Les Anges

The heavenly host praised God and said: Glory to God in the highest

Distler was my teacher earlier this month; now it is Messiaen. This is one of the nine “meditations” on the Nativity of Christ. Les Anges, “The Angels,” is the only one of the nine that I have not played, before this fortnight.

Here is Messiaen playing it:

What sort of music do the angels make? It is surely different from ours. Tolkien somewhere wrote about how it is that Elves and Men differ in their poetry, their songs – most of all because the Gift of Eru lies between them: Elves live forever, unless felled by accident or war, while Men grow old and die. He most directly addresses the issue in a practical way with the Song of Galadriel, when the Fellowship of the Ring prepares to leave Lothlorien.

The analogy carries over to Angels and Men. Our thought patterns differ, and so will our music. But Messiaen perhaps sensed that we have a model before us, an order of creature radically different (though, like us, mortal), but gifted with song: the birds. Messiaen's angels here sound at times like a tree full of songbirds in the spring, and they go twittering off into the distance at the end. Yet, the angels are unlike birds; they are creatures of might, beauty, intelligence, and glory, among the greatest works of our Maker's hand.

As I work at the organ console this week, I imagine myself in solidarity with the angels as they prepared for that night above the fields near Bethlehem. That night was as important to them as it is to us, and I have no doubt that they were as eager (and perhaps anxious?) as any human choir or orchestra before a performance. I suspect that in this, we are alike: music does not come into being without work, study, and preparation. So I work, perhaps as they worked. But we work to the same end:

Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
Laudamus te.
Benedictus te.
Adoramus te.
Glorificamus te.
Gratias agimus tibi
propter magnam gloriam tuam.