1830, was a year of revolution and a key year in the development of French romanticism. In addition to reviewing the artistic scene, this chapter considers aspects of Berlioz’s musical education and earlier work. This is set in relief by comparing his ‘Fantastic’ symphony with the Reformation Symphony by Felix Mendelssohn, which was composed about the same time. Differences in their the two composers’ musical upbringing and religious views are reflected in the two symphonies, including their use of traditional musical material.

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

This chapter draws on the author’s experience as a musicologist, philosopher, and ornithologist to examine different perspectives on birdsong in Messiaen, including verisimilitude, ecology, and Messiaen’s practice of notation. It places Messiaen’s birdsong in the context of his thought and examines the meaning of this important formant and creative source in Messiaen’s work.

To speak of institutions is usually to invoke an idea of brick-and-mortar establishments, and the organizations that inhabit and sustain them. However, an institution is as much an idea as it is a thing: the institutionalization of a musical genre is, above all else, the formalization of a narrative about the genre, and of the value system that the narrative embodies. The present chapter touches upon three instances of the institutionalization of jazz in the United States since the Second World War, including the Institute of Jazz Studies, housed at Rutgers University in New Jersey; the SF Jazz Center in San Francisco; and the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at the Berklee College of Music. I seek here to discern what their supporting narratives can tell us about shifting conceptions of jazz institutionalism, and its reflection of broader ideas about the music’s role in American and global musical culture.

The first movement, at least on the surface, is in the traditional form Berlioz knew well from Beethoven and others and that he had used in earlier overtures: a slow opening and a long faster movement. But the opening Largo is too long to be considered a mere ‘introduction’. Rather than beginning the Allegro with a sharply defined motive suitable for development, Berlioz presents a long melody, the idée fixe, and bases most of the movement on it, breaking it down and reassembling it in various forms, including a big climax and a wistful coda. The connection of the Allegro to sonata form has been an area of disagreement ever since, considered in more detail in Chapter 10. Major revisions undertaken after the first performance changed the movement’s proportions; the original version cannot be recovered.

While academic reactions to jazz were long dominated by a methodology drawn from musicology, attentive to composition and transcribed solos as forms, scholarship over the past few decades– amid the interdisciplinary shift of “the new jazz studies”– has articulated in ever more assertive terms that “meaning” in jazz depends not only on what is played, but how. This chapter responds to this interdisciplinary shift by thinking through the importance of performance to a comprehensive understanding of jazz expression, and the usefulness of African American studies and performance studies in conceptualizing the various theatrical and gestural vocabularies at work in jazz. Using examples from Thelonious Monk, Wynton Marsalis, and Ornette Coleman, this chapter examines in detail how we might understand jazz not just as music but as an extension of historical Afro-diasporic expressive practice, a construction of individual musical personae, and an ongoing aesthetic response to the persistent malice of white supremacy.

The spectralist composers in Messiaen’s class of 1971#–2 are an important part of Messiaen’s legacy. This chapter addresses how Messiaen’s work was essential to the creative thinking of Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey. It focusses on what these composers absorbed from Messiaen and how they qualified, extended, and enriched his legacy. In particular it understands these composers through the lens of an ecology of listening in which the concerns of the listener are an active formant in the compositional thinking.

Symphonies that Berlioz would have known, including Beethoven’s and those of his predecessors, usually included a dance movement (the Minuet and Trio) or, especially with Beethoven, the faster movement known as ‘Scherzo’, usually placed third after a slow movement. Having decided to put the slow movement third, Berlioz replaces the Minuet or Scherzo with a waltz. He evokes the glitter of a ballroom by introducing harps to the orchestra. The idée fixe suggests that the beloved woman is there; it is transformed to fit the waltz rhythm, acting as a contrasting section and reappearing near the end. Berlioz added a brilliant coda when rewriting the whole movement from scratch during his stay in Italy (1831–2).