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Pierre Boulez: “Commentaire III de Bourreaux de Solitude”
From Le marteau sans maître (1955)
Although I find much of Boulez’s work to be overrated (the frequently discussed Piano Sonatas in particular are yawns as far as I’m concerned), Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master) is to my mind one of the finest products of its decade, and indeed of the 20th century all told. In spite of the rigorous structural approach— Le Marteau, like virtually all of Boulez’s music, was written using the elaborate precompositional method of serialism— there is a certain jazzy sensibility to Le Marteau, which comes out particularly strongly in movements such as this one.
Le marteau is written for an alto voice and a chamber ensemble comprising flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, percussion, and xylorimba (an extended xylophone). The emphasis on the middle of the frequency spectrum, and the preponderance of plucked and struck instruments, gives the ensemble a brittle, shimmering quality that is without parallel in the usually warm and lush sound world of classical chamber music. In his idiosyncratic selection of instruments, Boulez was inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire of 1912.
The shifting, prismatic array of tone-colors also suggests the influence of Schoenberg’s idea of Klangfarbenmelodie, according to which the succession of timbres is subordinated to a musical logic akin to that which governs the unfolding of melody. In the mid-1960s, while brainstorming the design of Don Buchla’s first synthesizer units, Morton Subotnick would use a page from the score of Le marteau as an inspiration for the total control of all parameters of sound.
Four of the nine movements of Le marteau have vocal parts; the remaining pieces are conceived as instrumental “commentaries” on the vocal movements. The texts are from a 1934 collection by the French surrealist poet René Char.
Played 200 time(s).
October 29, 2010, 10:42am
