music history: Olivier Messiaen #musichistory #musiceducation #composer #messiaen

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Who composed a famous quartet in a Nazi prisoner of war camp? Well, today I want to tell you about a French composer by the name of Olivier Messiaen.

[00:00:11]Olivier was born in 1908 in Avignon, France. [music] And his father, Pierre, was a scholar and he would translate Shakespeare into into French. And his mother was a poet and she really loved looking into like the mysticism and and working that way.

[00:00:30]And so he was completely saturated in this deep cultural, deep artistic, and very expressive household. He was encouraged to use his imagination and by the time he was only seven, he was already composing and not just like simple little tunes, but vivid and expressive music. It was inspired by fairy tales, by religion, and by color.

[00:00:53]When he was just 11, he entered the prestigious Paris Conservatory and there he studied organ and harmony and composition as well.

[00:01:02]Rather than follow traditional harmonic rules, he began inventing his own system, what he would later call modes of limited transportation. And these modes created shimmering, static harmonies and that felt suspended in time and like stained glass that is glowing in sunlight. And he could break these rules because as I've told my students, once you know the rules, then you can think about breaking them.

[00:01:28]One of the fascinating facts about Olivier is that he had synesthesia and this is where you see colors, shapes in sound. So you hear something and you're going to see different colors. So when he was composing, he often said he would like to make a whole rainbow.

[00:01:44]And another interesting fact is that he believed that birds were the greatest musicians in all of Earth. So he became an avid ornithologist. We've had a few composers that did this and he would travel all around his notebook in hand trying to find different birds and listening and learning how they sang.

[00:02:03]In fact, he loved birds so much that he has a compositions that are built entirely around the sound of the birds singing.

[00:02:11]Then in 1940, the war was going on around them and he joined the French military. He was a soldier, but he wasn't really on the front lines. He was a medical assistant, you could say. Um but in 1940, the French invaded and they captured him and a bunch of other people. And so he was imprisoned, put in a prison of war camp.

[00:02:36]While in the camp, he met some other musicians and a sympathetic prison guard gave him some paper and a pencil and he started composing a piece, a quartet with the instruments that they kind of had.

[00:02:49]And there he wrote Quatuor pour la fin du temps, which means quartet for the end of time.

[00:02:57]And there in the prison camp, the rest of this video