During a visit to the Jura in France in the autumn of 2017 I had the following experience:
On October 16th, 2017, between seven and half past seven in the morning, it appeared to me that I met a shaman, who was as the same time Olivier Messiaen and My friend the Indian, according to a composition I wrote in 1996, shortly after my father died. The shaman had the following message: “abandon the ideal of playing the organ with as less movements as possible, as put into practice by Marcel Dupré, his student Olivier Messiaen and many others including yourself and introduce a dancing way of playing, to bring lightness into organ art. Identify with the instrument that you play and feel a spiritual unification. Be like a chameleon regarding the inmense variety of organs and other keyboard instruments.” One day later, the shaman c.q. Olivier Messiaen and My friend the Indian returned. This time he had a spiritual message: leave the strict, catholic context of Messiaen’s music and strive for a message which everyone, regardless of cultural background, race or religion, can understand.
This happened while I was practising on a keyboard without sound in a holiday home with a view to a lake, Lac Chalain, near Doucier in France, at about twenty kilometers of La Champagnole, where my wife and I would meet Bernard Jeunet later that week, who was a friend of Olivier Messiaen between 1972 and 1992, until the latter’s death in 1992. It was still half dark, the sun was rising.
With "My friend the Indian" I refer to a native American Indian, quietly seated somewhere in the Mojave desert, in a place where the energy of the archangel Michael can very well be felt."
Both the musical and the spiritual message refer to lightness, space and relaxation. This possibly represents Messiaen's afterlife, as his life on earth which made him a famous composer was evidently filled with internal conflicts.
