In 2008 musicians and scholars world-wide celebrated the centenary of Olivier Messiaen’s birth. One of the most influential composers in living memory, Messiaen is remembered as a great nature poet—a mystic whose music had a profound effect on the Twentieth-century avant-garde.

This volume of essays, marking the occasion of Messiaen’s centenary, was authored by musicologists, performers, composers, ornithologists and researchers from Australia, Germany, France, North America, Japan, New Zealand, Serbia and England. The writers, internationally acclaimed experts as well as emerging...