ABSTRACT
In a small article entitled 'Musique Religeuse', on the first page of La Page musicale, Olivier Messiaen published his challenge to the musical world and what amounted to a compositional call to arms. In this vignette, he contrasts three aesthetic categories of religious music: the conventional, the mystical, and the living. The revolutionary objectives of the avant-garde usually mingle political and artistic momentum. The avant-garde embraces a desire to break free of convention, and to do so in a way that creates a clear political and aesthetic demarcation. Messiaen's desire to wrench new expressive means from a musical dead end is a tribute to his compositional originality. The symbiosis of seemingly opposing forces is an essential tool in Messiaen's attempt to re-orient the search for the absolute, in Western music, towards God. Such disruptive convergence and divergence foreground the sense in which the avant-garde expression in the work is searching for certainties outside its own sphere of control.
