Benitez Interview of Gerald Levinson

8/19/2019 Benitez Interview of Gerald Levinson

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A Conversation with Composer Gerald Levinson about Olivier Messiaen

Vincent P. Benitez

Introduction

Gerald Levinson (b. 1951) has been recognized as one of the leading composers of

his generation.1 He has won numerous awards and honors in recognition of his work and

music. Levinson studied composition with George Crumb, George Rochberg, and Richard

Wernick at the University of Pennsylvania, and Ralph Shapey at the University of

Chicago. From 1974-76, he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris

Conservatoire. After his studies with Messiaen in Paris, Levinson served as Messiaen’s

translator and assistant for master classes, lectures, texts, and program notes when

Messiaen was in the United States. Levinson is the Jane Lang Professor of Music atSwarthmore College, where he has taught as a faculty member since 1977.

I became acquainted with Gerald Levinson in 2006 when both the Pennsylvania

State University (where I am a member of the music faculty) and Swarthmore College

were hosting Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, authors of a then recent biography on

Messiaen, as visiting scholars.2 Hill gave all-Messiaen piano recitals at both institutions,

1I would like to thank Gerald Levinson for his assistance with this article. For detailed biographical

information about Levinson and his music, I encourage the reader to visit the Web site of his publisher,

Theodore Presser (http://www.presser.com/Composers/info.cfm?Name=GERALDLEVINSON ).

2Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, Messiaen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).



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with Simeone providing pre-concert talks. I exchanged a few e-mail messages with

Levinson as I was preparing for the visit of Hill and Simeone. I knew that he was not only

a student of Messiaen but, more importantly, a person that I, as one interested in Messiaen

and his music, should get to know. After spending two weeks in Paris and Assisi, Italy in

May-June 2006 conducting research for a book on Messiaen’s opera, Saint François

d’Assise, I thought it would be a great idea to interview Levinson about Messiaen and his

music. I was unprepared for the wealth of information about Messiaen that I was to receive

on that hot Pennsylvania day, 14 July 2006, when I traveled from my home in State

College to the campus of Swarthmore College and Levinson’s office.

I met ‘Jerry’ in his office on the second floor of the campus’s music building. After

exchanging greetings, I immediately went to work, setting up my digital tape recorder for

the long interview that was to unfold. We covered a great deal of material on that day,

including how Levinson became acquainted with Messiaen and his music, his studies with

Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, and thoughts about Messiaen’s music andcompositional techniques. Throughout the interview, Levinson demonstrated a profound

esteem for Messiaen as a musician, teacher, and person.

In this article, I recount the conversation I had with Levinson about Messiaen. It is

a portrait of one of the greatest composers and pedagogues of the twentieth century, as

sketched by one of his pupils, a leading composer in his own right. I present the interview

in three segments, beginning with how Levinson became acquainted with Messiaen and his

music.



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Levinson’s First Contact with Messiaen and His Music

How did you become familiar with Messiaen’s music? What prompted you to study with

him at the Paris Conservatoire? 3

I am trying to remember how I became familiar with his music. I think the first

recording I ever had was the one in which Boulez conducted Et exspecto resurrectionem

mortuorum and the Couleurs de la Cité céleste, which I remembered was issued by CBS

Records and had a white cover with silver letters; very modern, very spectacular. 4 I believe

I read about Messiaen in William Austin’s book on twentieth-century music.5 Although he

talked about Messiaen in a lot of ways that made me very curious, Austin focused on the

earlier music. His book was published in the mid-1960s and thus covered music through

the first half of the twentieth century. I remember that it included excerpts from Messiaen’s

Quatuor pour la fin du Temps and Les Corps glorieux, and the discussion of him intrigued

me. Then I bought a recording of Et exspecto, and it seemed to have no relationship to thekind of music that Austin described. At the time, I was a Stravinsky devotee, and still am.

One of the things about Stravinsky that I found very exciting was that, in the 1960s, he was

transforming his musical language into a highly exploratory, ‘ultra-modern idiom.’

3Gerald Levinson, Vincent Benitez.

4For a compact disc version of this recording, see Group instrumental à percussion de Strasbourg,

Orchestre du Domaine Musical, Pierre Boulez, conductor; Yvonne Loriod, piano; liner notes, Sony Classical

SMK 68 332, 1969/1978/1995.

5William W. Austin, Music in the Twentieth Century: From Debussy through Stravinsky (New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1966), 390-95.



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Considering that he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, that was truly amazing. So, I got the

sense, listening to these pieces by Messiaen from the 1960s, that something similar was

also true of him, which it was. I was struck by the stylistic distance that he had traveled,

from his early music that Austin described in ways that intrigued me, to these new pieces,

which sounded nothing like what I had heard and understood previously.

By the time I was in college, at the University of Pennsylvania, I was a fan of

Messiaen’s music, and I was talking about it to all of my friends. I probably bored them a

lot. George Crumb told me that back then I introduced him to a lot of Messiaen’s music,

and that it meant a lot to him. Two summers ago [2004], that came full circle, when both of

us were invited to be in residence at the ‘Festival Messiaen’ in Le Grave.6 He could not go

because it was his seventy-fifth birthday year, so I spoke on his behalf when his music was

played. He wrote a beautiful tribute to Messiaen, on how much his music had meant to

him, which I translated into French for the program book. Anyway, by the time I

graduated, I had studied with Crumb, and then with Richard Wernick and GeorgeRochberg. Wernick and Rochberg had no sympathy for Messiaen’s music. Rochberg

admitted that the Quatuor was a great masterpiece, but he had no patience with any of

Messiaen’s other music. We used to argue about it.

By the time I graduated, I thought I should go to Paris and study with Messiaen. I

wanted to find out how to do that, so I wrote letters to him at the Paris Conservatory,

6An annual summer festival celebrating the music of Messiaen in the towns of La Grave and Villar

d’Arène in the French Alps, near Messiaen’s country home. Each yearly festival normally consists of a ten-

day series of concerts, talks, and other events, celebrating themes predominant in Messiaen’s life and music

in a beautiful mountain setting that he loved.



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which were not answered. Then I learned that he was coming to Washington, D.C. to play

the world premiere of the Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité. This was in the

spring of 1972. One aspect of his music that I didn’t ‘cotton’ to was his organ music—I

really didn’t get it. I didn’t like the organ, and I didn’t understand his organ music.

Even the earlier works from the 1930s?

