who was Olivier Messiaen.
A pious, humble composer whose cosmic organ music can still scare the bejesus out of all those well-meaning, mulleted “teen pastors” and spiky-haired “youth ministry coordinators” strumming guitars to “Our Father” in churches today. From planting the seeds of avant-garde music for postwar composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen to transcribing and integrating the complex tones and rhythms of birdsong (remember St. Francis of Assisi?) into his own music, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was an experimental musician who did it all for the glory of God. Although he is best known for the Gershwin-gone-gamelan Turangalîla Symphony and the desolate majesty of Quartet for the End of Time, the core of Messiaen’s work is organ music. He treated the organ like a synthesizer (oh wait, the organ is a synthesizer, with pipes instead of circuits), using unusually bleak tones and murky textures to convey humanity’s loneliness and longing for the divine. As you might guess from titles like
