For my own music I regard the Hauptwerk Organ as an extraordinary synthesizer. The following text for "Olivier Messiaen and the flutist of the Chauvet cave" shows how its stimulates my imagination:
"In 2017 I saw Werner Herzog's "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams", a fascinating film documentary about the Chauvet Cave in the south of France. Evidently, a flute was found in the cave, made of the bone of a vulture and probably about 30.000 years old. To my astonishment this flute appeared to be made for pentatonic melodies, similar to what I refer to as "timeless modality". I had a view of a flutist in the cave, 30.000 years ago, imitating a bird that might well have been a far ancestor of a bird that Olivier Messiaen transcribed in his atonal style in the 20th century, while traveling around France. Consequently, in this piece I use timeless, pentatonic melodies in combination with atonal melodies based on passages from organ works by Messiaen which I internalised over the years and now use for improvisation."