I am not sure. At some point, I obtained the Ducretet-Thompson LPs of him

playing all of his organ music. I still have those LPs, but they sound much better on their

CD-reissue.7 I do not know how long ago I had them. I tried listening to his organ music,

and I guess I didn’t connect with it too much. Then I found out he was being sponsored by

Catholic University, so I thought, well, if I want to find out what it’s like to study with

him, maybe I could try to arrange a meeting while he was in Washington. So, I left

messages for him at Catholic University. People there assured me that they would pass

them on to him. But I never got any responses, so I decided not to go. I thought, okay, thisguy is world famous. All those pictures of him—he looks as if he is on another planet,

totally unapproachable. But on the day of the concert, many of my friends asked why I

hadn’t left yet, since I was in Philadelphia, just a couple of hours from Washington. They

said: ‘It’s the world premiere of a new Messiaen piece. Why aren’t you there?’ I replied:

‘Well, . . . he didn’t answer my messages, and I’m not going to meet with him, and well

7 Messiaen par lui-même: Organ Works, Olivier Messiaen, liner notes, EMI Classics CDZ 7 67401

2, 1957/1992, 4 CDs.



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. . . I don’t like his organ music.’ And after enough people said, ‘Are you crazy?,’ I finally

got on the last possible train, and I remember I ran to the National Shrine where the

premiere was taking place, and I got in just as it was beginning. Messiaen played the

Méditations and as in most churches, the organ is concealed from the audience, so there

was this abstract experience with his music—an extremely strange music filling this vast

space, full of 3,500 organists.

Afterward, Catholic University gave him an honorary degree. That’s the first time

any of us in the audience saw him. He came down and there was an academic processional.

He actually had a cap and gown on. I can’t believe that he put up with that. It’s amazing, so

uncharacteristic. Then he gave a speech in French on esoteric, theological subjects with

which I was not familiar. Even if you understood French, which I did, I wasn’t sure what

he was talking about. I think he tried to explain why he wrote a piece about the Holy

Trinity to be played in the National Shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. He talked about

theological connections between the Virgin Mary and the Trinity, questions that were probably of no concern to anybody in the room. This just confirmed my impression that he

was a truly strange person and on another planet, spending his time thinking about things

very remote from what anybody else was thinking about, except, maybe, monks. So I

thought, well, I guess it was interesting to have been here, but I didn’t understand his

music. I won’t get to meet the guy, and he is really weird, but what the hell, I was here at

the premiere.

Afterwards there was a reception line, with all 3,500 organists. Most of them had

copies of the Banquet céleste. That’s the organ music of his that they knew, from 1928.



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This was 1972—they were a little behind. I had the sense from the room that everyone else

was at least as bewildered by the music as I was. But I thought it would be interesting to

see him close up—I thought, ‘I’ll just sort of sneak into the reception line.’ When I came

up to him, I just suddenly blurted out something like, ‘Can I talk to you for a minute?,’

instead of everyone else’s, ‘It’s such an honor to meet you. Would you please autograph

my score?’ I just sort of blurted this out, in my French, and he looked up at me, in that

intense, direct way he had, and said, ‘You must be the young man that’s been sending me

all of those messages.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, by all means.’ And Yvonne Loriod-

Messiaen got up and said, ‘Here, take my chair. Do you speak French? You can help

translate.’ So immediately upon meeting him, I assumed the role that I would take up for

so many years afterward. And so she said, ‘Can I get you a Coke?’ So there I was, being

taken in by this maternal figure, and being asked if I could help a little bit, and talking to

Messiaen about studying with him. Just like that. I was in shock, because they were such

nice people, so courteous, unpretentious, and friendly—and that was really a revelation, because I hadn’t thought of him as a human being. And the first meeting . . . well, he

recognized who I was. He confirmed that by my conversation with him. He was very tuned

into people. Actually, I think he was quasi-telepathic, or at least very, very intuitive about

people. He had many students who didn’t speak very good French, and we all felt we could

easily make ourselves understood to Messiaen, much more easily than to other people.

Was Yvonne Loriod in tune with people in the same way?



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Not in the same way. In fact, I always felt that I spoke better French in talking with

Messiaen than I did in talking with her. Partly because the way he spoke was very slow,

beautifully pronounced, and very clear, and . . . she spoke—she speaks—very fast and with

much more slang. She’s harder to understand, which made me more nervous, and my

French would fall apart. Since Messiaen was very patient, I felt that I could take my time

and think it out; I probably did express myself better. Messiaen told me something

intimidating at that first meeting, about all those terrible entrance exams at the

Conservatory. I was twenty years old and I was not a virtuoso in any way, and I thought all

of this sounded pretty tough.

I was and still am an amateur pianist who loves the piano. But I did not have much

technique, and I heard about these solfège exams and all the stuff they do, and I thought, I

don’t think I would pass. They space these exams from October to December, so you have

to actually go there and spend three months of your time just to find out if you’re getting

into the school or not. Messiaen said, ‘If you come over, and you don’t get officiallyadmitted, you are still more than welcome to audit the class, but the difference is, you

won’t have your works played through the Conservatory,’—and this was a really

wonderful thing. You got really good players, you got played over the radio, and so on.

And he said, ‘I don’t take private students anymore. I just don’t have the time, so it’s only

through the Conservatory; think about it.’ I figured that maybe I should wait a little longer

until I had better odds of passing those exams, and so I went to the University of Chicago

for two years and studied with Ralph Shapey. After I got a master’s degree there, I thought,

now that I’m a little older, I’d feel a little less at sea if I went to Paris and didn’t get in. So I



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got a grant from the University of Chicago to do that, and went over there in the fall of

1974. I found out that Messiaen’s class met for twelve hours a week—three four-hour

sessions—talk about generous; that was just amazing!

Levinson’s Studies with Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire

Were the classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?

I don’t remember. It probably was something like that. You know you can consider

an American university class as one-third of the time of that—three hours a week. In order

to help foreigners who had crossed oceans to try to get into his class, Messiaen was willing

to come early to do dictation exercises with us.

Oh, really? That is interesting.

It was. Those of us who went, got in, and those of us who didn’t, didn’t. Messiaenknew that the training in other countries wasn’t the same. They didn’t drill this dictation

solfège stuff the way they do at the Paris Conservatory, and we would have been at a

disadvantage. What’s very interesting is that those dictations, are, to my mind, anti-

musical. The melodic dictations were chromatic, pretty much atonal, but not music. They

had no shape. They were these artificial test-tube things, which would test your hearing of

intervals and rhythms, but they went on for so long that they became a memory trick—it

was like memorizing random numbers. It wasn’t music; it was random shapes.



