LDV49.1

56 MESSIAEN_THE ORGAN WORKS How did you approach this music before you played it? Through analysis. I read Messiaen’s analyses, and I did my own. Sometimes it was necessary to decipher the music, because Messiaen doesn’t always give you the access codes. For any music, the work of preliminary analysis is indispensable to me and constitutes the key to a good interpretation. Moreover, this process is a substantial aid to memory. Yes, on that point, surely it was quite a tour de force to record so many pieces in ten evenings and frommemory? Memory is a strange thing. We all know musicians with an impressive repertorythattheyplaybyheartandwithoutanydifficulty.DanielBarenboim, for example. Taking the music in dictation for the Braille transcription helped me to do a direct analysis. The process consisted in dictating each staff in fragments, because Braille musical notation doesn’t permit superposition: successively right hand, left hand, pedal. Then it’s up to the musician to synthesise the whole. Which means a very thorough detailed analysis that considerably helps one to memorise the music.