How did the godfather of post-war European musical modernism, Olivier Messiaen, compose? Anyone asking this question will be grateful for the sheer quantity of explanatory material provided by Messiaen himself, from the printed notes in his scores to his composition manual Technique de mon langage musical Footnote ¹ and the seven-volume, posthumously published Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie. Footnote ² These exegeses have set generations of scholars on fruitful scavenger hunts through Messiaen's scores for the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic devices he so carefully describes.Footnote ³ However, in Le Modèle et l'invention: Messiaen et la technique de l'emprunt, Yves Balmer, Thomas Lacôte, and Christopher Brent Murray demonstrate through a series of careful analyses that Messiaen's untheorized practice of musical borrowing remained a constant throughout his oeuvre. The authors theorize a nuanced notion of musical authorship based in borrowing but navigating beyond citation, irony, and pastiche.

As Balmer et al. recognize, Messiaen's borrowings have been noticed in a scattered manner by his contemporaries and scholars. Even one of Messiaen's commissioners, Henry Barraud, baulked at hearing the revolutionary tune Le Chant du départ (1794) in a 1945 work for a commemoration of French victims of Nazi camps and prisons. Barraud's recollection is a pithy summary of the compositional process that Balmer et al. have identified throughout Messiaen's oeuvre:

Choose, largely on the basis of a deeply felt love for a musical moment; sample a fragment capturing what was to Messiaen its key characteristics; and then transform into his own style through the application of his own modal, rhythmic, and harmonic lenses. Such is the creative process Balmer et al. argue pervades Messiaen's work from his first published works, the Préludes (1929), to his last completed composition, Éclairs sur l'au-delà (1991).

The authors identify an intensification of the borrowing technique around the years 1930 and 1940 with the Corps glorieux and the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, despite the latter being composed in a prisoner-of-war camp, far from the composer's music library. The kernel of the study is Messiaen's prolific period 1939–52 because of the hints left by Messiaen in Technique and in his own sketches. These sources allows Balmer et al. to perceive a diverse array of borrowings from Debussy, Ravel, Massenet, Jolivet, Honneger, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Tournemire, Falla, the Second Viennese School, Mozart, Rameau, plainchant, and the entries on Indian music by Joanny Grosset in the Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du Conservatoire,Footnote ⁵ as well as other non-Western music studied at the conservatoire and often traceable to the Encyclopédie, including music from South America, Russia, Bali, Korea, and Papua New Guinea.

The book is divided into three parts, roughly according to method. The first part examines Messiaen's writings, looking for references to moments in his favourite composers’ works that might be found in his music. The second part considers Messiaen's relationship to his personal pantheon of composers and styles more closely, while the third part elaborates upon how Messiaen sampled and transformed their music in works including Les Corps glorieux (1939), Cinq rechants (1948), Turangalîla-Symphonie (1948), and Visions de l'amen (1943).

By problematizing the canon of ‘Messiaen's techniques’, the authors also re-examine the commonplace chronological division of Messiaen's career. Messiaen's oeuvre is conventionally divided into three parts with the first culminating in the ‘Tristan cycle’ of Harawi (1945), Turangalîla-Symphonie and Cinq rechants, and the central ‘experimental period’, including the proto-serial ‘Mode de valeurs et d'intensités’, spanning 1949 to 1952. The experimental period is followed by a crisis of composition marked by the composer's turn to birdsong as a source of musical inspiration. Balmer et al. propose a deeper continuity between these three periods based on the persistence of the borrowing technique in such key ‘experimental period’ works as the Quatre études de rythme (1950), La Messe de la Pentecôte (1950), Cantéyodjâya (1949), and Le Merle noir (1952). Only at Messiaen's most strictly combinatorial moments, such as in the ‘Mode de valeurs’, does the borrowing technique appear absent.

Balmer et al. hear Messiaen's crisis in 1952 as less about the limits of experimentation than about ‘a crisis of material’ (563). From 1952, Messiaen continues to follow the same fundamental creative process in his ‘birdsong works’ Reveil des oiseaux (1953) and Oiseaux exotiques (1956). He chooses his basic musical material from a pre-existing source, in this case birdsong. He then transforms the birdsong through what we know as Messiaen's ‘techniques’, slowing it down, or changing its intervallic content. As Balmer et al. put it:

The authors urge scholars to focus on what endures in Messiaen's work as well as what changes.

