The main goal of this research has been to determine how to analyse the harmony and voice leading in the two homorhythmic chorales from Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Did this research find an answer to this question?
In Chapter 1, the search for Messiaen’s view on elements such as harmony and voice leading ended by concluding that Messiaen did not write much on these elements because they might have seemed self-evident to him. When he does write about aspects of his music he focuses mainly on rhythms, bird songs, modes and son-couleur. Moreover, Messiaen discusses his harmony from a vertical perspective, an approach subsequently adopted by many scholars as shown in Chapter 2. The horizontal aspects of Messiaen’s harmony are only discussed by Neidhöfer focussing on a limited portion of Messiaen’s repertoire and voice leading in general.
The ways in which Messiaen’s harmony and voice leading have been analysed during the last decades, were discussed in Chapter 2. Messiaen’s colour analysis is – because of his synaesthesia, or presumed synaesthesia – such a complicated and personal perception that one might wonder what it adds to the understanding of Messiaen's music. However, listening to Choral de la Sainte Montagne while seeing Messiaen’s colours in paintings at the same time, as in the video in Chapter 2, may bring a listener closer to Messiaen and/or give some insight into how Messiaen might have perceived his music. It could even be argued that one could only understand Messiaen’s harmonies from Messiaen’s own colour perspective, although it is difficult – or even impossible – to see the same colours that Messiaen imagined. The other approaches of analysing Messiaen’s harmony and voice leading result in labels (Forte numbers and Beckman’s HCI) that perhaps lie below the conscious level of the listener, although these labels do show relations between chords and make it possible to compare Messiaen’s complex chords easily.
In Chapter 3, the analysis focused on aspects that could be audible to a listener such as vertical intervals and motions between bass and soprano, cardinalities and cadences. With all these different analyses, the primary question is: can one hear this? While vertical aspects such as cardinalities and consonant triads are audible, horizontal aspects such as voice leading are more complex since Messiaen ‘blurs’ this with his orchestration. The analysis of both the voice leading and the orchestration shows that Messiaen considers the bass and soprano to be the most important voices, since these are the only voices he orchestrates strictly. It is hard to follow the inner parts because of the inconsistent (or constantly varying) orchestration, but playing a reduction of the chorales shows that the music is perfectly written for two (or three in the case of the added resonance chords in the winds) hands on the keyboard. Perhaps Messiaen has composed the chorales with the mind of a keyboard player and has orchestrated them for large choir and orchestra using variation and expressive lines as much as possible.
In this sense, indeed, we hear ‘Messiaen’s colourful hands’. One can enjoy and understand Messiaen’s colourful harmonies while listening to the two chorales of La Transfiguration, even without perceiving the colours Messiaen imagined. Though it is difficult to determine the precise voice leading and horizontal aspects of the harmonic progressions by listening, a reduction played at the keyboard will reveal Messiaen’s horizontal compositional techniques.