The Hidden Poetics of Messiaen’s “Serialism”

Interpretation of Messiaen’s piano étude Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949) as an exercise in the application of serialism to parameters beyond pitch has enshrined the work as a milestone in modernist music historiography. This article brings to light another intellectual current that played at least as significant a role in his formal experimentation during this period, namely the scientific study of poetic rhythm. I begin by sketching how Messiaen’s concertedly additive rhythmic techniques drew from linguist Antoine Meillet’s breakthroughs in the field of comparative metrics—specifically, his efforts to reconstruct “proto-Indo-European rhythm.” I then focus on the efforts of two little-known Romanian expatriate scholars—Pius Servien (1902–1959) and Matila Ghyka (1881–1965)—whose efforts to rationalize poetic lyricism, tone, and stress via numerical (and numerological) techniques of literary analysis shaped Messiaen’s multidimensional rhythmic formalism, applied to parameters other than duration by the late 1940s. Drawing together published texts, scores, and documents from Messiaen’s archive and library, this article addresses both historians and analysts, engaging the emerging field of “critical rhythm” to reveal crosscurrents of knowledge production, identity politics, and composition subsequently obscured beneath the universalizing and objectivizing discourses associated with postwar high modernism. This historical depth culminates in renewed readings of works, including Cinq rechants, Cantéyodjayâ, and Mode de valeurs itself, bringing added complexity to longstanding debates regarding Messiaen’s so-called “experimental period” and his serialist practice.