Learning Messiaen

[chrismaninoff]

I've been interested in Messiaen recently, and I decided to learn "Par lui tout a été fait" from the 20 regards.  However, it's freaking hard!  Just wonderin, has anyone else got a method for learning modern pieces like this? 

It's not the technique I find challenging, it's just learning the notes and knowing them well enough to play the thing without rereading chords all the time.  Let me know what tricks you employ in your 20th century musical pursuits! 

[j_tour]

I've been interested in Messiaen recently, and I decided to learn "Par lui tout a été fait" from the 20 regards.  However, it's freaking hard!  Just wonderin, has anyone else got a method for learning modern pieces like this? 

Good choice!  Now you've got at least one other person interested in trying this particular piece out.  It's pretty long, I also feel it's within my grasp, and is a fascinating piece of music, for reasons I can't properly articulate.

Except, as you note, the problem of finding the actual, literal notes and somehow internalizing them.  Which is often the easier part of learning a piece, before dealing with some perhaps novel technical challenges.  Not so, it appears, here.  No, on listening to a few performances, I don't pretend to claim it's exactly "easy" technically, but I think those sorts of challenges are some I've seen before and can handle.

I'm sure plenty of people have their own techniques for handling this challenge, but I really only use a small handful of very simple techniques.

In this case, for the chords, it saves me time to pencil in sort of pop/jazz notations for chords, whether they make sense from the point of view of functional harmony or not.  Sometimes it's not possible to fully describe a chord or voicing this way, but it can be effective as a kind of sketch of the harmony, especially when using a "slash" notation to indicate bass notes, or jazz notation to indicate polychords.  I use this a lot in Debussy's music, for example, where it actually seems appropriate many times in his préludes.  It may not be applicable here fully.

I haven't seen the score yet (maybe a long time ago, but I don't recall it), but the other trick that seems obvious to me is to rewrite the score using a notation that is more legible for you, personally, whatever that might be.  I'm doing this with the Scriabin Op. 74 where I just can't process Scriabin's bizarre notation on the page....but it's necessary to have a clear picture of the score to work on the actual musical challenges of the piece, viz., the interpretation.  And those préludes are brief and not especially demanding of technique at the mechanical level.

Yes, I consider myself an excellent, or at least proficient sight reader, but in the Scriabin, the difficulty is not parsing what a B# or whatever is on the page, but more a kind of limbic brain sense of outrage at the sense of his notational choices.  So, I try to "correct" the score to something simpler.  But, that does take time to enter into engraving software, and even though my handwriting is pretty good on staff paper, the end result is not as "clean" as I'd like.  Work in progress, for me, emphasis on "work," as in a kind of manual labor, or maybe a Bartleby the Scrivener type work.

Those are really the tricks I rely on most often for this kind of music where the difficulty is not really technical, but the obscurity of sight-reading the text at tempo.  And where committing the music to memory is either not an immediate goal, or is undesirable for other reasons.

I really don't know how specialists (or those whose repertoire includes notable examples from early-mid XXth C avant-garde composers) approach this core problem, other than that they probably have some kind of intimate relation with the music that I lack at the initial stages of approaching such music.

Perhaps Richter's (maybe apocryphal) examples of rehearsing debut performances of Prokofiev pieces at an unimaginably slow pace is apt:  that's the only other "trick" that I could see using for some long-time bugbears, such as the Schönberg Op. 25 or various pieces of Webern, where notation is clear, but the logic of the piece is not internalized readily, at least for me.

I look forward to hearing about other solutions or approaches:  after reading briefly through the score, I don't think my two suggestions will be applicable.  For me the score is pretty legible, although a bit complicated, and I don't know that reducing some of the chord (fragments) to shorthand notation is helpful.

Probably the dead-slow approach is the only one I can think of as appropriate, but then again, I only have average imagination.

[chrismaninoff]

Nice to hear from youy; I'm glad to find others who are interested in this music!! 

I'd also consider myself an excellent sightreader, which is partly why this music is so frustrating to learn haha.  I'm used to spending most of my time on technical problems, not note-learning, but this piece is a bit of a douzie in that regard! 

I could see some re-writing techniques being useful, for instance graphic notation... I mean the first section especially is super formally tight, so I could represent the subject with a certain squiggle and countersubject with another for instance, so it might be possible to condense that bunch of pages into one or two squiggle-maps. 

[j_tour]

I could see some re-writing techniques being useful, for instance graphic notation... I mean the first section especially is super formally tight, so I could represent the subject with a certain squiggle and countersubject with another for instance, so it might be possible to condense that bunch of pages into one or two squiggle-maps.

That's interesting!  Similar to what are sometimes called "listening scores," which can be florid in graphical design, or however one wishes.

The only other "trick" I have (that's not really a trick at all) is I keep a fairly large dry-erase board directly above the keyboard (in my case, a digital stage piano).  Convenient for simply writing out notes, sometimes in a kind of visual order related to the space the notes occupy on the keyboard.  In my case, the sketches tend to be pretty crude, rough visual placements. 

If nothing else, it helps me from keeping my nose buried in the score and looking (literally) in a different direction.

I would have thought your very good question would have elicited more of a response from others:  I suspect it's a pretty common difficulty.  I know there are people here who have conquered this sort of problem at the piano who have better strategies than my little techniques.

[quantum]

Get yourself a copy of the Technique de mon langage musical.  It can be a lot less laborious when you have an idea of what Messiaen is doing in his compositions.  You don't need the in depth knowledge a Messiaen scholar has, rather just a hint of what is going on. 

We learned scales, arpeggios, and other common use patterns, which gives us a foundation for learning music in common use tonality.  A similar thing needs to be done with Messiaen IMO.  There is a lot to dig into when it comes to Messiaen's theories, so just start with the stuff relevant to the piece. 

I've learned some of Messiaen's music for piano as well as organ, and can say that spending time with the modes, patterns, chords, etc. does help.  Eventually one begins to grasp it like it is just another scale to add to one's toolkit.

[j_tour]

Here's a link to the Messiaen text in English.  I couldn't find the French online.

The examples at the end of the book are astonishingly clear, and in some cases provided some guidance as to how to parse complicated passages.

Modes of limited transposition.  I completely forgot about those, and that Messiaen had a pretty elaborate system of his own, not just transcriptions of natural environmental sounds, especially birds, or devotional music. 

[chrismaninoff]

I have done my research in that regard and read most of the book in fact!  But thanks for the link anyways.  It's been a while and it would be good to go over it again  

Incidentally, I came up with a technique yesterday that has been helping me a lot.  There are passages such as that marked "sujet en strette, canon en rhythmes non-retrogradable" which are difficult to read but which hang together conceptually very well.  SO what I've been doing is breaking it down into its rhythm, and clapping/tapping the rhythms of each voice with my hands and feet, so internalize them, then playing those rhythms on single notes, then with the notes as written, etc.  I find that this has helped me to internalize the passage I mentioned above quite easily, and I imagine it will help for other formally tight passages as well.