boulez s künstlerroman: using blocs sonores to overcome ... · references to boulez’s essays are...

Boulez’s Künstlerroman: Using blocs sonoresto Overcome Anxieties and Influence inLe marteau sans maître

JOSEPH SALEM

Several decades after Lev Koblyakov published his groundbreaking in-vestigation of Le marteau sans maître in 1977, music theorists such asCatherine Losada and Ciro Scotto have in recent years provided crucial

additional insights into Boulez’s compositional process and the significanceof blocs sonores, or proprietary pitch-class collections, for his development asa composer.1 Yet conventional wisdom still treats the premiere of anotherwork, Structures 1a (1952), as perhaps the most noteworthy historical eventin Boulez’s compositional development, even though the experimental rele-vance of that work appears quite limited when considered alongside thesprawling role played by blocs sonores in his subsequent compositions andaesthetics.2 Such assessments suggest a tacit marginalization of Boulez’s blocs

I would like to thank Christopher Brody, Julia Doe, and my anonymous reviewers for thehelpful suggestions made during the drafting of this article. References to Boulez’s essays are toEnglish translations, followed by the new standard French collections, most often using the ab-breviations “PdR” for Boulez, Points de repère, and “PdR1” for Boulez, Points de repère, vol. 1,Imaginer. References to Boulez’s correspondence with René Char and Karlheinz Stockhausenare to the letters held in the Pierre Boulez Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel,Switzerland, translations of which are mine unless otherwise indicated. All other unattributedtranslations are similarly my own.

1. Kobylakov, Pierre Boulez; Losada, “Isography and Structure” and “Complex Multiplica-tion”; Scotto, “Reexamining PC-Set Multiplication.” For earlier discussions of the transitionaloperations behind Boulez’s blocs sonores, see Koblyakov, “P. Boulez, ‘Le marteau sans maître’”;Heinemann, “Pitch-Class Set Multiplication”; and Cohn, “Transpositional Combination.”

2. While many textbooks give space to both works, Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History ofWestern Music and Robert P. Morgan’s Twentieth-Century Music clearly emphasize the analyti-cal traits of Book 1 of Structures over those of Le marteau, and although Joseph Auner providesmore extensive discussion of Le marteau in his Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centu-ries, his analytical examples come primarily from Structures 1a (and, as usual, from Messiaen’sMode de valeurs et d’intensités). A major (and welcome) exception within textbook coverage isfound in Paul Griffiths’sModern Music and After (3rd ed.). Within more subject-specific cover-age, Martin Iddon, in his New Music at Darmstadt, provides more citations of Structures 1athan of any other work by Boulez, but notes that this piece was “aberrant in terms of the waysin which Boulez generally operated” (83). Meanwhile, Mark Carroll (Music and Ideology inCold War Europe) and M. J. Grant (Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics) both focus more on theanalytics of Structures 1a than those behind Le marteau or blocs sonores, although Grant is clear

Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 71, Number 1, pp. 109–154 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN1547-3848. © 2018 by the AmericanMusicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissionto photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissionsweb page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2018.71.1.109.

sonores to the realm of specialized musical knowledge, despite their centralimportance for his legacy, their relation to his broader goals in postwar aes-thetics, and their myriad appearances in his later music.

In this article I sketch a Künstlerroman that connects Boulez’s concept ofthe bloc sonore with his struggle to redefine serialism during the long gesta-tion of Le marteau sans maître (1952–55, rev. 1957). After explaining blocssonores as musical objects in Le marteau, I provide a biographical backdropfor these developments using letters written by Boulez during his trip toSouth America as music director of the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. I alsoconsider how the concept of the bloc sonore served Boulez’s broader aesthet-ic goals in his published writings on music from this same period. My hope isthat, as a result, the bloc sonore will be appreciated as Boulez’s single mostoriginal and substantial contribution to harmony in music.

