Olivier Messiaen Tristan and serialism What is Tristan and serialism? Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. What was the song about? The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Was he commissioned to write any other songs? I don't know. Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire.
How long did he teach for?
How long did Olivier Messiaen teach for?
Shortly after his release from Gorlitz in May 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956-57, Tristan Murail in 1967-72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.  In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jesus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la presence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.  Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalila-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalila-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.  Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensites" for piano (from the Quatre etudes de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrete, music for recorded sounds. CANNOTANSWER
In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest.
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.

Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his  ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.

Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).

He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.

Biography

Youth and studies

Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems,  ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of  ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.

At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.

He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.

At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.

While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.

La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war

In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.

He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.

In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.

In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").

At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.

The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.

Tristan and serialism

Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.

In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.

Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.

Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.

He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.

Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.

Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.

His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.

Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.

In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.

In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.

Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.

On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.

Music

Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.

His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.

Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.

As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).

While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.

Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."

Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.

Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).

Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).

Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.

In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of  synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").

When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."

Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.

Time

From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.

Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.

Time and rhythm

As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.

A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."

Harmony
 In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.

Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).

In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).

Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.

Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".

Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Writings

See also 
 Olivier Messiaen Competition

Notes

References

Further reading

 Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
 Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
 Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
 Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
 Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
 Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
 Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
 Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
 Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
 Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
 Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
 Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
 Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.

 
 Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
 Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
 Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
 Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
 Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
 Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
 

 Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
 Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
 Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
 Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
 Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
 McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
 Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
 Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
 Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
 Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
 

Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
 Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.

 Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
 Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.

 Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
 Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon

External links

"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen

My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.

Listening
 played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
 played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
 by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv

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Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
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Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
Teach For India (TFI) is a non-profit and a movement of leaders that was founded by Shaheen Mistri in 2009. It is a part of the Teach For All network. To build a growing movement of leaders, Teach For India runs a two-year Fellowship and supports an Alumni movement. The Fellowship recruits college graduates and working professionals to serve as full-time teachers in low-income schools for two years. The mission of Teach For India is “one day all children will attain an excellent education.”

The Fellowship is an opportunity for India's brightest and most promising youth, from the nation's best universities and workplaces, to serve as full-time teachers to children from low-income communities in under-resourced schools. Post the Fellowship, you join a network of leaders serving in various pathways known as the Alumni movement.

The Teach For India model consisting of a selective recruitment and selection process, focuses on ongoing teacher training and leadership development, measures the impact of Students, the leadership growth of Fellows and impact the Alumni has had on the education system.

The Education crisis in India 
India with approximately 1 in 4 people below the age of 14 years, stands at an inflection point on the ability to provide equal opportunities for all children to attain an excellent education. More than 50% of students in Grade 5 cannot read a Grade 2 text or solve a simple subtraction problem. Teach For India believes that at the root of this crisis in Indian education lies a crisis of leadership. Teach For India's motive is precisely to fill this deficit of leadership in education.

History 
In 2006, the founder of Teach For India Shaheen Mistri, 17 years after starting the Akanksha Foundation felt compelled to address the issue of educational inequity at a larger scale. She believed that the solution was a people's movement that needed to come in unison to provide every Indian child with an outstanding education.

In 2007, Shaheen Mistri met with Wendy Kopp, the Founder of Teach For America, and the ideation process to keep ‘leadership’ at the core was ignited.

In 2009, Teach For India welcomed the first cohort, the Class of 2009, to the Fellowship. The 87 ‘Niners’ formed the beginning of a nationwide movement of diverse leaders.

In 2011, two years later, the Niners graduated from the Fellowship and became the first cohort in Teach For India's Alumni movement. The first cohort of Alumni then went on to work in several pathways such as teaching, teacher training, school leadership, and government policy solving the complex problem of educational equity.

Today, Teach For India has 900 Fellows working relentlessly to change the lives of Students in their classrooms and have become leaders driving change. Now, the organization has over 3400 Alumni who are collectively fuelling the larger movement towards their vision.

Geographical Reach

Mumbai 
In the year 2009, the first cohort of the Teach For India Fellowship began in Mumbai and Pune with 87 Fellows. In 2011, they graduated with 46 Fellows and 1122 Students.

