Jonathan Harvey - Tombeau de Messiaen (1994)

Tombeau de Messiaen is a piece for live piano and prerecorded tape.

This work is a modest offering in response to the death of a great musical and spiritual presence. Messiaen was fascinated by the colours of the harmonic series and its distortions, and found therein a prismatic play of light. The tape part of the work is composed of piano sounds entirely tuned to the harmonic series using the Yamaha SY77 harmonic series micro tuning – twelve of them, one for each class of pitch. The ‘tempered’ piano sounds joins and distorts these series, never entirely belonging, never entirely separate.

There is a double meaning in this context for the word ‘tombeau’. ‘Tombeau’ follows the venerable French tradition but is also used in the sense of its close phonetic neighbour – the verb ‘tomber’ – to fall. The associations with the word tombeau (tomber) suggested a falling motive for the work, at the end the piano extends the motive, Glinging itself into a downwards vortex to the abyss.

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