LDV49.1

77 LOUIS THIRY As with any other music, the question of fidelity to the text arises in Messiaen’s works. As far as his organ music is concerned, however, there is a particular point that must give us pause for thought: he himself recorded most of it. These recordings represent an irreplaceable document, musically very captivating, but one that has not simplified the task of subsequent performers. Messiaen’s musical notation is very precise and sometimes at the very limit of the possibilities of realisation. Should we therefore aim for perfect accuracy, at the risk of the rigidity that such a constraint implies? The term ‘irrational values’ used by Messiaen can probably enlighten us: this term, which designates the divisions of the beat into five and seven (or possibly into other prime numbers), seems to distinguish these note values from those resulting from the division of the beat into two and three, which are supposed to be rational. Personally, I tend to think that this distinction is arbitrary and that musical interpretation is ill suited to the strictly measured time of clocks and metronomes: in music, the division of the beat into two is neither more nor less rational than division into five.