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Europe 2: Total Organization, 1949-1954

The Moment of Total Serialism 1: Darmstadt 1949 and
Darmstadt 1951

It was at this point that Messiaen, through becoming a pupil of his pupils, became

again their teacher. Speaking generally of his students, he once observed that 'their
questions compelled me to undertake studies I might not have dreamed of, had it

not been for them': 1 uppermost in his mind, surely, must have been his relationship
with Boulez in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, his leap from the Cinq

rechants ( 1949) to the Mode de valeurs et d'intensits for piano ( 1949-50) might
indicate some other catalyst, given that Boulez's most recent work at the time was
the Livre pour quatuor. Then again, the dateline of the Mode de valeurs, ' Darm-

stadt 1949', is momentous only in the light of Darmstadt's later history: that year,

when Messiaen was teaching there, the courses were still dominated by Leibowitz,

who had brought some of his pupils -- though not Boulez, who was already opposing
himself to what he considered 'academic' in Leibowitz's brand of serialism. Perhaps
the Mode de valeurs was a Boulezian historical necessity. Or perhaps it was tripped
by a new card dealt into the pack of French music in the spring of 1949: Cage.

Cage spent several months in Paris before returning to New York, and played his

Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano ( 1946-8) both for Messiaen's class on 7
June 2 and at a soire when Boulez delivered a slightly circumspect introduction. 3
Boulez's reference here to 'duration, amplitude, frequency, and timbre -- in other

words, the four characteristics of a sound' echoes a statement of sound's quaternary

nature in Cage's recent essay 'Forerunners of Modern Music', 4 and suggests that the

definition of those four parameters, which provided the organizational basis for total
serialism, came from Cage. The setting-up of compositional algorithms, another es-

sential feature of total serialism, also has clearer origins in Cage's principle of rhythmic proportioning than in Boulez's turmoil of motivic extrapolations. All that was

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needed was to add the twelve-note principle to these Cageian elements -- the four

parameters, automatic operation -- and the Mode de valeurs would be the almost inevitable result.

Messiaen's preface to the Mode de valeurs describes how the piece is composed as a
three-part counterpoint, each part using a different set of twelve chromatic pitches
and twelve 'chromatic durations'. These, following the principle of rhythmic arithmetic in the Turangalla symphony, are on scales from a demisemiquaver
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Music and Color, 176.

See The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, 5.
Reproduced ibid. 27-32.
Silence, 62-6; also republished ibid. 38-42.
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