In the year 2015, The Alumni movement grew bigger. The city of Mumbai started to steadily grow its Alumni network from 43 Alumni in 2011 to 280 in 2015. ‘321’ was Mumbai's first Alumni led organization.

In the year 2020, Teach For India Mumbai collaborated with MCGM. Teach For India's partnership with the government evolved over the years from being a mere service provider to reaching out to Teach for India for advice and collaborating on projects like training MCGM staff, Student Advisory Council, and best practice sharing.

The recent numbers for 2021 shows that 144 Fellows, 3500 Students, and 860 Alumni members are in the city of Mumbai.

Pune 
In 2009, the first cohort began in Pune with 87 Fellows. In the year 2011, Pune's first cohort graduated with 32 Fellows and 1100 Students.

In 2018, Pune received Secondary Education Access to English-medium secondary classrooms, which was a huge challenge for Pune's kids. This issue was addressed through the PPP model partnerships with Aakanksha Foundation and iTeach Schools.

The recent numbers indicates that Pune has 145 Fellows, 6500 Students, and 840 Alumni members.

Ahmedabad 
In the year 2014, Teach For India reached Ahmedabad and had its first cohort with 34 Fellows and 1,100 Students. The Samait Shala was founded by a 2014 Ahmedabad Fellow, Kushal Dattani. The organization, Samait Shala trains teachers directly to ensure that classrooms are inclusive of students who learn in different ways and at different paces.

In 2016, they started operations in 20 schools in Ahmedabad with 80 Fellows and 2,000 Students. The elementary Students in the state were known to outperform on every single metric when it came to the mastery of basic operations and reading. Teach For India was above the state and city averages for both the learning techniques.

The recent data for 2021 have indicated 47 Fellows, 1800 Students, and 230 Alumni members in Ahmedabad.

Bengaluru 
In the year 2015, Teach For India had its first cohort with 57 Fellows and 2,182 Students in Bengaluru.

In 2016, The community centers emerged. To solve contextual challenges, Fellows across the city set up community centers to facilitate additional learning time and Student-run community interventions.

The recent data for 2021 have indicated 120 Fellows, 3500 Students, and 270 Alumni members in Bengaluru.

Chennai 
In 2012 Teach For India had its first cohort with 32 Fellows and 660 Students in Chennai.

In 2017, Teach For India focused on Student leadership opportunities in Chennai. Students visited NASA, participated in Young Entrepreneurs Academy and TEDx.

In 2018, Teach For India partnered up with the government of Tamil Nadu. The Alumni worked as consultants for the Tamil Nadu Education Department to develop the state Education Information Management System and Digital Content Platforms for all teachers and students in the state.

The recent numbers for 2021 show that there are 110 Fellows, 3600 Students, and 370 Alumni members in Chennai.

Delhi 
In 2011, Teach For India had its first cohort in Delhi with 65 Fellows and 2000 students.

In the year 2016, 1000+ student leaders started driving change in the city. A Student leader Jyoti started project Gurukul inviting Students to conduct workshops in art and spoken word poetry for other students, hoping to build respect for arts and artists in the community.

By the year 2017, 30+ Delhi organizations were founded by Teach For India Alumni in the sectors of early childhood education and parent empowerment.

The recent numbers for 2021 have indicated 260 Fellows, 9000 Students, and 880 Alumni members in Delhi. Delhi is Teach For India's biggest regional operation.

Hyderabad 
In 2012, Teach For India had its first cohort in the city of Hyderabad with 46 Fellows and 1800 Students.

In the years between 2014 and 2015, the Fellow Durbar was inaugurated. The Fellow Durbar initiative is an organic space for people to come together and share their experiences and is now an integral part of Teach For India's ecosystem across 7 cities.

The recent numbers for 2021 have indicated 87 Fellows, 3250 Students, and 430 Alumni members in Hyderabad.

