He was educated at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the University of Cologne, and later studied with Olivier Messiaen in Paris, and with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn.

Through Messiaen, Boulez discovered twelve-tone technique — which he would later study privately with René Leibowitz — and went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style.

Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career.

Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard.

Messiaen later introduced what he called a " communicable language ", a " musical alphabet " to encode sentences.

In her later years, she and Messiaen acted as mentors to the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who has since become a great champion of the works of Messiaen.

This trend was present already in the 1920s and 1930s, for example in the music of Béla Bartók, Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee, Alan Hovhaness, and Lou Harrison, and slightly later in the work of Olivier Messiaen, Chou Wen-chung, Halim El-Dabh, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks.

On later releases, the band varied their stylistic approach and repertoire to include pieces from modern classical composers such as Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, Charles Ives, and Olivier Messiaen, whose works are featured on the album Grand Guignol.

The composer Olivier Messiaen referred to the " surrealist anxiety " of Schaeffer's early work in contrast to the " asceticism " of the later Etude aux allures of 1958 ( Messiaen 1959, 5 – 6 ).

Boulez was initially part of a cadre of early supporters of Leibowitz, but due to an altercation with Leibowitz, their relations turned divisive, as Boulez spent much of his career promoting the music of Messiaen instead.

Later in his life he was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatoire de Paris and the École Normale de Musique ; his pupils included Maurice Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, Joaquín Rodrigo and Manuel Ponce.

The serialization of rhythm, dynamics, and other elements of music was partly fostered by the work of Olivier Messiaen and his analysis students, including Karel Goeyvaerts and Boulez, in post-war Paris.

Luc Ferrari was born in Paris, and was trained in music at a very young age, studying the piano under Alfred Cortot, musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and composition under Arthur Honegger.

Olivier Messiaen (; December 10, 1908 – April 27, 1992 ) was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century.

Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others.

On the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was made a prisoner of war, during which time he composed his (" Quartet for the end of time ") for the four available instruments — piano, violin, cello and clarinet.

The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards.

Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born in Avignon, France, into a literary family.

He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French.

After showing improvisation skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré and inherited the tradition of great French organists ( Dupré had studied with Charles-Marie Widor and Louis Vierne, Vierne in turn was a pupil of César Franck ).

Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris | Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, where Messiaen was titular organist for 61 years

From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time.

At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army.

Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978.

The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951 ; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.

The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours.

Messiaen visited the United States in 1947, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski.

When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists wishing to enter the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano.

Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.

The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones ; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones.

Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin ; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.

Messiaen very rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was " nothing to add ", but the modes he did use are all similarly symmetrical.

At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble.

Messiaen said, " I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible.

“ I hear the tritone as the central interval on which to build harmonies and melodies, as opposed to the major or minor third … The tritone interval has been extremely important to me from the first day I heard Messiaen playing his own music on organ .”

For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with " total serialism ", in which field he is often cited as an innovator.

Messiaen with his mother and father in 1910

There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers.

After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in the autumn of 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas, who instilled in Messiaen a mastery of orchestration.

In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France (" Young France ").

Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly.

Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score ( Examples 1 and 4 ).

In 1954 he travelled with his young wife Myrto Altinoglou to Paris where he entered the Conservatory and studied musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and conducting under Eugene Bigot.

Salonen's tenure with the orchestra first began with a residency at the 1992 Salzburg Festival in concert performances and as the pit orchestra in a production of the opera Saint François d ' Assise by Olivier Messiaen ; it was the first time an American orchestra was given that opportunity.

Then, Annette Dieudonné, a close friend of Boulanger's, recommended that Xenakis try studying with Olivier Messiaen.

Messiaen and his students studied music from a wide range of genres and styles, with particular attention to rhythm.

Xenakis's compositions from 1949 – 52 were mostly inspired by Greek folk melodies, as well as Bartók, Ravel, and others ; after studying with Messiaen, he discovered serialism and gained a deep understanding of contemporary music ( Messiaen's other pupils at the time included, for example, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Jean Barraqué ).

* October 20 – October 21 – The Donaueschinger Musiktage new-music festival takes place with a memorial concert featuring the music of Arthur Honegger, and also concerts with compositions of ( amongst others ) Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Claude Debussy, Gottfried von Einem, Hans Werner Henze, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Maurice Jarre, Olivier Messiaen, and Igor Stravinsky