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Messiaen couldn’t bring himself to drill these kinds of non-musical melodies with

us, so when he wanted to practice atonal dictation, he brought in Schoenberg and Berg—

the actual music that was atonal and chromatic, stuff that had phrases. So, that was

interesting. He still wanted to use actual music to train us. The other types of dictation that

I found valuable, and very French, were pure chordal dictations, which involved up to

eight-note chords, where they would tell you what the bass note was. But these weren’t

progressions, and they weren’t functional, and they could be quite complex as chords. For

me, that was representative of the French taste for sounds in themselves, which was just

like Messiaen’s music. He would play more or less random chords for us, training us to

hear things like that. In hearing that way, I do well, and that’s something I have in common

with the French way of hearing. Anyway, a Russian friend and I were both accepted for

study there. Some other foreigners weren’t accepted.

Could you give me an overview of the class? How was it conducted? What was a typicalclass session like? What repertoire was covered during your two years there?

Well, let’s see. A lot of things you would have read about his class. There was his

plainchant course, the Greek rhythm thing, including Le Printemps by Claude Le Jeune

[1528/30–1600], which combines Renaissance melody and polyphony with Greek

meters— actually wonderful music.

That’s in the first volume of the Traité [de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie] , correct?



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Yes. When I started getting the volumes of the Traité, I thought, wow, this is just

like being there! I could almost hear him talking. What’s in the Traité is just like what he

did in class.

That’s good to know.

What he kept telling students all these years is what he wrote down. Some of it,

actually, Yvonne [Loriod-Messiaen] put together from his notes. They were probably the

notes he used in class. We did his short history of opera. I don’t know if we did all of his

favorite operas, or remember if we discussed Mozart, but I do know that we talked about

Pelléas [et Mélisande] and Boris [Godunov]. One day he brought in the score of Pelléas

that had been a gift to him on his tenth birthday. This was an historic, iconic thing.8 Oh my

God, that score was about sixty years old or so, and had tiny handwriting all over it.

Because we had that Russian student in the class, the discussions on Boris were

more interesting than usual. Messiaen said, ‘ Boris is the great Russian opera to non-Russians, but to Russians it’s Khovanshchina, not Boris.’ So we decided to talk about that.

That was brought in, something that Messiaen knew less well, and we had very interesting

discussions about it. A friend of mine, a conductor who had just toured with his teacher in

Russia [Charles Brück, conducting the first Russian performances of the Turangalîla-

Symphonie], brought me back an Urtext score of Boris, the non-Rimskyized version, which

8 Jean (or Jehan) de Gibon (1873-1952), Messiaen’s harmony teacher when he lived in Nantes,

France as a boy, gave him a copy of the vocal score of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Messiaen cited this

gift as a seminal moment in his development as a musician.



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now is pretty well known, but wasn’t in the mid ‘70s. I was able to show that score to

Messiaen while we were talking about Boris —he wasn’t familiar with it—and he saw how

different it was. I remember an interesting comment he made. In the Coronation scene

[scene 2], when they sing the Slava theme, there’s a place where the chorus sings it in a

fugal manner, but with imitative entries at the tritone [D/Aß]. Messiaen was talking about

that passage, and since I had just gotten the original Mussorgsky version, I was able to say,

‘You know there’s something interesting—Mussorgsky didn’t write that—that’s Rimsky,

who felt that chorus needed to be longer, so he threw in this fugal thing.’ Messiaen replied,

‘That’s actually very interesting, because when you think about it, it is a bit academic. He’s

using the tritone, which is intrinsic to this scene and its bell chords, but in a slightly

academic way, so there’s a sense that it’s Rimsky—but I still like the passage.’9

So when Messiaen taught, he sat at the piano and played?

He was always at the piano, singing and playing.

Did you take a lot of notes?

Yes, I took a lot of notes. Some people did, some people didn’t. I wrote all over my

score of Pelléas. I acquired a lot of scores back then. There was a music store on the way

to the Conservatory, with scores displayed in the window. I remember seeing the full score

of Pelléas, of Daphnis et Chloé. They tended to cost one hundred francs, which was about

9See Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky, Boris Godunov in Full Score (Rimsky-Korsakov Version)

(New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1987), 85-88, 103-5.



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twenty bucks at the time. And I thought, ‘How could they charge twenty dollars for one

piece?’ Now I’m pretty nostalgic for those days. If you could buy those scores now, they’d

cost about that amount in dollars. I’m glad I overcame my initial resistance, because I

bought a lot of really wonderful scores, including the Turangalîla. I had to buy a big metal

trunk to send this music library home when I returned to the United States. In fact,

Messiaen said, ‘I think one of the most important tools of a composer is his library.’

Oh, sure. Definitely.

You could see that in his case. One of the things that touched me most about

Messiaen was his openness about acknowledging his sources. The Traité is full of that, and

also the Technique [de mon langage musical ]. He’d say, ‘I found this progression in Ravel.

Here it is in the original, here’s how I made a sequence out of it, and here’s how I put it

into my music.’ There’s the chord progression associated with the Chorus of Sleeping

Soldiers in Wozzeck [Act II, scene 5] that Messiaen uses repeatedly in his music.

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Sometimes he doesn’t even transpose it. It’s just there, undigested, and yet he makes it

‘sound like Messiaen.’

Through the ‘deforming prism’ of his musical language, as he says?

Yes. There’s another progression from Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher that he

uses verbatim, without transposition, in much of his late music. It’s a big deal in Saint

10See Alban Berg, Wozzeck , Klavierauszug von Fritz Heinrich Klein (Wien: Universal Edition,

1958), 169-70.



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François. It seems to me that the funeral carillon in the last scene of Saint François is not

too far removed from the coronation scene of Boris. There are a few extra notes in the

chords, but they’re a similar type of thinking.

Messiaen would sometimes talk about his music, if pressed, particularly if a concert

was coming up—there were a lot of performances of his music in Paris. If we begged him,

he would discuss the music of his that was going to be played, such as Et exspecto, Livre

d’orgue, Turangalîla. I don’t remember them all, but there were a lot.

Since he was professor of composition at this time, and since it was a composition class,

did you have the opportunity to have your pieces played in class and critiqued?

That’s the other thing. He would make time for that. The interesting thing is that to

get into the Conservatory composition class, the last thing they wanted to see was your

music. You had to go through all these elimination rounds, dictation, solfège, all that stuff.