My narrative begins with an implicit acknowledgment of Boulez’s rela-tionship to some of his dodecaphonic predecessors. While I avoid reviewingthe influence of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, or explicating the literarytheories of Harold Bloom, I do invite reflections on “anxiety of influence”as a colloquial concept that can elucidate themes interwoven throughoutBoulez’s writings as he sought to modernize the style of his successes ofthe late 1940s (his Sonatine for flute, his first two piano sonatas, his earlycantatas) by means of the new techniques of integral serialism in the early1950s.3 My engagement with Bloom is based on Boulez’s actual composi-tional practices and private letters rather than reductive quotations from po-lemics such as “Schoenberg Is Dead,” which tend to hypostatize possiblepatriarchal connections rather than sustaining dynamic or thought-provokingtensions. Nonetheless, I do entertain the suggestion that Boulez’s musi-cal and theoretical acts resonate with the first four of Bloom’s six revisionaryratios, mostly because Bloom’s theory has narrative implications that drama-tize my Joycean allusion to the portrait of a maturing artist in provocative,if nonliteral, ways.4 Above all, my desire is to guide the reader toward a more

in her criticism of Structures 1a as a paradigmatic example of (and introduction to) serialism(131). Some shorter, nonspecialized textbooks, such as Mark Evan Bonds’s History of Music inWestern Culture (4th ed.), barely touch on Boulez.

3. Bloom’s elaboration of this concept is usually discussed through reference to his texts TheAnxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry and A Map of Misreading. A number of music theoristshave been attracted by Bloom’s ideas over the years, prompting a reaction by Richard Taruskinthat is especially thorough in its exploration of the possible application of Bloom’s work to mu-sic: Taruskin, “Revising Revision.” More recently Michael L. Klein has provided a very adeptrethinking of Bloomian concepts in relation to music in his two books Intertextuality in WesternArt Music and Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject.

4. Bloom lists the six revisionary ratios as clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis,and apophrades (Anxiety of Influence, 14–16); his concise descriptions of some of these termsare provided at relevant points below. Together these ratios form a loose narrative trajectorythat follows the poet from his or her first misreading of an influence to an appropriation of it via

110 Journal of the American Musicological Society

intimate understanding of Boulez’s stylistic development as a struggle towardself-identification, rather than offering a psychological gloss on his motives orpolemics.5

A secondary goal is to highlight the way in which the dialogic relationshipbetween Boulez’s writings and the development of his blocs sonores fed hisongoing struggle as a composer throughout the 1950s and into the early1960s. His monograph Penser la musique aujourd’hui (1963) is widely con-sidered to be a retrospective summary of his work from the previous decade,including his endeavors to appropriate Schoenberg’s and Webern’s variousforms of dodecaphonicism for his own brand of serialism.6 The cynical toneof this work is quite different from that of some of his earlier essays, however,especially those written during his angst-filled race to complete Le marteau.Thus, while I refrain from discussing Penser, I briefly review three essaysthat Boulez wrote in 1953–54, in order to highlight the relationship betweenhis development of a new serial method and his shifting agendas as a writer.Perhaps more than Le marteau itself, these writings shape the cast of myBoulezian Künstlerroman, revealing a fallible artist who struggled to main-tain his moral principles while sublimating his anxieties and influences intocreative energy.

The Forge, the Hammer, and the Emerging Master

Ever since its lauded premiere in 1955 Le marteau has maintained its status asone of Boulez’s most coherent and convincing works, yet the context for itscomposition provides an unlikely background for success. In fact, the firstscheduled premiere of Lemarteau, for October 16, 1954, at Donaueschingen,was canceled for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was Boulez’s inabil-ity to meet the deadline.7 This was followed by a premiere of a first version

a transcendent form of imitation. Addressing all six ratios lies outside the scope of this article,and indeed not all of them are relevant to the gestation of Le marteau.

5. In many ways I heed the warnings and implications of Taruskin’s “Revising Revision”here, especially where he writes, “Boulez’s stentorian proclamation of Schoenberg’s demise isa perfect Bloomian paradigm: the killing of the father and the opportunistic misreading of hislegacy, enabling the composers of Boulez’s and Babbitt’s generation to inherit and rational-ize the later Schoenberg’s neoclassical technique while at the same time claiming the earlierSchoenberg’s patrimony. This misreading has been well ratified in post-World-War-II academichistoriography . . . in which the serial ‘discovery’ is staunchly represented as the outcome ofa straight evolutionary line—perfectly sequent and eminently trackable—rather than as a clina-men, a swerve” (136).

6. For more on the textual history of Penser, see Nicolas, “L’intellectualité musicale,” andSalem, “Boulez Revised,” esp. 252–54.

