Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at eleven and by 1931 had landed the organist post at Église de la Sainte-Trinité, which he would hold for sixty-one years. After France fell in 1940, he spent nine months in Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps for piano, violin, cello, and clarinet - the only instruments available - and premiered it for fellow prisoners and guards. Released in 1941, he joined the Paris Conservatoire faculty, teaching harmony and later composition until 1978, shaping a generation that included Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis. His own music wove together modes of limited transposition, rhythmic labyrinths, Indonesian gamelan, and meticulously notated birdsong gathered from travels worldwide. Chromaesthesia let him see chords as colours, a synesthetic grid that guided everything he wrote. He died in 1992, leaving a catalogue that treated sound as both structure and vision.