The Technique of My Musical Language

With this publication, the Slovak musical community is presented with Olivier Messiaen’s seminal theoretical work Technique de mon langage musical (The Technique of My Musical Language). Written when the composer was thirty-three years old, the treatise was completed in the summer of 1942 and published two years later. As such, it reflects only the first third of Messiaen’s creative output and naturally does not include those characteristic features of his musical language that emerged in his later works.

Nevertheless, many of Messiaen’s most frequently performed compositions, including L’Ascension, La Nativité du Seigneur, Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, Visions de l’Amen, Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus, and the Turangalîla-Symphonie, date from the 1930s and 1940s, a period comprehensively covered by this treatise.

It is hoped that the Slovak translation of The Technique of My Musical Language will serve composers and performers not only as a key to understanding Messiaen’s musical language, but also as a means of gaining a deeper appreciation of his unique place in the history of twentieth-century music.