7. Some of these reasons are discussed below. For a complete description of the schedule ofdrafts, fair copies, and revisions to Le marteau, see Decroupet’s introduction to Pierre Boulez: Lemarteau, esp. sections 2 and 5, and O’Hagan, “From Sketch to Score,” esp. 632–34.

Boulez’s Künstlerroman 111

of the work eight months later, on June 18, 1955, in Baden-Baden, under thedirection of Hans Rosbaud.8 Supposedly inspired by the first performance,Boulez then added 149 measures to the final movement before conductingthe Paris premiere of the work onMarch 21, 1956, as part of his ownDomaineMusical series. (If Boulez’s own letters are to be believed, he actually composedthis last portion in less than ten days immediately following the Baden-Badenpremiere, which would pose a remarkable contrast to the otherwise very slowgestation of the work over the previous four years.)9

In fact, the preceding years of 1952–55 were some of Boulez’s least pro-ductive as a composer: despite his lively correspondences with John Cage,Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Henri Pousseur,10 his development of a new har-monic method, and his completion of several new works in 1951–52, Boulezappeared to lack energy—and perhaps inspiration—during this period.11 Andyet he also supposedly said that he intended to complete his first masterpiece bythe age of thirty (1955)—a self-imposed deadline that frames this advancedcomposition as the mature culmination of a lengthy apprenticeship.12 Letters tocolleagues attest to his developing ideas as a composer (not least through hiscriticism and critique of their works), but Boulez’s travels as music director ofthe Compagnie Renaud-Barrault left little time for composition.13 Beyond the

8. Some confusion exists over the “first version” of Le marteau. While Universal Editionmistakenly prepared a facsimile of the first six movements in the fall of 1954, this was not sanc-tioned by Boulez, and should not be considered a “first version” of the work since Boulez hadevery intention of adding more movements at that time; see Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le mar-teau, esp. 45, 62–63.

9. Decroupet leaves open the possibility that Boulez may have completed the work as earlyas February 1955 on the basis of a reference to the work in a letter to Stockhausen, although thisreference is to the “second ink manuscript,” which itself includes only the first forty-one mea-sures of the final movement: Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le marteau, 45–46. The greatly expand-ed version of the final movement is documented in Boulez’s letters to Stockhausen; here,Boulez claims that the idea for expanding the final movement came to him only after hearingthe premiere, although O’Hagan rightly treats this evidence with skepticism: O’Hagan, “FromSketch to Score,” 633–34.

10. Unfortunately, parts of these “correspondences” are unilateral. Despite continued ef-forts, Robert Piencikowski, the former head of the Boulez Collection at the Paul Sacher Foun-dation, has been unable to locate the letters received by Boulez between 1954 and 1959. Itis assumed, following the composer’s own recollections, that the letters were lost during hismove from Paris to Baden-Baden in January 1959. See Piencikowski, “. . . iacta est,” 42.

11. It is possible that Boulez devoted energy to his Symphonie concertante and, to a lesserextent, to revisions to Livre pour quatuor and Structures 1a and 1b during this period, althoughlittle evidence exists of substantial changes having been made to any of these works beyond per-formance modifications. In contrast, between 1950 and 1952 Boulez completed Oubli signallapidé, Polyphonie X, and Book 1 of Structures, and revised Le visage nuptial and Le soleil deseaux.

12. See Peyser, Boulez, 131.13. Boulez spent nearly a decade (roughly 1946–55, returning a number of times in later

years) with the theater company of Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault after a surprisestart as a substitute ondes Martenot player for the newly founded troupe. For a detailed


normal demands of the theater, Boulez accompanied the troupe on two toursto South America during these years, the second of which was long, busy withrehearsals for and performances of Milhaud’s Christopher Columbus, and onthe heels of his first Domaine Musical concerts.14 In effect, Le marteau is lessthe result of a focused dedication to a single work than a souvenir from a periodof distraction, travel, and intense personal growth.15