Teach For India Model 
Teach For India has a short term theory of change and a long term theory of change. In the short term, Teach For India follows a two-year Fellowship model. Their Fellows’ through the course of two years of teaching and working with key education stakeholders, are exposed to the realities of India's education system. The Fellows, in these years, cultivate the knowledge, skills, and mindsets required to achieve positions of leadership in and beyond education. In the long term theory of change, Fellows who graduate from the Fellowship join the Alumni movement.

The model for the Fellowship starts with a selective recruitment and selection process, followed by an ongoing teacher training and leadership development, after which Teach For India measures the impact of Students and the leadership growth of Fellows.

Each Fellow is assigned a classroom in one of Teach For India's placement cities to teach academics, values, mindsets and to give Students the access and exposure they require to reach their personal, long-term visions. Post-Fellowship, they join the Alumni movement that's working across various pathways for a more equitable India.

The long-term vision for Teach For India’s Fellows 

 The Commitment to Personal Transformation: Exploring who you are, your purpose, and striving to be a better person.
 The Commitment to Collective Action: Building relationships and organizing partners to multiply and deepen our impact.
 The Commitment to Educational Equity: Deepening our understanding of educational equity and committing to attaining it.

Fellows work on these commitments in and beyond the full-time lab of their classroom, where they relentlessly focus on moving their Students towards “path-changing” learning, the highest level of our Student Vision Scale. By growing in the 3 commitments, and embedded with real-life leadership experiences in the classroom and communities, Fellows are ready to be lifelong learners and leaders for greater impact on children.

In the next stage, Fellows either start their organizations or hold key positions of leadership, both within and beyond the education sector.

Teach For India Innovations

TFIx 
TFIx is a year-long incubation program and lifelong learning circle, for passionate entrepreneurs who want to adopt Teach For India's Fellowship model into their context.

Kids Education Revolution 
The Kids Education Revolution is a collective of schools and educational organisations that are working towards reimagining education at scale and are driven by a profound belief in the power of student leadership.

Firki 
Firki is an online teacher's training portal. It is an open-source, learning program for teachers across India to use and transform their teaching methods.

Innovation Cell

InnovatED 
InnovatED is Teach For India's national incubator for entrepreneurs looking to build impactful organizations in the education space.

The Impact 
Teach For India in a decade has seen more than 120,000 young people applying to the Fellowship Program. Currently, the non-profit organization has 900+ Fellows impacting over 3,2000 students in 260 under-resourced schools in India. They have 5,200 Student Alumni. Since Teach For India's inception, they have infused the system with more than 3,400+ Alumni who are running their own schools, organizations, training teachers, designing policy, and continuing to serve within classrooms, non-profits, and corporate institutions.

The Teach For India Alumni is serving more than 33 million children; 1 in 10 Indian children is now reached by a Teach For India Alumni. More than 77% of their Alumni continue to serve in the social sector. A recent study shows that Teach For India's community has founded more than 150+ organizations.

Teach For India has built a national focus on repairing India's educational crisis through their Innovation Cell programs that equip teachers, students, and entrepreneurs to spark long-term change in education. Through social and print media- Teach For India has garnered the support of thousands of people from a wide range of sectors, all of whom are invested in the vision of an excellent education for all children.

Academic Impact 
Teach For India has graduated 3 cohorts of 5,200 students from 10th grade in Mumbai, Pune, and Delhi till 2019 with a graduation rate that is consistently better than the Government schools’ average. Their 4th cohort graduated in 2020 with a passing rate of 94-98% across these three cities Mumbai, Pune, and Delhi.

Math 
Teach For India's students are learning to recall, apply knowledge and skills appropriate to their level. This has led to 36% grade-level mastery of Math at the end of the year versus 20% at the beginning of the year in 2018–19.

Reading Comprehension 
Teach For India students showed a record of 0.6 years of growth in their reading level in 2018–19, achieving a higher level of reading.

