Quatre Études de rythme

Quatre Études de rythme (Four Rhythm Studies) is a set of four piano compositions by Olivier Messiaen, written in 1949 and 1950.

Messiaen composed "Neumes rythmiques" and "Mode de valeurs et d’intensités" in 1949 (the latter at Darmstadt) and added the other two études in the following year, when he was at Tanglewood.

[1][2] The four movements were premiered on 6 November 1950 in Tunis (at that time under the French protectorate of Tunisia) by the composer himself, who shortly afterward made the first recording of the études.

[5] This movement is the most-discussed of the four, as the first work by a European composer to apply numerical organisation to pitch, duration, dynamics, and mode of attack (timbre).

[2] Because the treatment of the parameters is modal and not serial (that is, the elements are treated simply as a scale, without any implications for how they are to be ordered), there is no question of the material determining the work's form.

[4]The first of the four to be composed, this étude alternates two separate sets of refrains with longer strophes given over to the rhythmic neumes of the title.

As in the refrains, there is a process of augmentation upon repetition, in which new duration units are added in order to form more complex rhythmic cells.

[12] The second of the études, "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités", overshadows all the others for having become the model for composers interested in the serialisation of musical parameters other than pitch.

[13] Pierre Boulez, after a period of estrangement from Messiaen caused by what Boulez viewed as the excessively sensual Turangalîla-Symphonie, belatedly discovered the "Mode de valeurs" in 1951 and composed his Structures, Book I as a gesture of conciliation to his former teacher, transforming the twelve "triplum" elements of the Mode's first division into ordered series and composed Structures 1a in a single night.