Then they had the mise en loge, which, in Debussy’s time, lasted twenty-four hours. In mytime, it was reduced to seventeen. You came in at six o’clock in the morning and left at

eleven at night, something like that. You were not allowed to leave except to go to the

bathroom. You had to bring your own food in, and a guard accompanied you if you went to

the bathroom. They gave you a bit of music, and you had to do something with it.

There were two mises en loge. One was called style classique, and the other

moderne. They wouldn’t tell you anything in advance about the classique. For the

moderne, they would tell you the names of two composers, from whose music you would

be given excerpts, which you would have to use as a basis to write something for a



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specified instrumentation. That year the excerpts were going to be from Stravinsky and

Dutilleux. Messiaen helped us by acquainting us with Dutilleux’s music. As for the

classique, I remember they gave us the oboe d’amore introduction to the aria ‘Qui sedes ad

dexteram patris’ from the Gloria of the B-Minor Mass, one of those long obbligato

introductions before the aria even starts, and said, ‘Write variations on this for string

quartet, without access to a piano.’ And then, you’d try to catch up on sleep, and two days

later, you took the other mise en loge, which was to write something in a contemporary

vein, based on either an excerpt from Stravinsky or one from Dutilleux, your choice. The

Stravinsky one was from Agon, of all things. It was a sort of twelve-tone fugue that

happens near the end of the piece. It’s a fully serial piece by that point. And being a

Stravinsky fanatic, I happened to know the piece pretty well. So I was able to write

something that kind of sounded like the original, because I knew how it went. And I knew

that it was a trap. They said Stravinsky and they thought maybe we wouldn’t notice that it

was twelve-tone. So I worked out all the rows and stuff. I did it right. Only after that didthey allow you to present your own music. That was the last thing they wanted to see.

Did they evaluate your compositions at that point?

Well, they got submitted to a jury, somehow. You were allowed to submit a tape.

So I gave them a tape. There was a piece I finished my senior year in college that I was

fairly proud of. It was a song cycle, which actually had an oblique reference to Messiaen in

it. I used a progression of two chords that was taken from a melody from the Poèmes pour



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Mi. One of my precious recordings is one where Messiaen accompanies a singer on

Poèmes pour Mi.11 Have you heard that?

I think I have an old LP of it.

On Everest, right?

Yes. I have that exact LP.

That was one of my precious possessions. I don’t think I was there at the jury. I

think a tape was played for them. Maybe I was. I don’t remember if you had to present

your music in person. So, anyway, I got in.

In the class we were invited to bring our own music in, particularly works in

progress that we wanted Messiaen’s feedback on. He would schedule that ahead of time. If

somebody said, ‘There is something I’d like to show you,’ he would say, ‘Why don’t we

look at it from 9:00 to 9:30 on Wednesday?’ And that meant, if you didn’t want to just sitthere and be bored while somebody else talked about his or her music, you could come to

class later. So you would, more or less, have private time, although people might be

looking in on you. He would devote his full attention to your score and give you feedback.

He wasn’t very, very hands-on about digging into how the piece was written. We were

assumed to be fairly advanced by then. He would give us many detailed tips on

orchestration: ‘That doesn’t balance—it sticks out,’ or ‘You need to reinforce this,’ or

11 Poèmes pour Mi; Lise Arseguest, soprano; Olivier Messiaen, piano; Everest 3269, sound

recording.



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‘That’s not in a good register.’ There was a lot of attention to instrumental details. I

remember one comment, about the particularly sumptuous voicing and orchestration of a

chordal passage in my orchestral piece in progress, that it was bien capitoné. That sent me

to the dictionary; it turned out to mean ‘well-upholstered’—the mot juste for the sound I

was aiming for!

Messiaen also talked about pacing and shaping. I have two stories to tell. The first

one is about my first year there, when I made a mistake and did not take enough advantage

of this kind of teaching. The second year I did much better—I had learned my lesson. The

first year, I had come out of a long period of writer’s block, but I felt very alive and

stimulated in France. So I got back to work pretty early in my [second] year. And I wrote a

forty-minute piece for chamber orchestra, a really big, ambitious piece. And I refrained

from showing it to him. But it was scheduled for performance on the radio, and the

Conservatoire arranged for very good players. They were recent alums, generally, of the

Conservatory; they were top-notch players. A friend of mine was going to conduct it, buthe decided he wouldn’t be able to handle it. So he offered to coach me so I would be able

to conduct it. I had a little conducting training, but I really shouldn’t have done that. I also

never showed Messiaen the piece, for reasons I still don’t understand. Finally, it was about

two weeks before the performance, and I had really been doing all-nighters to finish the

piece. I finally thought, ‘I really should show it to him.’ So, we made an appointment. It

was a really long piece. He said, ‘Let’s set aside a good hour for this.’ So, everyone else in

the class was warned, ‘If you want to sit in on this, fine, but if you think it will be boring,

don’t come until 10:00 o’clock, or even later.’ I was still finishing the score, and I had



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stayed up really late the previous night to actually finish it. I set my alarm clock, but

wouldn’t you know it, I overslept. I woke up at 11, and I threw the alarm clock across the

room. I remember it. I would blame the alarm clock. I rushed down to the Conservatory on

the Metro, and Messiaen was looking very stern. ‘Where were you?,’ he said. I was deeply

apologetic. He had been there, but practically nobody else was, because they thought it was

my time, and all that time was wasted. I stood him up! So we arranged for another time to

meet, and he looked over the piece. There wasn’t really enough time to read the score, it

was so long. But he saw a lot of problems in it. He said, ‘You really should have come to

me sooner.’ But it was too late. I had to finish copying out the parts.

That concert was the worst catastrophe of my musical life. For one thing, all of us

composers had lied about how long our pieces were; otherwise, they never would have let

us schedule them. There were four new pieces, and I told them that my forty-minute piece

was twenty-five minutes long. All my colleagues had done something similar. And then it

was the last concert of the season, and there was a chorus that had gotten bumped from anearlier concert, so they threw that on. I found out that the Brahms B-major Trio was also

being added to the program. That’s one of Brahms’s longest pieces. So I went to the

director of the concert, saying, ‘You can’t do that. That’s impossible. The piece is fifty

minutes long.’ And the guy looked up and said, ‘No, they said it was fifteen minutes.’ I

said, ‘Well, are they just doing the first movement? Even that’s longer than fifteen

minutes.’ And he said, ‘No, four movements; fifteen minutes.’ And then I realized that the

guy whose job it was to coordinate chamber music at the Paris Conservatory didn’t know

Brahms, because they don’t like Brahms in France. So you could lie about Brahms and get



19

away with it. And then André Jolivet died that week, so they had to do a tribute to him.