This context places Le marteau in stark contrast to Boulez’s later worksof the 1950s, especially when compared to the burst of creative opportun-ism sparked by L’Orestie (1955) and its progeny.16 Unlike these latercompositions, in which Boulez experimented with all forms of borrowing,transcription, and new, freer serial derivations in order to meet the grow-ing demand for his compositions, Le marteau is an extremely focusedwork, dense in its dodecaphonic derivations, and almost meditative in itsaffect. And while it borrows organizational material from an earlier piece(Oubli signal lapidé, discussed below), the creative impetus for the workis overtly reflective of Boulez’s travels with Barrault, including his experi-ence of foreign cultures and instruments, his deepening appreciation ofcontemporary musicians, and his desire to introduce new sources of crea-tive freedom into his rigorous serial methods. Le marteau thus acts as atransition between Boulez’s earliest works, which reflect the eagerness ofa young apprentice, and his later ones, which multiply and mature as fund-ing and support for the Domaine Musical stabilizes and his theater dutiesslowly fade.17

discussion of Boulez’s relationship with the company, see Steinegger, Pierre Boulez et le théâtre,and Campbell, “Pierre Boulez: Composer, Traveller, Correspondent.” While Campbell’s workand my own feature a number of the same excerpts from Boulez’s letters, our research was com-pleted separately, many of these excerpts playing a key role in my “Boulez Revised.”

14. In fact Boulez had accompanied the troupe on a tour to South America in 1950, beforethe period under discussion, and then on one to North America (primarily Canada) in 1952–53,before heading to South America for a second time in 1954; see Steinegger, Pierre Boulez et lethéâtre, 42–47, and Campbell, “Pierre Boulez: Composer, Traveller, Correspondent.”

15. The exception proves the rule, such as when Decroupet writes of the supposed expan-sion of the final movement in just ten days that it gives “some idea of Boulez’s capacity for workonce he was free of his other obligations (to the Compagnie . . . and to the Domaine Musical)and able to concentrate on his activity as a composer”: Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le marteau, 45.

16. For more on the various works that followed in the wake of L’Orestie, see Salem,“Boulez Revised,” as well as Salem, “Serial Processes.”

17. Between 1955 and 1962 Boulez composed a long list of ambitious works, includingL’Orestie (1955), the Symphonie mécanique (1955), the Troisième sonate (1955–62 and revi-sions), Book 2 of Structures (1956–62), Strophes (1957), Le crépuscule de Yang Koueï-Fei(1957), all movements of Pli selon pli (1957–62 and revisions), Doubles (1957), Poésie pourpouvoir (1958), and “Don” for piano and soprano (1960), as well as undertaking revisions toolder works.


The Impetus for a New Harmonic Language

The importance of Le marteau for Boulez’s musical development cannot beoverstated. As Pascal Decroupet writes,

[Le marteau] occupies a pivotal place in the career of the early Boulez: thefirst work—in the true sense of the word—after the adoption of “total seri-alism,” it is also the last—for a number of years—not to be haunted by themobility of structures and scores. . . . [Le marteau] remains as a last exampleof a kind of composition in which Boulez would still want a conclusion,“forcing” an ending that is not simply a cessation of the discourse but rathera finale, unravelling the intrigues [that], up to that point, might seem to bejust so many parallel plots.18

The musical worth of Le marteau as a synthesis of Boulez’s ongoing musicaland aesthetic development is supported by its long and rich reception history.Analysts have also routinely acknowledged the work’s musical density, fromthe angularity of its vocal setting to the experiences that lay behind Boulez’schoice of instrumental ensemble, both of which represent a level of refine-ment beyond that of his first settings of René Char’s texts in Le visage nup-tial and Le soleil des eaux (in 1946 and 1947 respectively).19 Yet even whenstripped of all its grandeur and complexity, Le marteau still functions as anintroduction to Boulez’s major compositional innovation of this period—hisuse of blocs sonores to lay the foundation for new harmonic and melodic serialprocesses.

Boulez himself emphasized Le marteau as a whole—and “L’artisanatfurieux” in particular—as an opportunity to reinsert more agency into hisserial processes, a moment when he loosened Schoenberg’s “rigid” dodeca-phonic system to allow for a localized indeterminacy in an otherwise prede-termined framework, such that “at the overall level there is discipline andcontrol, at the local level there is an element of indiscipline—a freedom tochoose, to decide and to reject.”20 It is for this reason that Boulez’s har-monic clusters are not mere vertical simultaneities, but pitch collectionsthat provide for harmonic, melodic, and/or contrapuntal writing. In thewords of the composer,

18. Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le marteau, 41.19. The literature on Boulez has exploded since his sketches became generally available via

the Paul Sacher Foundation, showing the extent to which Boulez scholarship is aided by analyt-ical understanding of his compositional methods. In the case of Le marteau, early essays byKoblyakov and Piencikowski provided detailed analyses before the sketches became publiclyavailable, jump-starting interest in it and helping to make it one of Boulez’s most studied works.Noteworthy contributions include Piencikowski, “René Char et Pierre Boulez”; Stacey, Boulezand the Modern Concept; Koblyakov, Pierre Boulez; Mosch, Musikalisches Hören serieller Musik;Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le marteau; and O’Hagan, “From Sketch to Score.”

