Messaien’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time is one of my favorite works. It’s quite a bit different from the Turangalila, most notably in scale (for a quartet of clarinet, violin, cello and piano), but you can tell it’s the same composer.
The quartet was composed (and premiered) while Messaien was a prisoner in a POW camp in Germany during WWII.
I saw an amazing performance of it last summer at the Marlboro Music Festival - the first time I’ve ever heard it live. The solo clarinet movement is absolutely haunting live. If you get a chance to see it performed, go for it.
I’ve been to a performance of Turangalila by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and there will be another performance in a few months, this time by the local university orchestra. I guess seeing it live is only a twice-in-a-lifetime event. Love that Ondes Martenot.
I’ve seen numerous performances of Quatuor pour la fin du temps here in Montreal.
It looks like Montreal is a city that really loves Messiaen.
Thanks to the OP for posting this. I’m really enjoying this piece. (halfway through it so I figured I’d take a quick pause to post). Messiaen is one of those composers that I’d come across every now and again and always think, “man I gotta hear some more of that” and never quite get around to it for some reason.
I just finished listening to the 5th movement and it’s definitely the most tonal movement so far, with the main themes sounding jazzy or even show-tune-y.
Incidentally, on that note (heh), to the OP or others who aren’t quite sure about this tonal-atonal distinction, despite how it sounds from the words themselves, “atonal” and “tonal” are not opposites. Tonality can be talked about by degree. Atonality is the conscious (and in the case of serialism, systematic) avoidance of tonality. This piece is not atonal, but it’s also not (really) tonal.
Dude, get out! I’ve made the exact same association, not just with cartoons, but specifically Tom & Jerry. I’ve mentioned this many times over the years in various conversations but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it from someone else.
Get Dvorak? What’s there to get? It’s pretty bog standard mid-19th-century Romanticism (with a Slavic twist). I like Dvorak, but he’s not particularly difficult.
While it’s not true now from an adult perspective, when I was a kid, studying and playing Dvorak on the piano, it was pretty “weird” music to me in a way that Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, and other Romantics weren’t. So it doesn’t sound to me particularly weird for some people to consider Dvorak odd. To me, Dvorak was a bridge from Romanticism to Contemporary/Modern classical music in the way that Beethoven was a bridge from Classical to Romantic.
I believe I can tell the difference…but, wow, that is VERY close! That’s extremely pretty.
I fall back on my caveat: this is more a tribute to the sheer power (and finesse!) of computing than to anything else.
There’s a little bit of that, but it’s mostly because the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s conductor, Kent Nagano is a pupil of Messiaen. He even lived at the composer’s house for a while. When he landed his job with the MSO, the first piece they played was Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’au-delà.
Wait, wait, wait - there could be another reason: It could be…because I am an idiot!!
Where you see Dvorak, please substitute Bartok.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
That’s what I get for dashing off this post while watching Monday Night Football.
We saw some piano concertos and bagatelle’s and some had some fun, tinkly atonality marching up and down the keyboard.
Oy, what a maroon.
Ah, well that makes even more sense. That said, Dvorak is, for me as a kid, where things started getting different. By Bartok, it was sufficiently weird, like in Mikrokosmos (which starts with technically very easy pieces), being written in key signatures with both sharps and flats or sharps in odd places.
Yeah, Tom & Jerry is responsible for my love of Liszt (particularly, of course, Hungarian Rhapsody #2) and much of my initial interest in jazz (the “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” episode being one of the most memorable). We didn’t really have that kind of music generally playing around the house. And then they had the really funky psychedelic sounds when they shifted over to that Eastern European animation( or whatever it was) in the later episodes (I’m guessing somewhere around the 1960s–the “mouse in space” type episodes). The silly amounts of cartoon violence had no effect on me, but the music did. 
I’m not sure why I particularly keened in on Tom & Jerry. Other cartoons had wonderful orchestral accompaniment and scores, too, but T&J was the one most influential to me.
So much this. I think the way I approached heavy metal actually prepped me for my descent into the bowels of modern classical, honestly. It took me ages to “get” songs like Slaves Shall Serve or Skeksis. Just like it took me ages to “get” pieces like this symphony.
(The booze probably didn’t hurt either 
)
I would damn near pay money to hear that.
BTW - thanks for the information!
Huh, I’d just thought it was pure synth/electronic stuff in these songs, or in the case of “How to Disappear Completely” strings run through some effect. Neat stuff.
I always think of it (and many other Messiaen pieces) as modal. His music sounds weird because he uses his strange modes of limited transposition very frequently http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_limited_transposition.
Ah, I used to make the same mistake all the time 
!
Check out this video of the player explaining it. That instrument makes some killer expressive sounds in skilled hands. I particularly like the “tutti” stop around 4:00 that gives a very cello/string-like texture. Love that you can shake the keys to produce vibrato, as well. Very interesting, especially for something invented in the first half of the 20th century.
Yes. The theremin gets all the love and fame because it’s more compact and mostly just plain weird, but in terms of playability and expressiveness the ondes martenot is wonderful.
Anyone interested in early electronic instruments should also check out Oskar Sala’s Trautonium and the soviet ANS synthesizer which allowed the user to draw sounds. It was the descendent of early experiments using optical sound synthesis.
The invention of the theremin, ondes martenot, trautonium and the soviet optical sound experiments, as well as similar work in Germany all happened almost simultaneously in 1928-1929.
I know, right?
Slight hijack, because cool musical instruments discussion.
I actually know where a Theremin-built Theremin is for sale:
http://www.retrofret.com/products.asp?ProductID=5165
Is that cool or what?! I have seen it a few times, but not asked to “play” it - I tax their patience enough with guitars as it is (do NOT check out their guitar inventory if you don’t want to see drool-worthy guitars - the shop is known for having quality stuff at the higher end of pricing for vintage guitars - they are known for great inventory and the best workshop in the area so you pay a bit for that).
I want to say I have heard the Theremin was going for ~$75,000 but don’t quote me on that. Also, when I was there last time, there was another instrument I got to see - the owner had been tracking it for 25 years - one of the earliest known synthesizers (i.e., electricity-based tone generation). It was from the early 1900’s and used alternating current to excite tuning forks electro-magnetically at the depression of button switches. It wasn’t functioning but they were getting on that. Just amazing.
Carry on!
After reading up on the Ondes Martenot and watching a couple of videos, I gotta get me one, or at least an Ondèa. I have 2 Theremins (a cheap kit one I built and a slightly-not-cheap one I bought used) and they are fucking difficult to play; the Ondèa looks much easier and actually seems to be more versatile than the Theremin.
One bit of Bartók that sounds like cartoon music is in the Concerto for Orchestra, in the movement “Intermezzo Interrotto.” In the “interruption,” woodwinds and brass sound just like something out of Tom & Jerry, whose composer was Scott Bradley. In fact, Bradley was a Bartók fan and was influenced by him, and apparently the Concerto for Orchestra, composed while Bartók lived in America, returned the compliment.