u should read: (this is expanding over time)

About Messiaen

• Messiaen, by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, pretty much the biography of Messiaen. Special in that it's one of only two biographies that have made me cry at some point...highly recommend
• The set of poems titled L'Âme en bourgeon by Cécile Sauvage, mother of Olivier Messiaen, is found in the volume Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature, edited by Christopher Dingle and Nigel Simeone.
• «Bien Cher Félix»: Letters from Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod to Felix Aprahamian is a nice collection of letters edited by Nigel Simeone (who is really lovely...he sent several of his books, signed and for free, to me when I was about 13!!).
• One of these is an interesting and very detailed catalogue of Messiaen's work titled Olivier Messiaen: A Bibliographical Catalogue of Messiaen's Works, which contains information about each of his compositions, when they were premiered, and images of their first editions.
• Olivier Messiaen: Music and Colour by Claude Samuel is a book of conversations with Messiaen about his compositional methods, views and life. It does a pretty good job of humanising him.
• Messiaen by Robert Sherlaw Johnson - this was a really good look into Messiaen's musical language, and how exactly his music works. My major qualm is that as the book was written during Messiaen's life, not all of his work is covered (most notably Saint François d'Assise), and a lot of biographical information had not yet come to light. I'm not actually sure if a more comprehensive work has been written on the matter - most of the scholarship these days appears to be either really specific (e.g. a book solely about Catalogue d'Oiseaux) or biography such as the recently released and suspiciously short book by Robert Sholl...
• Not a book but Forgotten Offerings: Messiaen's First Orchestral Works by Christopher Dingle is a pretty interesting article both in its tracking of the development of Messiaen's early orchestral writing and in that it offers a bit of 'meta-Messiaenology', looking at how Messiaen is seen as an 'organist-composer'.

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