They had Pierre-Laurent Aimard come and play the Cinq Danses rituelles. So, long story

short, the concert was five and a half hours long.

My forty-minute piece started at 11:30 p.m. Two-thirds of the audience had gone,

but Messiaen was still there. My piece was mostly slow, and it got slower and longer as it

went along. The fifth movement out of five was the longest and slowest, and it fell apart at

the performance. There were long stretches of actually nothing happening. Eventually I

was reduced to calling out rehearsal numbers, saying ‘vingt-trois,’ but even then nobody

came in, because they were all sort of blitzed. And so the concert ended at 1:15 a.m. with

Pierre-Laurent playing. The technicians got mad and dimmed the lights about 1:00 o’clock

in the middle of the [Cinq] Danses rituelles. And Pierre-Laurent didn’t miss a beat. Now

he’s a great master. Everybody knows Pierre-Laurent Aimard now. He was seventeen then,

and an amazing prodigy. I asked him afterwards, ‘How did you keep playing when all

those lights went out?’ And he said, ‘The lights went out?’ That to me was a real lessonabout what a real master performer does. So anyway, Messiaen said to me, ‘You know,

you really should have talked to me beforehand.’

That work for chamber orchestra is the most major piece of mine that I do not keep

in my active catalogue anymore. It had some lovely things in it, but it was hopelessly,

badly shaped. So the next year I wrote a clarinet trio, which I still like a lot, and am just

finishing a recording of it now, thirty years later. Another was a two-panel orchestra piece,

of which the first one’s pretty good, very slow and very massive. I showed that to

Messiaen as soon as I had a good draft of it, and he went through it with a fine-tooth comb,



20

and he was very helpful. I remember he said, ‘This movement is eighteen pages of score,’

and the second movement—which I had the first little bit of—was a fast movement with

lots of notes in it, which had cost me a lot of effort. I had maybe five or six pages of the

second movement. I was exhausted from writing it out, because it had scads of notes in it.

And he said, ‘Well, that’s good. You just need this to be about a hundred pages long.’ I

said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Well, in my experience, to balance slow music with fast music

takes about five times as many pages.’ Well, if you look at the score of Turangalîla, the

fifth movement and the last movement go on for an unbelievable number of pages, covered

with sixteenth notes. Solid sixteenth notes. That’s why Stravinsky made that crack that all

you need to write Turangalîla is a copious supply of ink. In the end, when you asked

Messiaen to look closely at your pieces, he would do it. The most important thing you

came away with, more than any specific compositional advice, was the feeling that your

musical efforts had been deeply understood and generously supported.

When interesting contemporary composers were in town, which would includemany of his former students, he would invite them to his class. I think Tristan Murail and

Gérard Grisey came to class. This spectralist thing was new in the mid ‘70s. These

composers were Messiaen’s recent alums. At least one of them came to class and talked

about their music. I definitely remember Xenakis coming to class. Of the operas we talked

about, the ones that made the biggest impression on me were Pelléas, Boris,

Khovanshchina, and Wozzeck .

Any Wagner during your two years there? The Ring of the Nibelungen?



21

I’m not sure. I should remember that. We must have looked at it, given the way he

went chronologically through opera. I know that Parsifal was staged then, and I remember

going to see that. That was the closest experience I ever had to Saint François. The pacing

and the feeling were actually a little bit similar. But I don’t remember him talking about

Parsifal . We would also bring in things. We took about half a class where I acquainted him

with George Crumb’s newest music, ‘Music for a Summer Evening,’ for two pianos and

percussion, which was written for the dedication of this very music building here at

Swarthmore. That’s why we have the manuscript page of it out in the lobby. But I didn’t

know anything about Swarthmore at the time. Messiaen’s reactions to that music were very

interesting. He really liked it and was moved by it. But, hearing the Petrouchka- or Boris-

type chords and whole-tone harmonies in it, he said, ‘You know it’s very interesting that

American composers are finding these sounds, because it’s what we French composers

grew up with back in the 20s. It seems a little “old hat” to me.’ I asked, ‘What about the

pure pentatonic stuff in the last movement?’ ‘That seems different,’ he said. ‘That’s so old,it’s eternal.’

I also brought Ives’s Fourth Symphony to the class, which he found quite

fascinating. I don’t know if he had known that piece beforehand. That’s the piece I used to

get my prix in analyse when I was in Claude Ballif’s class; my friends were in Betsy

Jolas’s class. She filled in for Messiaen when he was touring, which he did a lot. And so I

did get to know her that way. That was a nice bonus of the class. In fact, Messiaen’s first

trip away after I entered the class was to come to New York to hear the first performance

of the Des canyons aux étoiles . . . , which my parents went to, and I thought that was



23

In the summer of 1983, when we were completing a year-long around-the-world

journey, after our second stay in Bali, we visited the Messiaens briefly at the cottage in

Petichet. They were knee-deep in proofreading the thousands of pages for parts of Saint

François and rehearsing the singers, and were beyond exhaustion. Messiaen looked so old

and tired—we were really worried. Nigel and Peter’s biography confirms that his health

was very poor at that point.13 When we saw him six months later, after the premiere of the

opera, the transformation was astounding. He looked years younger and stronger. Seeing

Betsy Jolas in the hall afterward, I said that the opera was marvelous, magnificent, but so

long. ‘It's so generous,’ she replied rightly.

I saw Messiaen a lot in 1986 because we went to Boston for the U.S. (concert)

premiere of music from Saint François, for which I translated the libretto and program

notes, and I went to Detroit for the premiere of the Livre du Saint Sacrement . In between,

my biggest piece, my Symphony, Anahata, had been premiered, so I played that for him in

Detroit.

14

I have pictures of him following that score, and he wrote about that in the bookwith Claude Samuel. He said some very nice things about the piece.15

13Hill and Simeone, 340.

14Levinson composed his Anahata: Symphony No. 1 in 1984-86. The Northeastern Pennsylvania

Philharmonic commissioned the work, premiering it on 18 April 1986, with Hugh Wolff conducting.

15‘To the American Gerald Levinson, a composer of great talent, who has found inspiration for some

of his works in the gamelan of Bali and the music of Nepal and Tibet, and who just wrote a masterpiece: the

Symphonie Anahata for large orchestra.’ See Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color: Conversations with Claude

Samuel , trans. E. Thomas Glasow (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994), 189.