Le Modèle et l'invention stimulates the growing field of study into the creative process in music by reactivating some fairly dormant concepts: influence, authorship, and intertextuality. Instead of considering Messiaen's practice as pastiche, an abdication of authorship, or a testament to the always-already intertextual text, Balmer et al. see Messiaen's borrowing technique as a powerful act of creation, not just of music but also of a bond with the wider musical world (579). The musician chooses what will continue in musical traditions and brings it to life, in the present tense, in their work.

The analysis of Turangalîla-Symphonie is a particularly rich demonstration of the fine line between ‘model’ and ‘invention’ in the book's title (513–28). The analysis addresses Messiaen's use of rhythm and melody from André Jolivet in a short excerpt of ‘Turangalîla I’, the symphony's third movement. Here the authors’ curiosity was piqued by the presence of irrational rhythms, a red flag for borrowed materials in Messiaen's work. The fragment of ‘Turangalîla I’, bars 55–66, is particularly interesting because Messiaen himself analyses it in the second volume of his Traité, but without mentioning the borrowed material. He focuses instead on his technique of ‘personnages rythmiques’, itself formulated with reference to Stravinsky. For Balmer et al., Messiaen's borrowing provides a more complete and unifying analytical explanation. A rhythmic line from the ‘Danse initiatique’ in Jolivet's Cinq danses rituelles (1939) furnishes the rhythm of the principal melody in the oboe and is also played in retrograde as a rhythmic counterpoint in the percussion. Messiaen then combines multiple ‘samples’ in complex ways. For the pitches of the principal melody, Messiaen borrows from elsewhere in Jolivet's Cinq incantations (1936). Rather than an automatic coupling of melody and rhythm, Messiaen repeats and trims the pitches of the borrowed melody to fit the rhythm. This level of extra intervention, the authors argue, is where the use of a model passes over into invention.

Balmer et al. have opened the door for future scholars to consider the presence of borrowing techniques in Messiaen's music and elsewhere, in particular among his students. Though the modernist ideology of the 1950s necessitated a rejection of Messiaen's techniques, the authors identify a compositional ethos of borrowing in the testimony of none other than Pierre Boulez, who later in life spoke about his own process of keeping aspects of other composers’ ideas in the ‘refrigerator’ for later use in an ‘unrecognisable’ way (578).

The authors also hear in the arpeggio of Gérard Grisey's spectralist work Vortex Temporum (1996) a borrowed material that is then progressively transformed (577). But where Grisey wanted to transform the original material to the point of unrecognizability, Messiaen's borrowings are included precisely because they have a shape or colour that he wanted, shining and present, in his own work.

A work of genetic criticism will never receive a perfect score. Like the ‘cheap, fast, good’ paradox, genetic criticism aspires to an almost impossible combination of hard evidence, authorial testimony, and original scholarly insight. If the composer exhaustively explains the score, then original scholarship is unnecessary or at worst misguided. If evidence for the analyst's theory can be found in the score but testimony is not forthcoming, then the scholarship may be regarded as a work of highly creative music appreciation. Fortunately, Le Modèle et l'invention contains both a vast array of original hypotheses backed up by exhaustive analyses and just enough authorial testimony to keep the whole exercise interesting. It really is the genetic-criticism equivalent of an excellent detective novel.

Even if a piece of genetic criticism ‘succeeds’, why should we care? Ultimately a work of genetic criticism should fundamentally change the way one hears a work, even if we choose to retain our naïve feelings about it. Nobody can read Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous poem Un Coup de dés in quite the same way after Quentin Meillassoux's masterful deciphering of its fundamentally numerical organization in The Number and the Siren,Footnote ⁶ but one will not necessarily be counting each syllable as one reads it. Similarly, thanks to Balmer, Lacôte, and Murray, it is now impossible to ignore that Messiaen's oeuvre is a tissue of carefully selected and transformed musical materials, even if they are so well hidden that it has taken this long for many of them to come to light.