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MESSIAEN AND THE CONCEPT OF ‘PERSONNAGES’

Messiaen's concept of ‘personnages’ is essential to his compositional and analytical thinking. Yet it is not described in his Technique of My Musical Language of 1944, and it features only sporadically in the secondary literature. There are references to personnages in Messiaen's booklet notes to recordings of the Turangalîla-symphonie, but only the basic premise of personnages rythmiques is discussed there. Messiaen's preliminary thoughts on the rhythmic aspect of the process are given in his 1939 article ‘Le rythme chez Igor Stravinsky’, but those two pages only permit fairly general comments and the label ‘personnages’ was not yet in use. We are introduced to personnages in detail at various points in his seven-volume Traité de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie – a compilation of Messiaen's writings from 1949 onwards, edited by Alain Louvier and Yvonne Loriod and published between 1994 and 2002, the order of material having been decided by Messiaen shortly before his death. For those patient enough to negotiate its convoluted presentation, the Traité allows the reader a unique insight into Messiaen's thought-processes, his musical and technical influences, analytical style, and non-musical interests. The present article seeks to disentangle and clarify the concept of personnages, to gather the threads from various analyses in the Traité in which they appear, and to trace their progress from Messiaen's Stravinsky analysis to a pinnacle of complexity in the Turangalîla-symphonie.