24

Then I saw him in New York. I know he was there more than once during his

eightieth-year tour in 1988. Zubin Mehta did the Turangalîla in New York. I remember

seeing Messiaen there, and again at a New York performance of Des canyons aux

étoiles . . . . And we had a very lovely visit with the Messiaens at home in Paris in late

1990. He was already suffering from serious back pain by then, but was hard at work on

the Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà . . . , which he described in some detail, especially its extravagant

orchestration: ‘If I can’t commit these follies now, at my age, when can I?’ We exchanged

letters in between times. He was a gracious correspondent. That’s how we were in touch

with each other. After 1986, I never sent him any more of my music, strangely enough. I

don’t think he heard anything of mine after Anahata. I actually didn’t write too much for a

while. We had two kids during that time, and I slowed down a lot. In 1990, I finished a

couple of big pieces, and I remember in early 1991, I thought I should send something to

him. I didn’t get around to it for a while. I was a little slow. And then he died in 1992. It’s

possible that the last piece he heard of mine was that symphony, I’m not sure. There wereletters. In fact, I came up for promotion to full professor at the end of 1991, when he was

already pretty sick, and he wrote a beautiful recommendation for me in nice, clear

handwriting. It’s actually dated Berlin or somewhere else in Germany. I think it was

December of 1991, and he was still able to go to some concert in Germany, and wrote a

really nice letter from there.

How could Swarthmore College refuse granting you a promotion when they received a

recommendation from one of the world’s greatest composers?



25

A letter of his helped me get hired in the first place in 1977. I was completely

green. I’d never taught a class in my life. I hadn’t had a graduate teaching fellowship, and

this is a very teaching-oriented place. But my two colleagues here, James Freeman, the

conductor, and Peter Gram Swing, who was the founder of this department, liked my

music. They particularly liked that song cycle I’d written as a senior in college. And

Messiaen wrote a really nice letter. And those two things made them think they would take

a chance on me, which for a few years, may have seemed like it hadn’t paid off, because I

was a terrible teacher. I’m less terrible now, but I was a disaster then.

I’d like to turn now to tonality, color symbolism, and natural resonance in Messiaen’s

music. I have always felt that Messiaen has been unclear regarding how tonality is defined

in his music. I’m not sure how tonality is asserted, emphasized, or put forth. I know, in

reading a lot of the literature on Messiaen, that Peter Hill remarked, when taking lessons

from him, that Messiaen did talk about tonality. He would say that ‘this is in the key of thedominant, or the dominant of the dominant’ when Hill was playing some of Messiaen’s

works for him. There are these fleeting remarks. From your experience, how is tonality

defined in Messiaen’s music? If something is in C major or A major . . . I have some ideas,

based upon my analysis of his music.

I think he thought, in a lot of his earlier music, which often uses key signatures, that

there was a background tonality, and that the basic functions of tonality are there—you

could have read about this even as early as the Technique —that, let’s say, in Harawi, or in

the love theme from Turangalîla —in the Garden of Love’s Sleep, there’s an Fƒ tonality,



26

there’s a region which is clearly dominant, there’s a region that’s tonic, and there’s a

region that’s subdominant. Each of them is colored by the octatonic mode, Messiaen’s

‘Mode two.’ The three different transpositions of the octatonic mode are coloristic

decorations—elaborations of the three basic harmonic functions. So that theme begins on

the dominant, moves to the tonic, and has a climax on the subdominant, about which he

always said, ‘That’s the romantic climax.’ When I’ve given talks on Turangalîla, I play the

last page of Tristan [und Isolde], and I play the last climax of the love theme in the eighth

movement of Turangalîla. It’s clearly the same music. What is it? It’s a big plagal

cadence, with prominent added sixths, in both cases.

Did he think in large structural terms?

I don’t think he thought in structural terms. If he did, it was very primitive. The

idea of sonata form, as exemplified in the fifth movement of Turangalîla, that’s just a

scaffolding it’s based on. You know, I teach a lot of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Ithink of sonata form as an extremely fascinating, dynamic way of thinking. It’s not a form.

It’s not—this happens, and then this happens, and then you plug this in there. But the

French conception of sonata form is more like a recipe. And it’s that recipe that Messiaen

follows in the fifth movement of Turangalîla, but it’s filled with the most wildly radical

materials. It’s very paradoxical because it’s put into this mold of clearly labeled first

theme, transition, second theme, cadence, development section with modulations, and

recapitulation. But the actual music lights a stick of dynamite under that rigid mold. The

actual processes, all those rhythmic games. . . .



27

I think one of the most thrilling places in all of his music is the development

section of that fifth movement, where the brass takes the ‘statue’ theme in personnages

rythmiques [rhythmic characters] and polyrhythmic counterpoint. It really sounds like the

universe is about to explode. Extraordinary energy level. Well, that fills the ‘here comes

the development’ part of the recipe. As that passage goes on, the personnages rythmiques

passages are extremely dissonant with harsh clashes between the different brass groups.

They alternate with restatements of the theme where the key signatures come back, and it

goes through different keys. I think he even called them ‘plateaus.’ It has nothing in

common with the way Beethoven would go through keys as a dynamic process in a

development section. It’s just a kind of a grid—like a preformed grid—that you lay your

materials over.

What about tonality in the music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s?

You’re right. That’s a different story.

I’m thinking of the ‘Chorale on the Holy Mountain’ from La Transfiguration de Nôtre-

Seigneur Jésus-Christ where all phrases come to rest on E-major chords.

I copied that out. That Chorale is one of the most perfect things he ever wrote, one

of the most extraordinary things in all of music. It shouldn’t work. I can play a bunch of it

by heart. You can identify what the chords are, one by one. The first one is the Pelléas

chord, the second one is the Daphnis et Chloé chord, the third one is one of the turning



28

chords, and the fourth one is an E-major triad.16 How it moves from a sort of polytonal

sound to thick and almost clustery atonal sounds to pure triads—that’s pure magic! Smooth

voice leading seems to be a part of it, but that’s the part that he can’t explain, or doesn’t

want to, and why that chorale seems so perfect, why it really works. Well, that’s where

your work really begins, it seems to me.

Was Messiaen interested in voice leading with respect to his compositions? I’ve read all of

these accounts of his teaching. He seemed to be most interested in isolated chords, and the

history of chords.

