Once Messiaen had, five years ahead of time, accepted the commission from Alice Tully to write a piece that would mark the US bicentennial of 1976, he consulted an encyclopaedia in search of a suitable subject. What he found was the canyon territory of southern Utah. In the spring of 1973 he paid the region a visit—as the Utah Symphony would do fifty years later, to give a performance of the resulting work in the canyons and under the stars, a performance to which this studio recording relates.