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. A performance of them lasts between 15 and 20 minutes.

The four pieces which the composer collectively termed Études de rythme are not a "cycle" like Messiaen's earlier Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus (1944) or Visions de l’Amen (1943). 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 (Sherlaw Johnson 1989, 104; Toop 1974, 142). 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. The French premiere was given in Toulouse on 7 June 1951 by Yvonne Loriod (Anon. n.d.).

The work consists of four movements

The title refers to Papua New Guinea, and the thematic material of this movement has "all the violence of the magic rites of this country" (Messiaen 1994). The piece consists of five sections, in alternating pairs of musical ideas. The first part of each section is a melodic theme with accompaniment, the second is a departure which Messiaen calls a trait ("episode"). The first section consists of a thematic statement and trait. The first half of the next three develop the initial theme. The fifth and final section introduces a new, longer theme in two periods which are immediately repeated before the etude is concluded by a final trait amounting to a short coda (Barash 2002, 18–19).

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) (Toop 1974, 142). 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 (Toop 1974, 148). According to the composer's own description, there are separate modes composed of 36 pitches, 24 durations, 12 attacks, and 7 dynamics. The duration scale is separated into three overlapping scales, called "tempi" by the composer, which correspond to the high, middle, and low registers of the piano, and occur in simultaneous superimposition. The first tempo uses 12 chromatic durations applied to the semidemiquaver, the second does the same with the semiquaver unit quaver, and the third with the quaver (Sherlaw Johnson 1989, 105).

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