Scott Cantrell

Bird songs twitter and shriek. Pianos and orchestras dance off-kilter dances. Great sonic cataclysms give way to music in which time seems to stand still in sublime sweetness.

This is the sonic world – often out of this world – of the late French composer Olivier Messiaen. Influences on his music, by his own account, included birds, Russian music, Debussy's mysterious opera Pelléas et Mélisande, plainsong (Gregorian chant), Hindu rhythms, the French Alps, stained-glass windows and rainbows.

"He was a 20th-century composer who was able to combine the most esoteric, academic, intellectual approaches to music with the most mystical and sensuous and appealing elements for the average audience," says pianist Christopher Taylor, who's playing Messiaen's nearly two-hour piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus (20 Gazes on the Infant Jesus) tonight at Caruth Auditorium.

Co-sponsored by Voices of Change, Mr. Taylor's recital is a run-up to a two-day symposium, "Olivier Messiaen: The Composer as Theologian," jointly presented by Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology and Meadows School of the Arts.

In addition to lectures and discussions, the symposium will include performances of the organ suite La nativité du Seigneur (The Nativity of the Lord), played by George Baker, and the song cycle Harawi, sung by soprano Virginia Dupuy, with pianist Shields-Collins Bray. Post-symposium concerts will feature his Quartet for the End of Time and Visions de l'amen.

"I was looking for a way for the Meadows School and the Perkins School to collaborate fruitfully," says Christopher Anderson, associate professor of sacred music at SMU and coordinator of the symposium. "Messiaen's music carries such an extra-musical subtext of religion and theology. His project is at least as theological as it is musical."

Messiaen (pronounced "messy-AHN"), who died in 1992, celebrated his Roman Catholicism in his music. As much as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes, this is art about big faith issues: the birth and ascension of Christ, transcendent love and sacrifice, battles between good and evil, visions of the resurrected faithful.

Messiaen's oeuvre includes the opera St. Francis of Assisi, symphonic works titled The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ and Illuminations of the Beyond, and symphonic-band-and- percussion pieces called Colors of the Celestial City and I Look for the Resurrection of the Dead.

Even Messiaen's devotion to bird songs, painstakingly transcribed around the world and threaded through so much of his music, has an element of the transcendent.

"Birds are the opposite of time," the composer wrote. "They are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant songs!"

One needn't be Catholic, or even Christian, Dr. Anderson says, to appreciate music alternating great drama, sheer ecstasy and hushed tenderness.

"Messiaen is one of those composers whose music is effective on a variety of levels. If you approach it just from the interplay of sounds, and the suggestive quality of the music, one stands to gain without knowing one whit about Catholicism."

Born in Avignon in the south of France, Messiaen grew up in intellectual surroundings. His father, Pierre, was an English teacher who translated the complete works of Shakespeare. His mother was the poet Cécile Sauvage.

A musical prodigy, Messiaen was only 11 when admitted to the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers included the composer Paul Dukas and the organist Marcel Dupré. He won an impressive list of the conservatory's first prizes, in harmony, counterpoint, fugue, piano accompaniment, music history and composition.

In 1930, he became organist of the Parisian church of La Trinité, where for six decades his Sunday-morning improvisation alternately transported and perplexed the faithful. He also became an influential professor of musical analysis at the Paris Conservatory. His students included Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

For all the mysticism, few composers have so painstakingly elucidated their musical means and ends – in a major book, The Technique of My Musical Language, and in detailed program notes on individual works.

Growing up in the world of Debussy and early Stravinsky, Messiaen invented his own scales and absorbed the complex rhythms of Indian music. Claiming to possess synaesthesia, the association of colors with musical sounds, he composed brilliantly colored music.

As it turns out, all the works to be performed in and around the SMU festival date from the 1930s and 1940s, this for a composer who remained active for four more decades.

"We ended up with a very lopsided conference," Dr. Anderson says, with some regret. "I suppose it will be revealing in a way, but it would be nice to have things from the 1960s, '70s and '80s. But we are having a paper on St. Francis of Assisi," from 1983.

Between the bird songs and the heavy incense of Roman Catholicism, Messiaen remains a controversial figure. Reviewing the March 1945 premiere of Vingt regards, the critic Bernard Gavoty called it music "smelling of the hair-shirt." But another writer, Yves Baudrier, saluted Messiaen's insistence on "the right of music to be violently emotional, the vehicle for a fiery inner life."

"Certainly, he's one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century, as far as music and composition are concerned," Dr. Baker says. "His music is something apart from anybody else. You can usually tell within seconds that, yes, that's Messiaen's style. Nobody else sounds like that."Plan your life

SCHEDULE:

• 7:30 tonight: Christopher Taylor, piano: Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus. Caruth Auditorium, Owen Fine Arts Center, Bishop and Binkley.

• 8 p.m. Thursday: George Baker, organ: La nativité du Seigneur. Perkins Chapel, SMU.

• 8 p.m. Friday: Virginia Dupuy, soprano; Shields-Collins Bray, piano: Harawi. Caruth.

• 3 p.m. Saturday: Carol Leone, piano; Lynda O'Conner, violin; Paul Garner, clarinet; Andres Diaz, cello: Quartet for the End of Time. Caruth.

• 8 p.m. Saturday: Annie Lin and Steven Hall, duo-piano: Visions de l'amen. Northaven United Methodist Church, 11211 Preston Road.

TICKETS: SMU concerts (except Quartet, which is free) $25, $10 for students. For Christopher Taylor recital tickets, call 214-378-8670 or go to www.voicesofchange.org. For other SMU concerts, call 214-768-3515. Northaven concert $15; $5 for students. For information on that only, call 214-363-2479.

For full lineup, go to http://smu.edu/theology/perkins_art/schedule.html.

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