Alumni

Notable Teach For India alumni 

 Ashish Srivastava, 2009 Cohort, Shiksharth
 Aniket Thukral 2009 Cohort, Director of Programs, Global School Leaders
 Daniel Lobo, 2009 Cohort, Director, Leaders’ Quest
 Madhukar Banuri, 2009 Cohort, Leadership For Equity
 Charag Krishnan, 2009 Cohort, Partner, McKinsey and Company
 Yash Kumar, 2009 Cohort, GenYMedium
 Gaurav Singh, 2009 Cohort, 321 Education Foundation
 Rahul Gupta, 2009 Cohort, Pune Children's Zone 
 Namita Goel, 2009 Cohort, Lead School
 Shalini Datta, 2010 Cohort, AfterTaste
 Mayank Lodha, 2010 Cohort, KPMG India
 Sriram Chemuturi, 2010 Cohort, Principal, Matshori English Medium School
 Divya Behl, 2010 Cohort, Programme Manager, Global Schools Forum
 Aniket Doegar, 2010 Cohort, co-founder and CEO, Haqdarshak
 Kaushik Ananthanarayana, 2010 Cohort, Analytical Lead and Industry Manager, Google India
 Nisha Subramaniam, 2010 Cohort, Kanavu 
 Alpana Mallick, 2011 Cohort, Director, Training and Impact, Teach For India
 Lewitt Somarajan, 2011 Cohort, CEO, Life Lab
 Jagnoor Grewal, 2011 Cohort, Punjab Civil Services, Govt. of Punjab
 Kimberly Fernandes, 2011 Cohort, Joint Ph.D. in Human Development/Quantitative Methods (Education) and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
 Kimberly Fernandes, 2011 Cohort, Ph.D. Candidate, Education (Human Development) and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
 Hemakshi Meghani, 2011 Cohort, Indian School of Democracy
 Arja Dayal, 2012 Cohort, Former Country Director of Sierra Leone and Liberia, Innovations for Poverty Action
 Dipti Balwani, 2012 Cohort, Program Lead, Saturday Art Class; Transformational Teaching Fellowship Fellow
 Aaditya Tiwari, 2012 Cohort, Officer on Special Duty to the CM of Arunachal Pradesh
 Nathaniel Seelan, 2013 Cohort, ASL, Vidyaniketan, Chennai
 Ankita Nayak, 2013 Cohort, JP Morgan and Chase
 Jasmine Sachdev, 2013 Cohort, Shiv Nadar School, Aagaaz Theatre Trust 
 Sarthak Satapathy, 2013 Cohort, Former Team Lead, DIKSHA-PMU, Central Square Foundation
 Anurag Kundu, 2013 Cohort, Senior Officer, Govt. of Delhi 
 Jasmeet Walia, 2013 Cohort, Creatnet Education
 Priyanka Agrawal, 2013 Cohort, Engagement Manager, McKinsey and Company
 Ananya Shekar, 2013 Cohort, Thrive Foundation 
 Varun Prasad, 2013 Cohort, For A Smarter Tomorrow Foundation
 Pooja Chopra, 2013 Cohort, Khwaab
 Abhiram Natarajan, 2014 Cohort, Lead, 1M1B
 Mahesh Medlari, 2014 Cohort, People & Culture, Openhouse
 Aditya Krishnan, 2014 Cohort, Teach For India
 Kushal Dattani, 2014 Cohort, Founder, Samait Shala
 Hari Haran, 2014 Cohort, MBA, INSEAD
 Rahul Balakrishnan, 2014 Cohort, co-founder, Arthan
 Dhruv Gupta, 2014 Cohort, Consultant - Global Education Practice, The World Bank
 Surabhi Venkatesh, 2014 Cohort, Director, People & Culture, Heads Up For Tails
 Prasanna Sundaram, 2014 Cohort, Augmented Understanding 
 Piyush Gupta, 2015 Cohort, Manager, Policy Support, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
 Sharmili Phulgirkar, 2015 Cohort, Vice President, Citi, Singapore 
 Shefali Mishra, 2015 Cohort, Manager, Partnerships, Harappa Education
 Ramya Krishnan, 2015 Cohort, Team Lead, Central Square Foundation
 Tanvi Metre, 2015 Cohort, Founding Team Member and Manager, iTeach Schools
 Jahnavi Reddy, 2015 Cohort, The News Minute
 Mrinalika Rathore Project Lead, Sashaktikaran Foundation, 2015 Cohort
 Aaran Patel, 2015 Cohort, Master of Public Policy, Social and Urban Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
 Leena Bhattacharya, 2015 Cohort, Ph.D. in economics, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai
 Ankita Nawalakha, 2015 Cohort, The New Education Project
 Abhijit Thakur, 2016 Cohort, MBA, Indian School of Business
 Leeja Pillai, 2016 Cohort, Campaign Strategy, Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) 
 Sruti Sriram, 2016 Cohort, Teacher, Avasara Academy
 Vishal Sharma, 2016 Cohort, Founder, SMILES in Life Foundation
 Atul Sahu, 2016 Cohort, General Manager, Aditya Birla Chemicals
 Ketaki Patil, 2016 Cohort, Ummeed 
 Benoy Stephen, 2016 Cohort, Y-Ultimate
 Alamelu Kathiresan, 2016 Cohort, Math Love 
 Vatsala Misra Sharma, 2017 Cohort, Masters of Education in Human Development and Psychology, Harvard Graduate School of Education
 Manu Gupta, 2017 Cohort, MBA, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
 Shekar Hariharan, 2017 Cohort, Founder, Shifting Orbits Foundation
 Shreya Krishnan, 2017 Cohort, co-founder, The Better Design Foundation
 Sivaram Renganathan, 2017 Cohort, City Director, Reap Benefit
 Sneha Shetty, 2017 Cohort, Avasara Academy
 Sowmya Lakshminarayanan, 2017 Cohort, Founder, Lead by Design
 Shitanshu Maurya, 2017 Cohort, Business Analyst, Egon Zehnder

