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)
In a Nazi POW camp in 1940, the composer Olivier Messiaen wrote a quartet for the end of time and premiered it for prisoners and guards on battered, broken instruments. The end of the world has a soundtrack — and it ranges from devastating beauty to headbanging nuclear dread to a gleeful, fast-talking 'and I feel fine.'
Key concepts
- Program Music
- Instrumental music meant to depict or evoke something beyond itself — in Messiaen's 'Abyss of the Birds,' the abyss is Time and despair, the birdsong is hope, written into the sound.
- Tone And Irony
- How an artist's attitude shapes the message — R.E.M. delivers catastrophe at breakneck, almost cheerful speed with 'and I feel fine,' using irony to capture our numbness toward constant doom.
- Context As Meaning
- Where and why a work was made can be inseparable from what it means — Messiaen's quartet, composed and first played inside a prison camp, carries a weight no concert hall could give it.
- Techniques Of Dread
- The specific musical tools that create a mood — Black Sabbath's heavy, distorted, slow-grinding riffs were practically invented to make nuclear apocalypse something you feel in your chest.
What to know
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The same subject yields opposite tones — Messiaen finds transcendent hope, Black Sabbath visceral terror, R.E.M. ironic detachment — so 'the end' is less a fixed mood than a canvas each artist fills with what their moment needs to express.
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