Backward Revolutionary

April, la saison des amours for wild life in France, inevitably brings out the bird watchers. Last week one of the oddest sights in the fields and forests was a stocky, monkish fellow in a Basque beret and rimless glasses, cocking an ear to all the amorous twittering, and furiously scribbling music on manuscript paper clipped to a board. It was French Composer Olivier Messiaen, 58, elder statesman of the far-out realm of 20th century music, gathering new themes for his compositions. "Birds are the greatest musicians," he insists. "You will never find in their song a mistake of rhythm, melody or counterpoint."

If Messiaen's use of bird song in his work seems at once avant-garde and traditional, the paradox is typical. He is a fervent Roman Catholic who feels a primitive reverence for nature, a musical innovator who retains his childhood love for Mozart and Chopin. Although he stands aloof from the factions of the music scene, he is a teacher and champion of such different composers as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Ache in G Major. Little wonder, then, that Messiaen's compositions defy pigeonholing. Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine (1944), scored for soprano chorus, strings and a clattering assortment of percussion, celebrates God's omnipresence by mixing swatches of Gregorian chant with Hindu rhythms and the unearthly quavering of the Ondes Martenot (an electronic wave generator). The 77-minute Turangalila Symphony (1948), a thick layer cake of orchestral textures, is part of Messiaen's treatment of the Tristan legend, which he considers "the greatest myth of human love." Chrono-chromie (1960) echoes the sounds of nature in a complex tone poem, climaxed by an ear-ringing passage in which 18 solo strings each play a separate bird song simultaneously.

Such mixtures seem quite natural to Messiaen, who describes himself as "a born believer, musician and revolutionary." He taught himself to play the piano at eight, at ten was devouring the scores of Don Giovanni, Die Walkure and Pelleas et Melisande. He conceived a lifelong fascination with "all things mysterious and marvelous," and found that musical sounds gave him inner visions of colors; once, he got a stomach ache while watching a ballet because the violet hue of the lighting clashed so badly with the tonality of G major.

Subtleties of Rhythm. After a prize-laden graduation from the Paris Conservatory, where he studied composition with Paul Dukas, the 22-year-old Messiaen won the coveted organist's job at La Trinite church in Paris, and later a teaching post at the conservatory. Today, he still gives composition classes and plays for weekly Mass, occasionally enlivening a service with a hair-raising, dissonant improvisation on the organ. In his spare time, he labors at a scholarly tome on the subtleties of rhythm, which he regards as "the primordial, perhaps the essential, part of music."

In the resort town of Royan last week, as Messiaen presided over an international piano competition, he reflected that the young musicians he has influenced have not imitated him but have gone their own way, forging new electronic, mathematic or aleatory (chance) musical techniques. His own ideal is still "to rejoin the eternal durations and resonances, to apprehend the inaudible which is above music." Meantime, he is content to clap on his beret, pack up his music paper, and drive off for some bird watching.

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