Flavorwire
December 2016

On a cold January night in 1941, four inmates at a German prison-of-war camp debuted Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” The piece was largely written in the camp itself, Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany, where Messiaen, a French solider, was held for a year. He and three other musicians performed it for the first time for an audience of 300 German soldiers. In an inscription, Messiaen dedicated the piece “in homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises his hand towards Heaven saying ‘There shall be no more time.’”

A cacophonous and arrhythmic piece, “Quartet for the End of Time” is challenging enough for both player and spectator that it’s rarely performed in concert. But in August of this year, a group of 100 or so inmates from New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex gathered outside in the yard to hear a group of musicians perform selections of Messiaen’s compositions for an episode of the Amazon original series Mozart in the Jungle. The result, called “Not Yet Titled,” is a moving half-hour of television that extends beyond the boundaries of fiction and serves as a reminder of art’s power to transcend even the most miserable circumstances.

The writing team on Mozart in the Jungle, which centers on the fictional New York Symphony, had toyed with the idea of sending the orchestra to play at a prison or jail. In the show’s third season, which premiered on Dec. 9, they got their chance when the musicians finally settle a contract dispute with the symphony’s president — but the concert hall is still being rented out to another group. It makes perfect sense for the orchestra’s unconventional conductor, Rodrigo (Gael García Bernal), to arrange a concert on Rikers in the interim.