Due to my personal love of the composer Messiaen, and the interest in Christianity that has arisen since I came to the UK to study, for this research I would like to use Messiaen’s work as a case study of the development and influence of contemprory music with regards to the religious part of it.

I plan to write a piano concerto soundtrack in the style of Messiaen. I’m using the original text of The Ascension of Isaiah as a developmental thread for the music, with some religious elements to tell the sound version of the story. The Ascension of Isaiah is a work of Christian ‘apocalyptic literature’, the Apocrypha, consisting of eleven chapters from two different sources combined by early Christians. The first part is the Martyrdom of Isaiah. The second part (chapters 6 to 11) was written by the Christian Gnostics in the first half of the 2nd century. It describes a ‘vision’ given by Isaiah to Hezekiah, king of Judah, in which he was led by an angel to the seven heavens to see the Triune God and to see the Son from His birth to His ascension to heaven. There is also an intervening section (chapter 3, verse 13 to chapter 4, verse 18) on the dedication of Christ, the persecution of the Church and the end of the age. It was written by Christians at the end of the 1st century and was later inserted.