Head Phone Trip

In Apparition of the Eternal Church, 31 people listen to a ten-minute piece of music through headphones and describe what they hear.

What all but a few don't know is that the music is Olivier Messiaen's monumental organ work Apparition of the Eternal Church, which the composer wrote in 1931 when he was 24 years old. A devout Catholic and the organist at the Church of the Trinity in Paris, Messiaen wrote a piece that sends some listeners to the heights of spiritual and erotic ecstasy.

For others, the encounter with Messiaen is like ten minutes in Dante's inferno.

The experiment, then, is to have 31 people put the violent contradictions of Messiaen's music into words. The result is a collective interpretation improvising its way through an aesthetic landscape defined by paradox. Resolution confronts eternity, eroticism asceticism, spiritual ecstasy physical torture. Together, the music and its interpreters conjure something like what William Blake famously called the marriage of heaven and hell.