“Originality may be overrated in the arts. All creators emulate the masters and borrow from one another. Big deal! The composer and critic Virgil Thomson routinely debunked what he called the ‘game of influences,’ which he considered ‘about as profitable a study as who caught cold from whom when they were standing in the same draft.’

But the French modernist master Olivier Messiaen, who died in 1992 at 83, was truly an original. No other music sounds quite like his, with its mystical allure, ecstatic energy and elusive harmonic language, grounded yet ethereal. Rhythmically his pieces slip suddenly from timeless contemplation to riotous agitation then back again, sometimes by the measure. In the introduction to his 1985 book on Messiaen the critic Paul Griffiths calls him ‘the first great composer whose works exist entirely after, and to a large degree apart from, the great Western tradition.’ ” (New York Times)