ABSTRACT
For a composer who was the most publicly feted of the past 50 years, Olivier Messiaen remains strikingly enigmatic. Exceptionally natural in his total and thorough musicality, Messiaen's output contains paradoxically little in the way of absolute music. According to Hill and Simeone, Messiaen noted in his diary on 15 May 1945 the need to reply to the Conservatoire request for such a piece. To Hill and Simeone, Loriod asserted that the oboe piece was reworked almost at once as 'L'Amour de Piroutcha', that is, that it had its origins not as a song in Harawi, but rather as an abstract piece of functional concours music. This chapter explains that the lack of any external images or symbolism in a composing project usually caused in Messiaen a serious failure of musical imagination and even a consequent drop in compositional technique.
