Le marteau sans maître

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Le marteau sans maître (The hammer without master) is a piece of classical music composed by the French composer Pierre Boulez. It is a setting of the surrealist poetry of René Char for alto, five instruments, and percussion. It was first performed in 1955.

1 Movements
2 History
3 Composition
4 Text
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Movements

The work has nine movements, four of which set the text of three poems of René Char. The remaining movements are instrumental extrapolations of the other four:

avant "l'artisanat furieux" (before "the furious craftsmanship")
commentaire I de "bourreaux de solitude" (first commentary on "hangmen of solitude")
"l'artisanat furieux" ("the furious craftsmanship")
commentaire II de "bourreaux de solitude" (second commentary on "hangmen of solitude")
"bel édifice et les pressentiments", version première ("stately building and presentiments", first version)
"bourreaux de solitude" ("hangmen of solitude")
après "l'artisanat furieux" (after "the furious craftsmanship")
commentaire III de "bourreaux de solitude" (third commentary on "hangmen of solitude")
"bel édifice et les pressentiments", double ("stately building and presentiments", again)

[edit] History

Before Le Marteau, Boulez had established a limited reputation as the composer of a few very modernist, and very serialist works such as Structures I, Polyphonie X, and his infamously "unplayable" Second Piano Sonata. Le Marteau was written between 1953 and 1955.

It received its premiere in 1955 at the 29th Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Baden-Baden. Boulez's work was chosen to represent France at this festival. The French members of the committee were against this, but Heinrich Strobel, then director of the Baden-Baden Sudwestfunk Orchestra, scheduled to give all of the concerts at the festival, threatened to withdraw if it was not. The first performance was given on June 18, 1955 conducted by Hans Rosbaud, with Sybilla Plate as the solo singer.

Boulez, notorious for considering his works to be always "in progress", later revised Le Marteau in 1957. In the years that have followed, it has become Pierre Boulez's most famous and influential work. (For instance, Mauricio Kagel's Anagrama of 1958 was dedicated to Boulez.)

[edit] Composition

The instrumentation was quite unique for Western music at the time, lacking any kind of bass instrument, and was influenced by Balinese music. Boulez chose the collection with a continuum of sonorities in mind. This purpose is to allow a graduated deconstruction of the voice into percussive noises, a compositional technique which has been common throughout Boulez's work (e.g. the recent Sur Incises of 1998 similarly breaks down the sounds of the piano by combining it with harp and percussion). The voice and five instruments can be arranged in a line, each pair connected by a similarity, as in the following diagram:

The vocal writing is challenging for the singer, containing wide leaps, glissandi, and even Sprechstimme, a device found in the work of the Second Viennese School before Boulez, and there is deliberate similarity to Arnold Schönberg's song cycle, Pierrot Lunaire (it is somewhat of an homage to Schönberg). Another similarity to Pierrot is that each movement chooses a different subset of the available instruments:

Alto flute, Vibraphone, Guitar, Viola
Alto flute, Xylorimba, Tambourine, 2 bongos, Viola
Voice, Alto flute
Xylorimba, Vibraphone, Finger cymbals, Agogô, Triangle, Guitar, Viola
Voice, Alto flute, Guitar, Viola
Voice, Alto flute, Xylorimba, Vibraphone, Maracas, Guitar, Viola
Alto flute, Vibraphone, Guitar
Alto flute, Xylorimba, Vibraphone, Claves, Agogô, 2 bongos, Maracas
Voice, Alto flute, Xylorimba, Vibraphone, Maracas, Small tam-tam, Low gong, Very deep tam-tam, Large suspended cymbal, Guitar, Viola

The writing is often hermetic: the three cycles each use different serial techniques. The "L'Artisanat furieux" movements, for example, use a technique Boulez called "pitch multiplication" in Boulez on Music Today (Boulez 1971). Lev Koblyakov identified its use in Le Marteau (Koblyakov 1977, 1981, and 1990). Later, a complete explanation of the processes themselves was made by Stephen Heinemann (1993). Pitch, durations, and dynamic associations in the "Bourreaux de solitude" cycle were described by Winick (1986) and Wentzel (1991), and the deployment of these materials was discussed by Ulrich Mosch (1997 and 2004).

