Pierre Boulez
Le marteau sans maître

THE REVIEW

Think of sounds far from Europe, the very French très chic Pierre Boulez during the composition of the most famous piece from the early phase of his career, "Le marteau sans maître": and so, in the instrumentation, he includes classical guitar, vibraphone, and xylorimba, which respectively suggest the Japanese koto, the Balinese gamelan, and the African balafon.

He also thinks of a way of composing music made not of notes, but of sounds: it is the serial organization of sounds, where the concept of series is extended not only to the notes (that is, the pitches, to use a technical term) but to all the constitutive parameters of sound, namely durations, intensities, timbres, in addition to pitches. Others in Europe were also beginning to do this in the mid-1950s, but Boulez is a leader, one of those who achieved the first important results.

"Le marteau sans maître" is a suite for female alto voice and 6 instrumentalists (in addition to those already mentioned, the ensemble also includes flute, viola, and percussion). With a duration of 37 minutes, it was first performed in June 1955 in Baden-Baden, Germany. Boulez was thirty at the time: he considered this work as "an enrichment of the European sound vocabulary through the consideration of what is extra-European."

And this music still sounds very new today, constantly changing, in direct opposition to the stylistic rigidity of the 19th-century symphonic tradition and its remnants in the early 20th century. It is a suite because the piece is divided into nine short sections; the instruments never all play together but in small sub-groups that change from section to section, ensuring variety and dynamism to the piece.

The sung texts are borrowed from the surrealist poet René Char: his is the poem entitled "Le marteau sans maître." The alto voice is a discreet presence, intervening in four of the nine sections, in the last one with the technique of singing with a closed mouth: once the articulation of Char's visionary texts is concluded, the voice returns to being pure sound that integrates with the other sounds surrounding it.

A music made of sounds, not notes: as mentioned before. A music that is not easy but of great variety and richness, a paradoxical result of the extreme rigor of its laws: this is the lesson of Pierre Boulez.