Peter Asimov (University of Cambridge)
Mode de valeurs at 75: a meta-analysis and a new direction
SMA Zoom Colloquium, Thursday 6 February 2025, 6.00-8.00pm (GMT)
Meeting ID: 964 2323 3177 Passcode: 222924
Abstract
This paper is conceived around an unanticipated analytical breakthrough in a work scholars tend to think we know well: Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’ (1949), the second of his four Études de rythme and a longstanding staple of the twentieth-century history and analysis curriculum due to its role as a launchpad for ‘total serialism’.
To situate this finding, I first offer a meta-analytical overview of previous efforts to make sense of this work, which, despite its reputation, confounds orthodox notions of serialism and represents a puzzling and exceptional opus in Messiaen’s catalogue. I then ask, What makes Mode de valeurs a specifically rhythmic etude? My answer, grounded in the intellectual historical context of the field of scientific poetics, opens up a new analytical insight that, counterintuitively, reveals the work to be more serial than has previously been recognised.
Finally, I turn to the limitations of this analytical finding. While our understanding of Messiaen’s ‘precompositional’ construction is deepened, I suggest that attempts (past and future) to analyse the work’s form as it unfolds remain fundamentally limited by misrecognition of the object of analysis: a sort of category error. Thinking with Henri Bergson (focusing less on the concept of ‘duration’ most commonly associated with Messiaen scholarship, and more on his notions of ‘intensity’ and ‘perception’), I suggest that Messiaen’s work strategically demands perception rather than analysis.
Biographical Note:
Peter Asimov is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Magdalene College. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, as well as a research associate at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French music is published or forthcoming in 19th-Century Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and the Journal of Musicology, as well as in several edited volumes; his most recent article, titled ‘Yvonne Loriod and the Practice of Analytical Memory’ and co-authored with Christopher Brent Murray, has just come out in Music Analysis.