Right. Chords as isolated objects. It’s not unique to him. It’s very French, as

indicated by those dictation exercises at the Conservatory. We don’t do that here. I try to

do that with my students because I think it’s a good kind of aural training. Chords as things

16The chords from Pelléas et Mélisande and Daphnis et Chloé are two sonorities that Messiaen has

identified in his analyses of the music of Debussy and Ravel at the Paris Conservatoire. They are comprised

of two superimposed triads a semitone apart. As used in the Chorale, the Pelléas (or Golaud ) chord consists

of an Fƒ-minor triad on the bottom and F-minor triad on top, and the Daphnis et Chloé chord its mirror image

(an F-minor triad on the bottom and an Fƒ-minor triad on top). In a filmed class session of Messiaen teaching

at the Paris Conservatoire drawn from Denise Tual and Michel Fano’s documentary, Messiaen et les oiseaux

(1972), Messiaen discussed the Golaud chord and its relationship to the Daphnis et Chloé chord. The two

chords are mirror images of one another, with the Golaud chord featuring a B ß-minor triad on the bottom and

A-major triad on top, and the Daphnis et Chloé chord an implied A-major triad on the bottom and Aƒ-minor

triad on top. See Jean Boivin, La classe de Messiaen (Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1995), 217-20; and

Vincent Benitez, ‘A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis,’ College Music Symposium 40

(2000): 120-27.



29

in themselves, apart from context. I don’t remember Messiaen talking about voice leading,

but when you play that Chorale, you just feel how each chord moves [at this point,

Levinson has moved to the piano in his office and plays chords from the Chorale]. There’s

a bit of the German sixth in that [Levinson plays the third chord, a turning chord with a

second-inversion F-major triad at the bottom]. The next phrase is an elaboration of the

first. I think part of it is Messiaen’s clear phrase writing. He presents his materials very

simply. But I think of that as tonality by sheer assertion—that phrases keep ending on the

same triad, so they lead you to expect that triad and that—at the end of that Chorale—feels

like a very satisfying sense of cadence.

This is what I have gathered from my work. For example, in his book on twentieth-century

music, Robert Morgan discusses how tonality is established by assertion in the music of

Debussy and in early works of Stravinsky.17 And I’m thinking that in Messiaen’s music—

especially in the later works, tonality is just asserted. The example I have here is the Angel’s music from scene 3, ‘Le Baiser au Lépreux,’ of Saint François. You have these

phrases and modes. Transpositions of mode three begin and end with an A-major chord in

first inversion. You have all these nice colors in between.

Yes, that’s a special kind of tonality. It’s the tonality of A major in that particular

spacing. I think there are precedents for that, such as the beginning of Beethoven’s Fourth

Piano Concerto: G-major chord with a B on top, with a unique, characteristic spacing

17Robert Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and

America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 45-50, 89-103.



30

[Levinson plays a G-major chord with tripled third, and the third on top, at the piano]. It’s

not just about a tonality, but a particular sound. It’s the spacing, and the third on top, the

extra doubling of the third, and . . .

The particular color.

So, the Angel’s key of A major is inextricably associated with the coloration of that

particular voicing of the first-inversion A-major triad. It’s not just the key of A major in

general. What’s really remarkable is the variety of chords, their level of dissonance,

thickness, or thinness. A heterogeneous assortment of sounds that somehow makes

harmonic sense. Messiaen talked about the ‘harmonic dictionary’; you probably heard that

phrase. He said that’s an important compositional tool. You just keep adding things to your

harmonic dictionary, such as ideas from the music of other composers, your own ideas, or

whatever. But what’s really interesting is how systematically he thought about the things

he did. His list-making compulsion is really extreme. But the music, at least at its best inthe Chorale from La Transfiguration, sounds completely free and daring. These clusters,

the pure octatonic mode, the third mode, the Wozzeck progression, it’s so heterogeneous,

but that’s the last thing that occurs to you, listening to that Chorale. That sums up

Messiaen’s later personality for me. He’s an incredible magpie. The range of stuff that

he’ll draw into his music, even quite undigested, untransformed quotations from other

music—it sounds like him. This business of the distorting prism—sometimes he doesn’t

even bother to distort it. It’s just that he places it into his world somehow, and it seems

right at home, even though it hasn’t been altered a bit.



31

In a conversation I had with Father Jean-Rodolphe Kars [22 May 2006, Paray-le-Monial,

France], he described Messiaen as ‘the Catholic composer.’ 18

Small c?

Small c and capital C, in the sense that we were talking about Messiaen and his

relationship to Saint Thomas Aquinas. There’s an article by Father Pascal Ide that

was published in Olivier Messiaen: Homme de foi.19 Father Ide is a Thomist, and he is

comparing, of course, Messiaen with Thomas Aquinas. I pursued that comparison with

Father Kars in our conversation, and he thought of Messiaen as a modern-day counterpart

to Thomas Aquinas, in that Aquinas would draw from the philosophies of non-Christian

thinkers and incorporate them into his theology.

I don’t know that much about Aquinas, but I’m very touched by how much

Messiaen drew from the symbolism of Buddhism and Hinduism for Et exspecto, and the

Amazonian bird from Peruvian mythology, which you only hear at the moment of death, in Harawi. What I never knew until reading Paul Griffiths’s book, then in Peter Hill and

18Father Jean-Rodolphe Kars (b. 1947) studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire. He was a finalist at

the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1967, and the first-prize winner at the First International

Olivier Messiaen Piano Competition in 1968, which launched his career as a concert pianist. In 1966, Father

Kars began to study the piano music of Messiaen. He was fascinated by the music and passionate about the

composer’s accompanying commentaries. This led ultimately to his conversion to Catholicism and vocation

as a priest.

19Père Pascal Ide, ‘Une rencontre décisive,’ in Olivier Messiaen, homme de foi: Regard sur son

œuvre d’orgue, Église de la Trinité (Paris: Trinité Média Communication, 1995), 76-79.



32

Nigel Simeone’s book, was how the main tunes there are transformations of Peruvian folk

tunes.20 That main theme is one of the most beautiful themes in all of Messiaen, in my

opinion. It doesn’t make it less beautiful to realize that he just tweaked a folk tune to get

that.

Let’s move on to color symbolism. Messiaen said that color drove his approach to music.

There is music that is colored, and music that isn’t. He always admired painters. He had a

friendship with Charles Blanc-Gatti [1895-1965]. Surely, the symbolism of colors, in my

mind, must have played some role in his approach to composition. I don’t think it could

have been fortuitous to choose, for instance, E Major for parts of Scene 7 of Saint

François , ‘Les Stigmates.’ E Major evokes red for Messiaen, and red has always been

associated with Pentecost and the blood of martyrs. And also the red robes that cardinals

wear to signify power. But it would be strange for me if Messiaen chose to set ‘Les

Stigmates’ in A Major. It just wouldn’t make sense.As I recall, the only tonality in that movement is associated with the chorus at the

end, right?

