ABSTRACT
This chapter represents a source for understanding Olivier Messiaen and provides a fascinating glimpse of the composer in the early part of his career. Despite Messiaen's significance in twentieth-century music, a large proportion of his early writing has not been revisited since its initial publication and is little known. If Messiaen had wished to draw attention to his early writing, he drew attention to obscure and unpublished early works such as the Variations cossaises. One of the remarkable features of Messiaen's journalism is the way that he adopted a slightly different voice for each of the journals to which he contributed. A feature of the early writing that bears mention here is its consistency with later statements: the preoccupations that Messiaen foregrounded much later in his career in the celebrated Claude Samuel interviews, for instance are found in an embryonic form in the journalism.
