The Sound of the End

The end of the world can have a soundtrack, too. Consider the musical selections below. What were the circumstances around each one’s creation, and what techniques do they use to achieve their messages and moods?

Olivier Messiaen | Quartet for the End of Time: “Abyss of the Birds” (1940)
Black Sabbath | “Electric Funeral” (1970)
REM | “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” (1987)

One clarinet alone in a prison camp. A grinding riff about the atomic tide. A shouted list of names that ends 'and I feel fine'. Three endings, three moods.

Key concepts

Program Music: Instrumental music written to depict a scene or idea rather than just to sound pleasing. It is Messiaen's technique: with no words at all, a lone clarinet's long notes and sudden shrieks 'are' a bird over an abyss. The two rock songs reach their moods the other way, through lyrics.

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Every work — at a glance

Quartet for the End of Time: Abyss of the Birds — Olivier Messiaen (song)

A long, exposed solo-clarinet movement from a 1940 quartet Messiaen composed in a German POW camp and premiered for fellow prisoners. He wrote that 'the abyss is Time, with its sorrow,' while the birds are 'our longing for light.'

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What to know

01
What technique creates each mood? In “Abyss of the Birds” Messiaen strands a single clarinet in near-silence so the listener feels the void; “Electric Funeral” grinds on the tritone at a dragging tempo to sound like collapse; “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” does the opposite — a breathless, almost cheerful torrent that makes the apocalypse feel absurd. Dread, doom and irony, each built from one specific musical choice.

Across subjects

History gives Messiaen's piece a weight no analysis of the notes can: he wrote and first performed the Quartet for the End of Time in 1941 inside a Nazi

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

The end of the world gets a soundtrack, and each era scores it differently. Should apocalypse be made to sound beautiful (Messiaen) or even fun (R.E.M.)? Turning catastrophe into art can help us face it — or it can anesthetize us, letting us hum along to our own extinction.

Practice — a sample

LITMessiaen's title comes from Revelation's 'time no longer'. Someone who believes music should enact its title would LEAST likely praise —

A A free, drifting pulse
B A dissolving metre
C A march tread
D An unmeasured solo line
E A repeated figure

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