[edit] Text

The text for this work was taken from René Char's collection of poems, Le Marteau sans maître, written in the 1930s while Char "still shared the surrealist views of poets like André Breton and Henri Michaux."[1] Boulez had earlier written two cantatas, Visage nuptial and Le Soleil des eaux in 1946 and 1948 which also set poems of René Char.

L'artisanat furieux La roulotte rouge au bord du clou Et cadavre dans le panier Et chevaux de labours dans le fer à cheval Je rêve la tête sur la pointe de mon couteau le Pérou.	The furious craftsmanship The red caravan on the edge of a nail And corpse in the basket And plowhorses in the horseshoe I dream the head on the point of my peruvian knife.
Bourreaux de solitude Le pas s'est éloigné le marcheur s'est tu Sur le cadran de l'Imitation Le Balancier lance sa charge de granit réflexe.	Hangmen of solitude The step is distant, the walker is you On the frame of imitation The pendulum throws its load of granite reflex.
Bel édifice et les pressentiments J'écoute marcher dans mes jambes La mer morte vagues par-dessus tête Enfant la jetée-promenade sauvage Homme l'illusion imitée Des yeux purs dans les bois Cherchent en pleurant la tête habitable.	Stately building and presentiments I hear marching in my legs The sea dies, waving overhead A child walks the savage pier Man imitates illusion The eyes gaze into the forest Searching, in tears, for a habitable head.

[edit] References

Boulez, Pierre. 1957. Le Marteau sans maître, score. London: Universal Edition.
———. 1971. Boulez on Music Today. Translated by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-08006-8.
———. 1986. Orientations: Collected Writings. Edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez; translated by Martin Cooper. London & Boston:Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-14347-4. ISBN 0-571-13811-X (cased). ISBN 0-571-13835-7 (pbk).
———. 1991. Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship. Translation by Stephen Walsh. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-193-11210-8.
———. 2005. Le Marteau sans maître. Facsimile of the draft score and the first fair copy of the score, with an introduction in French and English. Veröffentlichungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung. Edited by Pascal Decroupet. Mainz: Schott. ISBN 3-7957-0453-7.
Grout, Donald, and Claude Palisca. 2001. A History of Western Music, 6th edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, p. 726. ISBN 0-393-97527-4
Heinemann, Stephen. 1993. "Pitch-Class Set Multiplication in Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître. D.M.A. diss., University of Washington.
———. "Pitch-Class Set Multiplication in Theory and Practice." Music Theory Spectrum 20/1 (Spring 1998): 72-96.
Jameux, Dominique.1989. Boulez: Le Marteau sans maître, included booklet. MK 42619, CBS Masterworks, 1989.
———. 1991. Pierre Boulez. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-66740-9. London: Faber. ISBN 0-571-13744-X
Koblyakov, Lev . 1977. "P. Boulez Le Marteau sans maître: Analysis of Pitch Structure". Zeitschrift für Musiktheorie 8/1:24-39.
———. "The World of Harmony of Pierre Boulez: Analysis of Le Marteau sans maître. Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981.
———. Pierre Boulez: A World of Harmony. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990. ISBN 3-718-60422-1.
Mosch, Ulrich. 1997. "Wahrnehmungsweisen serieller Musik." Musiktheorie 12:61–70.
———. 2004. Musikalisches Hören serieller Musik: Untersuchungen am Beispiel von Pierre Boulez' 'Le Marteau sans maître'. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag. ISBN 3897272539.
Wentzel, Wayne C. 1991. “Dynamic and Attack Associations in Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître”. Perspectives of New Music 29, no. 1 (Winter): 142-170.
Winick, Steven D. 1986. “Symmetry and Pitch-Duration Associations in Boulez' Le Marteau sans maître” Perspectives of New Music 24, no. 2 (Spring): 280-321.