Music is essential to survival, right? I sometimes think of it as a support system, that snug little pack in my pocket ferrying sound to my ears like astronaut's oxygen, along curling white wires. Also it's a barrier. I turned it up to block out someone noisy on the bus: straightforward enough, arguably entirely necessary (I think he was listening to Girls Aloud). But troubling too, because the more I hear, the less it seems possible to listen. Music not as art but defence, keeping at bay the vacuum outside.
I was pondering this because the bus happened to be ferrying me back from one of the opening events of the Southbank Centre's new Messiaen festival, which started last weekend to celebrate the centenary of the composer's birth. I'm unbelievably glad I made it. After an afternoon of open-door workshops, the Nash Ensemble were performing the composer's Quartet for the End of Time for the second occasion that evening, not in a formal setting but in what the Queen Elizabeth Hall rather optimistically calls the Front Room (what the rest of us call the foyer). But the environment was surprisingly engaging. Instead of sitting row upon sterile row, we were ushered through to cafe tables grouped around an informal stage. With the lights low, the Savoy glowing across the Thames and trains gliding noiselessly in and out of Charing Cross, it felt less like a gig and more like an opportunity to think.
Also to listen. If some of Messiaen's later works sometimes sound like they're trying to cram in everything, layer upon layer of instrumental colour swirling hypnotically in front of you, the Quartet is all spare, pointillist precision. Partly that's because of its agonising genesis - it was composed while Messiaen was interned in a German prisoner of war camp, and the reason it's scored for piano, violin, cello and clarinet is because that's all that was available. First played in secret in a lavatory, of all places, it was properly premiered on January 15 1941 (the handwritten poster is moving enough in itself) in front of the full camp, Messiaen playing a beaten-up piano dug out from somewhere or other while Étienne Pasquier used on a cello shipped in from the local town. Everyone in the audience was hungry, many were desperate. "Never was I listened to," the composer said afterwards, "with such rapt attention and comprehension."
And whereas you might expect Messiaen to wring every possible effect from this impromptu group, it's the work's ecstatic restraint that I find most moving, and which made me, too, listen harder than I've done for a long time. Hearing it again the other night, it struck me as a piece whose ellipses and silences speak as profoundly as the music itself, a work whose disarming intensity comes from what it doesn't say as what it does.
That's very much the kind of composer Messiaen was, and which is why the Southbank's festival, curated by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, is such an exciting prospect. Tonight there's a chance to hear the massive Turangalîla symphony - one of those works that attempts to cram everything in - with gamelan musicians playing in the Festival Hall's public spaces before and afterwards. On Saturday The Sixteen are singing his wonderful Cinq Rechants alongside Debussy and Le Jeune; on Sunday the Philharmonia are tackling Oiseaux Exotiques (more birds) alongside Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
The festival continues off and on until the end of the year, an inspiring mix of community and education events with plenty of world-class performances. And in November they're even doing the Quartet for the End of Time once again. Time to pay attention.