Yes, everything else is very dissonant and atonal. There are the Mode de valeurs-like

passages. But then once you get to the chorale at the end, it’s E Major when the chorus

calls out ‘François.’ You have these E-Major chords. And then it ends. You have E Major

20Paul Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1985).



33

appearing at structural points. In some of the literature on Messiaen, for example, the

Conversations with Claude Samuel , you get glimpses of Messiaen’s thoughts on color

symbolism. Messiaen talked about the truth of love, and the love of truth—it’s a play on the

color violet. Here, the reddish side of violet would signify the love of truth, and the bluish

side of violet—hyacinth—would signify the truth of love. I’m just wondering about color

symbolism.

You’ve given that more thought than I have. I don’t know. For one thing, Messiaen

admitted that the sound/color sense is personal and at least somewhat subjective. He

thought that everybody had the capacity to have sound stimulate an inner vision of color,

but to varying degrees. He was hypersensitive to that. But he wasn’t unique. And he

hedged when people asked him, ‘Would everybody else see the same colors?’ He would

say, ‘Well, no. Everyone’s experience is colored by their own personality, in the sense that

everybody’s senses are different.’ People would see things more or less vividly, or more or

less specifically or generally. But he would also say, ‘I don’t see how, if one person seessomething as blue, that someone else could see it as yellow. There would be general

families of colors that I would think would have to be in common.’ So he hedged his bet

about how subjective or objective it was. I didn’t remember that E Major symbolized red

for him. Because if I was just thinking, E Major, it doesn’t sound red. It sounds like a

cooler, purer, color—not as much as C Major—but . . .

Yes, it’s red. The stage lighting at the choral calls of ‘François’ in Les Stigmates is red-

orange. He actually called for red-orange stage lighting.



35

And for Messiaen, it was in his head.

He saw colors as if he were seeing them through his eyes. Actually, Messiaen told

this to lots of people. He pointed to one of Blanc-Gatti’s paintings on a wall in his

apartment at the Rue Marcadet, a painting of a church steeple with great big spirals coming

out of it, and said, ‘That looks surrealist, but it isn’t. He [Blanc-Gatti] was painting exactly

what he saw. It’s not the same for me. In fact, it helps me if I close my eyes and really

focus my attention. It’s an inner, imaginary vision. It feels real to me, but it’s at an

imaginary level that’s different from a medical condition of synesthesia, which Blanc-Gatti

had.’

What is your opinion of natural resonance? Messiaen always talked about natural

resonance as the foundation of his approach to harmony. ‘There are all these different

schools, but my music is based upon natural resonance.’ What is your opinion, from what

you have gathered, talking to Messiaen, being in his class, studying his music?Messiaen didn’t have to convert me with respect to natural resonance. I remember

we were talking about music that was colored and music that wasn’t, and the subject of

Elliott Carter’s music came up. He said, ‘It’s very interesting from the point of view of

rhythm, but it’s totally gray because of the way the pitches move around. They don’t

coalesce into specific colors. He’s [Carter] totally unaware of that.’ That is another way of

saying, ‘I think there’s no natural resonance in it.’ I know that Carter has published a

harmonic dictionary, but it’s developed much more abstractly. It’s based on interval

collections and abstract harmonic thinking, which I must admit I haven’t studied enough.



36

But it doesn’t seem to stem so much from the actual sounds, as from a conception of

relationships—intervals—among sounds and different ways of disposing the aggregate

and, I don’t know exactly, symmetries and stuff like that. But as someone who is rooted in

the piano as Messiaen was, or even Stravinsky, though I can’t play like those guys could,

I’m really fundamentally motivated by how sounds resonate together. Just constructing a

chord through some sort of logical intervallic thinking doesn’t cut it for me.

Couldn’t Messiaen’s approach to harmony have arisen from his work as an organist?

Because again, I get tantalizing glimpses from what he said about his construction of

chords, when he talked about clusters in his piano music with Claude Samuel. He talked

about organists and mixture stops—and I know that you’re familiar with what he said. As

an organist, you pull out 16’, 8’, and 4’ stops, and you pull out the mixture. The mixture

will reinforce the unisons and fifths, and, depending upon the mixture, can reinforce the

thirds. But it’s reinforcing the natural acoustic space. And Messiaen said, ‘Oh that’s too symmetrical. I do different things.’

I’ve followed up on that. I just wrote for the organ, for the first time. I worked with

Olivier Latry from Notre-Dame on finding the right registrations for my piece, Toward

Light . One of the passages depends on isolating some mutation stops in a way that

suppresses the fundamental, which shows the influence of Messiaen’s thinking. One of the

organ builders demonstrated to me how you can add all the overtones up to the eleventh

partial, or something like that. It made the most fantastic sound. Messiaen never used that

particular sound, as far as I know. But that really is natural resonance. Those things are



37

tuned to the overtone series. It was quite an adventure, and an education, writing for the

first time for Messiaen’s own instrument, although I didn’t heed his advice never to try to

combine organ and orchestra. I remember him saying something like ‘You can’t have two

kings.’

Conclusion

On that hot Pennsylvania day, 14 July 2006, at Swarthmore College, I talked to

Gerald Levinson about Olivier Messiaen for five hours. At the end of our interview, I

thanked him for his generosity—the interview lasted two hours longer than originally

planned. My wife Esther took pictures of the two of us before she and I left his office to

return to State College (Figure 1).

I learned a great deal about Levinson that day, and even more about Messiaen. For

me, Levinson’s recollections of Messiaen, along with his thoughts about his music, werefascinating. Through Levinson’s narrative, I could easily imagine myself as a student in

Messiaen’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire, trying to pass all of the entrance

exams, taking notes as he analyzed music at the piano, or absorbing his critiques of my

compositions. I knew that Messiaen sometimes quoted the music of other composers,

altering it through the ‘deforming prism’ of his musical language, but I did not know the

extent to which he incorporated the musical ideas of others into his music with no change.

As Levinson stated, these quotations somehow worked.



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Figure 1. Vincent Benitez and Gerald Levinson, Swarthmore College, 14 July 2006

Messiaen clearly influenced Levinson as a composer and teacher. That was evident

in the way he talked about Messiaen and his music. Through his words, Levinson really

made Messiaen and his music more real for me. I hope that readers of this interview will

feel the same way.

Benitez Interview of Gerald Levinson

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Transcript of Benitez Interview of Gerald Levinson