I am reposting below the series of entries on Messiaen's Île de feu II with no changes to the originals posted April 2015–May 2016. These were done as a kind of experiment in 'stream-of-consciousness analysis', following my nose to what caught my interest in a single score each time I returned to it, and publishing a few selectively. Much material never made it into the blog. What I ended up with resembles random pages from a laboratory notebook with observations only partially organized. Still, disorganized as they are, I am in the process of turning some of the material into a more finished form, and there may be some things here that may also trigger ideas from readers.
I am currently working up several short papers that connect Île de feu I and Île de feu II. The first of these, an expansion of the blog post 'Broken Symmetries 3.1', is a comparative analysis of rhythmic structures based on a theory of duration string contours. It will be finished soon, and I will post a link to it in a separate post.
