Mark Steinbach, organist and lecturer in music at Brown University.

M. Benedicte Verley

Brown University organist Mark Steinbach celebrates the 100th birthday of pioneering French composer Olivier Messiaen this weekend with a free concert at Sayles Hall on the Brown campus.

The program features several organ works, including a rare opportunity to hear the 30-minute Ascension suite in its entirety.

Messiaen, who died in 1992, was one of the most original voices in 20th-century music, someone whose colorful compositions use striking harmonies along with melodies drawn from bird songs and Indian ragas. And much of his music is based on aspects of the Roman Catholic faith.

He is perhaps best known for his haunting Quartet for the End of Time, written while the composer was a German prisoner during World War II. But he also wrote many pieces for organ, an instrument Messiaen had a special relationship with.

Messiaen was 18 when he enrolled in the organ class of the legendary Marcel Dupré. The story goes that the young Messiaen had never seen an organ console before, but within a week had mastered a difficult Bach score.

In 1929, when he was 21, he became substitute organists of the Sainte-Trinite in Paris and took over the post on a full-time basis in 1931. It was a job he would hold for more than sixty years.

Messiaen, who entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11, felt that music had a strong visual impact and claimed to have possessed synesthesia, or the ability to “hear” colors when music is being performed.

“When I hear music, I hear colors,” he said, “not through my eyes but through my intellect. When I compose, I see the colors as I see the sounds.”

The Ascension, the centerpiece of Steinbach’s program, was written in 1933 as four “meditations” for orchestra. The composer arranged three of those movements for organ the following year, and added a new section called “Transports of Joy,” a tour de force that is often performed on its own. Steinbach, an authority on new organ music, can be heard playing that final movement of the suite on the 2007 CD, Pipes Rhode Island, a sort of survey of local organs. Steinbach made the recording on Sayles Hall’s 1903 Hutchings-Votey organ, the instrument he will use this weekend.

Other works on the program, which takes place Saturday night at 8, include Apparition of the Eternal Church and excerpts from The Birth of the Lord and Glorious Bodies.

Again, the concert is free. Call (401) 863-2344.

cgray@projo.com