Board Members and Leadership Team

Board Members

Shaheen Mistri, CEO, Founder, Trustee, Teach For India 
Shaheen Mistri the CEO and Trustee of Teach For India grew up in 5 countries around the world and returned to India when she was 18 to start Akanksha. For 17 years, Shaheen worked with Teachers and Students, building Akanksha to provide children from low-income communities the kind of education that would maximize their greatest potential. Today, Akanksha serves 9300 children through their School Project and after-school centers in Mumbai and Pune. Shaheen founded Teach For India in 2008, with a vision of providing an excellent education to all children across India through building a pipeline of leaders committed to ending educational inequity in India. Today, Teach For India directly impacts approximately 32,000 children across seven regions in India. Shaheen has also created projects like the Maya Musical, the Kid's Education Revolution which explore student leadership, creating platforms for student voice and partnership, and TFIx, which is a year-long incubator program for passionate entrepreneurs who are willing to adapt Teach For India's model to their context and region in rural areas. Shaheen serves on the boards of Akanksha Foundation, and Simple Education Foundation.

Nisaba Godrej, Chairperson, Trustee, Teach For India 
Nisaba alongside being the key architect of GCPL's strategy and transformation in the last decade is also the Chairperson of Teach For India. She sits on the board of Godrej Agrovet, Mahindra and Mahindra and VIP Industries.

Arnavaz Aga, Founder, Trustee, Teach For India 
Arnavaz retired as Chairperson of Thermax Limited, an engineering company providing systems and solutions in the areas of energy and environment, and currently serves as a director on their board. Since her retirement in 2004, Anu has been focusing on social causes and is closely associated with the Thermax Foundation. Her area of interest is education and she is keenly involved with the Akanksha Foundation, an NGO promoting education for underprivileged children in Mumbai and Pune and Teach For India.

Nandita Dugar, Founder, Trustee, Teach For India 
Nandita has over 15 years of work experience in the nonprofit education sector. She is currently on the board of the Akanksha Foundation. She was a part of the core founding team at Teach For India and was involved in creating the strategic blueprint for its launch in India. Nandita has also served as the interim-CEO of Akanksha in 2008. Her prior experience includes working in the UK and India at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Unilever, and HDFC Bank.

Neel Shahani, Founder, Trustee, Teach For India 
Neel was a former banker with J.P.Morgan and Barclays. Before moving to Barclays, he led Sales Trading at CLSA and IIFL and has more than 25 years of experience in the industry. He is currently on the Boards of Teach To Lead and Akanksha Foundation.

