As Though Your Life Depended on It

Source: Wilhelm von Wright/public domain

One of the most famous musical compositions of the 20th century was born under infamous circumstances.

On January 15, 1941, at Germany’s Stalag VIII-A, several hundred prisoners of war braved the cold to witness the premiere of a musical work titled the Quartet for the End of Time. The Nazi guards who ran the camp sat in the front row. They could not have imagined that this avant-garde piece of chamber music would go on to become a touchstone of the modern chamber music repertoire.

The piece was written by Olivier Messiaen, who was drafted into the army and captured at the age of 31. Fellow musicians were also held at the same camp, and so he wrote his quartet for piano, violin, cello, and clarinet—an unlikely combination, but it is what was available to him.

Messiaen drew on themes that occupied him his entire creative life: birdsong, and the immortality of Jesus. The title of the piece, written in the score, is a line from the book of Revelation: “There should be time no longer.”

New Yorker magazine critic Alex Ross points out that the composer interpreted this line in two ways. The first was purely musical, having to do with an advanced concept of musical meter. The second was spiritual. “For Messiaen,” Ross writes, “the end of time also meant an escape from history, a leap into an invisible paradise.”

Faced with a threat to his very existence, the composer responded in the most uniquely human way possible—with an act of artistic creation.

I believe he was able to respond as he did because he had developed an ongoing creative practice, as a composer and church organist in Paris, that prepared him for this moment. But things could have gone any number of ways.

The behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges has put forth a theory that humans possess a three-layered nervous system, each layer coming into existence at a different point in evolution. At the base is our primitive, so-called lizard brain. This is what we talk about when we talk about the freeze response, which aims to make imminent death less painful. On top of that, mammals evolved a separate system that enables the well-known fight-or-flight response. Then, the outermost layer, with its immensely complex cognitive capabilities, gives humans the option of employing rational, problem-solving skills when responding to crises.

Of course that’s what happens under ideal circumstances. But often our rational, human brain fails us, and Porges argues that in those moments we revert to the more primitive, vestigial responses that abide in each human nervous system.

Ross reports that Messiaen did indeed try to escape but was convinced by a sympathetic guard that he was safer staying inside the camp. Denied the fight-or-flight option, it would have been unsurprising had the composer frozen in fear. Instead, he drew on the resources that he had been cultivating every day of his life and produced a creative gift to the world.

I think of this story whenever I use musical composition as part of therapeutic practice. Artistic creativity is one avenue for processing our feelings, and if done on a regular basis, it can become a life-sustaining habit. In my own compositional practice, I have no illusions of becoming the next Messiaen. The act of composition brings on the flow state and, with it, a calmer nervous system and improved mental well-being.

If Messiaen is a role model, it is because he represents a kind of object lesson in how to incorporate music-making into a healthy life. Soon after the premiere of his quartet, Messiaen was released from Stalag VIII-A and went on to live and compose for another 50 years.