20. Boulez, Conversations with Célestin Deliège, 66. See also Mosch, “Disziplin undIndisziplin.”


The first piece in Le marteau sans maître was written in September 1952, justbefore I left for Canada with the company of Jean-Louis Barrault. It was simul-taneously a preoccupation with harmony and a way of constructing melodiclines that were not constrained by the obligation to continually follow thetwelve-tone series, because what aggravated me in the twelve-tone series washaving to unfurl the different chromatic tones in a rigid manner. I thus hadharmonic objects that I could portray horizontally in no specific order. Thepiece in Le marteau sans maître for flute and voice [“L’artisanat furieux”]—which is moreover a homage to Schoenberg—is founded on something funda-mentally opposed to the twelve-tone method. It was a way of rediscovering thefreedom that Schoenberg had at the time of Pierrot lunaire, but that he hadthen lost because of the rigidity of the system.21

It is fitting that one of Boulez’s most confident (and complex) composi-tional forays into the world of serial harmony should borrow a poetic titlethat doubles as a reference to a liberated acoustics, a hammer without aPythagoras to derive the natural origins of consonance from a cacophony ofringing anvils. Onemight also think of this as an undermining of Schoenbergas “master,” at once acknowledging Boulez’s debt to the dodecaphonic uni-verse while misreading his predecessor in order to reconstruct his own proj-ect as a historical one, separate from Schoenberg’s guiding influence. And asif to challenge tonality, Boulez describes his method as sequences of “multi-plication,” subverting, as it were, the cyclic generation of the natural and har-monic series, or even the mathematic ratios of Rameau’s corps sonore.22

Of course, Boulez’s harmonies have little to do with anything natural.23

Rather, his method of harmonic derivation is typical of the advanced serial

21. Quoted in Decroupet and Leleu, “‘Penser sensiblement’ la musique,” 180: “La pre-mière pièce duMarteau sans maître fut écrite en septembre 1952, juste avant que je parte pourle Canada avec la compagnie de Jean-Louis Barrault. C’était à la fois une préoccupation harmo-nique et une manière de construire des lignes mélodiques non contraintes par l’obligation desuivre continuellement une série de douze sons, car ce qui m’agaçait dans la série de douze sons,c’était de devoir dérouler les différents sons chromatiques de manière rigide. J’avais ainsi des ob-jets harmoniques que je pouvais décrire horizontalement dans n’importe quel ordre. La pièce duMarteau sans maître pour flûte et voix, qui est d’ailleurs un hommage à Schoenberg, est fondéesur quelque chose de fondamentalement antinomique à la série de douze sons. C’était unemanière de retrouver la liberté que Schoenberg avait au moment du Pierrot lunaire, mais qu’ilavait perdue ensuite à cause de la rigidité du système.” Accordingly, “L’artisanat furieux” is “di-rectly and deliberately related to ‘Der kranke Mond,’ the seventh number of Pierrot lunaire, notonly in its handling of the words and the layout of its vocal part, but also in being accompaniedby a single counter-melody in the flute”: Mosch, “Pierre Boulez: Le marteau,” 94.

22. I refer here not to Rameau’s various philosophical bases for the corps sonore but rather tohis later ratios and related tables of thirds and fifths, resembling early versions of nineteenth-century Tonnetze. See especially the diagrams of the triple and quintuple progressions in his Dé-monstration du principe de l’harmonie: for example, Briscoe, “Rameau’s Démonstration,” 129.