Zia Mody, Trustee, Teach For India 
Zia is the Founder and senior partner of AZB & Partners. She previously worked as a corporate associate at Baker & McKenzie in New York for five years and returned to India to establish the Chambers of Zia Mody in 1984, which then became AZB & Partners in 2004. She is the deputy chairman and non-executive director of the HSBC Asia Pacific Board, a member of the governing board of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA), foreign arbitrator on the Panel of Arbitrators of the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC), a member of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal, Washington, D.C. (2008-2013), and a vice president and member of the London Court of International Arbitration (2010-2013).

Meher Pudumjee, trustee, Teach For India 
Meher is the chairperson of Thermax Ltd. Meher served as the chairperson of Pune Zonal Council of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and represented India at the Asian Business Women's Conference in Osaka in 2006. In 2008, the World Economic Forum selected her as a Young Global Leader for her professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. In 2009, she was selected CEO of the Year by Business Standard. She also serves on the boards of Imperial College India Foundation, Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation and Pune City Connect Development Foundation. She is on the board of Akanksha Foundation and is a trustee of Teach to Lead, Mumbai.

Ashish Dhawan, Trustee, Teach For India 
Ashish is the Founder and Chairman of the Central Square Foundation (CSF). Prior to this, he worked for twenty years in the investment management business and managed ChrysCapital, one of India's leading private equity funds. In June 2012, he left his full-time role at ChrysCapital to start CSF. His passion for education led him to spearhead the founding of Ashoka University. Ashish holds a place on the India Advisory Board of Harvard and the Yale Development Council. He serves on the boards of several non-profits including the Akanksha Foundation, 3.2.1 Education Foundation, Teach For India, Centre for Civil Society, India School Leadership Institute and Bharti Foundation.

Ramesh Srinivasan, Trustee, Teach For India 
Ramesh is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, and an established leader in Pharmaceutical and Organization practices. He is a Dean of the Bower Forum, McKinsey's program for CEO learning. Ramesh has extensive experience working on a broad range of strategy and organizational topics across healthcare, private equity, high-tech, banking and industrial sectors.

Leadership Team 

 Shaheen Mistri, CEO, Founder, Trustee, Teach For India
 Aakansha Gulati, Chief Program Officer, Teach For India
 Sandeep Rai, Chief of City Operations, Teach For India
 Manasi Jain, Chief of Staff, Teach For India
 Tanya Arora, Director, Human Resources, Teach For India
 Hitesh Rawtani, Director Technology, Teach For India
 Payoshni Saraf, Director, Alumni Impact, Teach For India
 Alpana Mallick, Director, Training, and Impact, Teach For India
 Sara Khan, Director Development, Teach For India
 Devangana Mishra, Director, Recruitment, Teach For India
 Abhik Bhattacherji, Director, Marketing and Communication, Teach For India
 Aloma Rego, Director, Fellowship Selection, Teach For India
 Aditya Mallya, City Director, Mumbai, Teach For India
 Nalika Braganza, Program Director, Training and Impact, Teach For India
 Mansi Joshi, City Director, Delhi, Teach For India
 Dakshinamoorthy Visweswaran, City Director, Chennai, Teach For India
 Tulika Verma, City Director, Bangalore, Teach For India
 Keshar Mohka, City Director, Pune, Teach For India
 Apoorv Shah, City Director, Ahmedabad, Teach For India
 Vignesh Krishnan, City Director, Hyderabad, Teach For India
 Rajshree Doshi, Director, TFIX, Teach For India
 Ashwath Bharath, Director, FIRKI, Teach For India
 Kritika Rawat, Coach, Kids Education Revolution, Teach For India
 Pramod Pujari, Manager, Administration, Teach For India
 Shivani Agrawal, Director, Strategy, and Learning, Teach For India

Published works 
 Grey Sunshine: Stories from Teach For India by Sandeep Rai (2019)
Redrawing India: The Teach For India Story by Kovid Gupta and Shaheen Mistri. (2014)

References

Non-profit organisations based in India
Educational organisations based in India
Organisations based in Mumbai
Organizations established in 2007
2007 establishments in Maharashtra Wendy Sue Kopp (born June 29, 1967) is the CEO and co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent nonprofit organizations working to expand educational opportunity in their own countries and the Founder of Teach For America (TFA), a national teaching corps.

