Russell Hoban

This title nicely reflects a family background in which the techniques of language were continually in focus: his father was an English teacher and translator of Shakespeare, his mother a poet. Perhaps in keeping with this, Messiaen’s music does not use its ‘language’ to narrate, to dramatize, nor even to express, but rather to represent.

The first movement of the Quatuor, ‘Liturgie de cristal’, provides us with the first named use of birdsong in Messiaen’s music on the violin and clarinet.