ABSTRACT
This chapter citation constitutes significant primary sources on Messiaen. They include all of his birdsong notebooks, fair copies of works, compositional sketches, autograph manuscripts of various types of notes, selected correspondence, and diaries that are now housed as part of the Fonds Olivier Messiaen at the Bibliothèque nationale de France/Richelieu-Louvois (BnF), Paris. As per the BnF's listings on its website, the birdsong notebooks are presented in chronological order as to their approximate first use, not in the manuscript order devised by Loriod-Messiaen according to the types of notebooks Messiaen used. The BnF absorbed the holdings of the Fonds Olivier Messiaen in February of 2015, although Loriod-Messiaen donated ca. 800 scores and a number of books from the composer's library to the Mediatheque Hector Berlioz. The chapter retains French spellings for birds and identifies Messiaen's modes of limited transposition by two numbers separated by a colon respecting technical matters.