Background
Wendy Kopp attended Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas and later was an undergraduate in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She received her Arts Baccalaureate degree from Princeton in 1989 and was a member of Princeton's Business Today and the University Press Club.

Teach For America
In 1989, Kopp proposed the creation of Teach For America in her 177-page long senior thesis titled "An Argument and Plan for the Creation of the Teachers Corps" which she completed under the supervision of Marvin Bressler. She was convinced that many in her generation were searching for a way to assume a significant responsibility that would make a real difference in the world and that top college students would choose teaching over more lucrative opportunities if a prominent teacher corps existed.

Shortly after graduating from Princeton, Kopp founded Teach For America. In 1990, 500 recent college graduates joined Teach For America's charter corps.

In 2007, Kopp founded Teach For All, a global network of independent nonprofit organizations that apply the same model as Teach For America in other countries.

In 2013, Kopp transitioned out of the role of CEO of Teach For America and named Elisa Villanueva Beard and Matt Kramer as co-CEOs of the organization. Villanueva Beard assumed full leadership in September 2015. Today, Kopp remains an active member of Teach For America's board.

Kopp chronicled her experiences at Teach For America in two books, One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way and A Chance To Make History: What Works and What Doesn't in Providing an Excellent Education For All.

According to 2012 online records, Kopp makes at least $416,876 per year.

Personal life
Wendy Kopp is married to Richard Barth, president of the KIPP Foundation. They have four children and live in Manhattan.

Awards
Honorary doctorates
 2014: University of Oklahoma
 2013: Boston University
 2012: Harvard University
 2010: Marquette University
 2009: Washington University of St. Louis
 2008: Georgetown University
 2007: Mount Holyoke College
 2007: Rhodes College
 2004: Pace University
 2004: Mercy College
 2001: Smith College
 2000: Princeton University
 1995: Connecticut College
 1995: Drew University

Awards
 2011: Spelman College National Community Service Award
 2008: The Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship
 2008: Presidential Citizens Medal
 2008: Ashoka Fellowship
 2006: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
 2006: The Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education Award
 2004: The John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award
 2003: The Clinton Center Award for Leadership and National Service
 2003: The Schwab Foundation's Outstanding Social Entrepreneur Award
 1994: Aetna's Voice of Conscience Award
 1994: The Citizen Activist Award from the Gleitsman Foundation
 1993: Princeton University Woodrow Wilson Award
 1991: The Jefferson Award for Public Service
 1991: Echoing Green Fellowship

Trivia
On February 5, 2007, Kopp appeared on The Colbert Report.

Published works
 One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way (2001)
 A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn't in Providing an Excellent Education for All (2011)

References

External links

Biographies:
 Official biography – Teach For America
 Thesis sparks thriving teacher corps – Princeton University
 Biography – John Glenn School of Public Affairs
 
 Wendy Kopp: America's Best Leaders
Interviews and speeches:
 Feature video interview with Wendy Kopp on The Alcove with Mark Molaro
 Teaching Children – PBS
 Change the World Interviews
 2013 Commencement Speech – Boston University
 2009 Commencement Speech – Washington University in St. Louis
 2008 Commencement Speech – Georgetown University
 2007 Commencement Speech – Mount Holyoke College
 2006 Commencement Speech – University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
 Podcast Interview with Wendy Kopp Social Innovation Conversations, February 1, 2008
 How I Built This - Teach For America: Wendy Kopp
 
 "Wendy Kopp Biography and Interview" – American Academy of Achievement

1967 births
American nonprofit executives
Educators from Texas
American women educators
Living people
Mercy College (New York) alumni
People from Austin, Texas
Presidential Citizens Medal recipients
Women nonprofit executives
Princeton School of Public and International Affairs alumni
21st-century American women