Messiaen season continues in this blog as we head towards Trinity Sunday. Messiaen was organist of a church dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and those who know his organ music will think immediately of the Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, a cycle of meditations that originated in an event alternating organ improvisations with preaching on that subject.

I am going to head in a different direction, however. Messiaen’s earlier organ cycle Les corps glorieux ends with a movement entitled Le mystère de la Sainte Trinité. This movement takes the standard approach for illustrating the Trinity of using a trio texture in which three distinct lines of music make a single piece. So far so predicatble, but this trio makes use of the specific properties of the pipe organ to add a level to this illustration of περιχώρησις (perichoresis). Because of the way ranks of organ pipes relate to the manuals and pedalboard, it is normal in organ music for one key to sound notes in several octaves – and indeed non-octave intervals. Thus, the movement begins with the pedal, which uses stops at 32’, 16’ and 2’, in other words the same note in three different octaves, with a large gap between the 16’ and the 2’ sound. The second voice enters on a single 8’ flute, the third, linked to the pedal uses the hollow 16’ and 2’ but in a different part of the range.

The effect of this is that the moving voices are heard as three, but with paralel motion in which voices encompass one another, one voice sounding at the same time both higher and lower than another. This further combines the three as one, where a less complex trio texture illustrates more the distinctness of the persons, in this we hear more the mutual interpenetration into that great and central mystery of the Trinity.

I’m going to veer off on a bit of a tangent, because there is a further way in which I have heard music-lovers enjoy the term περιχώρησις, but unfortunately on the basis of something of a misunderstanding. It has been claimed that there is a meaning of that term which can be understood as relating to dance. Let’s break the term down a little: the first part is the preposition περί – around, about; the rest of the word derives from the verb χωρέω, which means to take up (sometimes to give up) space, to contain, to hold. There is a different, though superficially similar verb χορεύω which does mean to dance in a circle (and is a root of our word chorus). The difference between omega and omicron here means that over-excitement about the Trinity as a dance cannot really be substantiated on linguistic grounds – though it may remain a poetic and possibly even enlightening image.

Messiaen’s musical illustration of three musical voices taking up musical space around one another, moving while at the same time appearing (as Messiaen’s music often can) rather more static than energetic, is faithful within the possibilities afforded by the musical medium, to the mystery which he positions as the final point in a meditation on resurrection life: in the end, the Trinity is not only the source but the goal of all creation.