Messiaen?

Anyone who knows my musical preferences knows that I think Olivier Messiaen is the greatest "classical" composer in the 20th century. The timbral and rhythmic vitality of his music is uncontested in modernist composition, and he is still my favorite composer to rip off. Earlier, I was listening to one of my favorite of his pieces, the Turangalîla-Symphonie. I love how over the top and indulgent this piece is: it employs an enormous orchestra, a huge percussion section of exotic instruments played by 11 musicians, a virtuosic piano part, and a solo ondes Martenot (an early electronic keyboard instrument). All this adds up to what Morton Feldman disdainfully called "Technicolor orchestration." Not only that, but his compositional style emphasizes sudden juxtapositions of material, acting as an extension of Stravinsky's use of this technique. Together, these two aspects lead occasionally to truly insane episodes of music, like this section of movement 8 of Turangalîla (about five minutes in):

Yes! I dream of writing things like that. Definitely not the best part of this piece, but one of those places that always excites me. This piece is filled with moments like that.

I've felt for a long time that "programmatic" music is a lot more interesting to listen to than "abstract" music. (Not that jazz is necessarily programmatic in the classical sense; I love jazz, but it's a different kind of listening. I'll save that for another day.) This piece is a demonstration of that, because Messiaen's music is always, even at its most abstract, highly programmatic. It is inherent in his compositional style in the form of his birdsong quotations and transmutations, and most of his pieces (including this one) have many leitmotifs. Additionally, he sometimes writes the "colors" associated with his harmonies or orchestrations directly in the score (Messiaen was synaesthetic: he "saw" colors when he heard music).

You get the impression, sometimes implicitly, that he's always symbolizing something with his music, even if it's something spiritual or metaphysical. Regardless of whether the listener is familiar with the sources of this symbolism or not, I feel it communicates somehow into the impression of the music. This is sometimes evident in the musical "personifications" of his music, each sound idea having a particular character that exists on a "higher" level than just rhythms or intervals (like serialism). The presence of strange musical effects in his music points to this idea, and it is the same idea found in much programmatic music, from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, to Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, to newer music like John Zorn's "cartoon sounds." Historically, some in the establishment have criticized these types of effects as "cheap" or "crude." I find these effects stimulating and exciting, and aren't those important aspects of music in general?