23. Boulez discusses his distaste for a dependence in modern music on “natural” origins inone of his essays from 1954, “‘. . . Near and Far,’” when he writes, “it is certain that no musicalsystem—either in our western civilization, or in those of Asia or Africa, for example—has everfound its complete justification in the laws of nature. Arab or Chinese theory is as logical as


processes he was developing at this time. A combination of row parsing, rota-tion, and transcription, the generation of his harmonic matrixes is itself a mul-tistep process. Furthermore, the use of these materials in the drafting of ascore requires further manipulation and spontaneous invention. Throughout,the twelve-note row is respected as the source and generator of serial pro-cesses, but, differently from the way it is used in Structures 1a, its fundamentalcharacteristic as an equally weighted, chromatic representation of the octaveis soon compromised for the sake of expressive and thematic variety.24

It is worth noting that Boulez conceived his method as entirely new anddifferent from Schoenberg’s, but only according to Boulez’s own misread-ing of his predecessor. This provides an obvious contact point with Bloom.The themes discussed by Boulez here and elsewhere bring to mind Bloom’sclinamen, or “misreading/misprision,” while the related music leans towarda kind of tessera, or revised completion, of Schoenberg’s Pierrot project.25 Inthese instances Boulez offers strong interpretations of Schoenberg’s methodby putting undue stress on the most rigid aspects of Schoenberg’s orderedrows while simultaneously exaggerating his reliance on classical forms oroutdated formal techniques; these assessments are always made with the goalof making room for Boulez’s own adaptation and expansion of the method,effectively “completing” Schoenberg’s project while also altering it far be-yond his precursor’s intentions.

The fact that these processes were a natural extension of a method firstused in another, less conspicuous opus is not without relevance. An a cappellachoral work originally set to a text by Armand Gatti, Oubli signal lapidéwas withdrawn by Boulez after a single performance on October 3, 1952.26

Although only seventy-five to one hundred sketches exist for this work (de-pending on whether or not drafts and duplications are included in the count),these contain a number of important templates that are reused in several

Pythagorean, and responsible for sound worlds that are just as valid”: Boulez, Stocktakings,142–43; PdR1, 299.

24. In fact, Boulez was already experimenting with distorting this aspect of the series inStructures 1b; see Salem, “Boulez Revised,” ch. 3, and Decroupet, “Développements et ramifi-cations.”

25. In Bloom’s words, “1.Clinamen . . . is poetic misreading ormisprision proper. . . . A poetswerves away from his precursor, by so reading his precursor’s poem as to execute a clinamen inrelation to it. This appears as a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the pre-cursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in thedirection that the new poem moves. 2. Tessera . . . is completion and antithesis. . . . A poet anti-thetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but tomean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough”: Bloom,Anxi-ety of Influence, 14.

26. After being introduced to the poetry of e. e. cummings by John Cage during a visit toNew York in 1952, Boulez substituted the Gatti texts with a poem by cummings, a point thatshould not be lost given Boulez’s later use of the bloc sonore matrix employed in Oubli as theorganizational material for cummings ist der Dichter (1970, rev. 1986); see Piencikowski,“. . . iacta est,” 56.


later pieces, including Le marteau, “Tombeau,” and the second version ofcummings ist der Dichter.27 Like earlier attempts at broadening his seriallanguage, Oubli represents a serious but “false” start: Boulez successfullyintegrated the new bloc sonore serial process into Oubli, only to realize bythe time of the work’s premiere that the potential of his new method farexceeded the confines of its sui generis context (a pattern seen in severalpairs or families of Boulez’s later works).28 It was at precisely such a mo-ment that Le marteau was first conceived as a better promotion of his newharmonic language.

Segmenting the Series, blocs sonores, and “Multiplication”

Indeed, the starting point for Boulez’s harmonic appropriation of Oubli isthe preliminary version of “L’artisanat furieux,”29 a piece for alto flute andvoice that was first composed in 1952 (in all likelihood alongside Oubli andStructures 1b).30 Even in its earliest stages “L’artisanat” utilized Boulez’s

27. Key among the sketch folders is Mappe F, Dossier 3a, 2, in the Pierre Boulez Collectionat the Paul Sacher Foundation. The sketches it contains include the row tables and matrixesused in Oubli. For a broad overview of the way these sketches relate to works composed afterLe marteau, see O’Hagan, “Pierre Boulez and the Foundation of IRCAM,” and Bradshaw,“Comparing Notes.” For a more detailed discussion, see Salem, “Boulez Revised”; Tissier,“Mutations esthétiques”; and Piencikowski, Pierre Boulez: Tombeau.

28. Boulez’s ample use of self-borrowing from unfinished works also supports this thesis:Oubli is the first example, but he also uses the early Notations (1945) and large sections ofL’Orestie (1955) in Pli selon pli, not to mention the literal transcription of material betweenL’Orestie, