FEATURES OF CYCLICAL THINKING IN O. MESSIAN'S PIANO CYCLE “TWENTY CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE INFANT JESUS”

Abstract

The article is devoted to understanding the peculiarities of cyclical thinking in Olivier Messiaen's piano cycle “Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus” in the context of sacred tradition and modernist compositional poetics of the 20th century. The cycle is considered as a complex artistic and philosophical structure in which cyclicality is realized not only on a formal level, but also as a way of organizing the spiritual experience of listening. The aim of the study is to identify the principles of cyclical thinking in the work and to substantiate the role of repetition and enumeration as contemplative mechanisms of musical dramaturgy. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between the compositional organization of the cycle, the composer's theological worldview, and the traditions of Christian spiritual culture. The methodological basis of the work is a complex of interdisciplinary approaches that combine musicological analysis (structural-formal, tonal-harmonic, thematic), hermeneutic and semiotic methods, as well as elements of comparative-typological analysis, used to compare the compositional principles of the cycle with the logic of the sacred list and prayerful contemplation. The scientific novelty lies in the consideration of the cycle “Twenty Contemplations of the Infant Jesus” through the prism of the principle of the litany as a model of musical thinking. Numerical order, the autonomy of individual parts, and the nature of thematic variation form a special type of cyclicality, close to the contemplative practices of the Christian tradition, but transformed into the plane of the author's modernist composition. The conclusions note that Messiaen's cyclical thinking is realized as a multi-level system–from conceptual design and symbolism of numbers to the organization of musical time and the manner of listener perception. Repetition and variability appear not as means of development, but as instruments of deep contemplation, allowing the cycle to be interpreted as a unique model of sacred musical meditation of the 20th century.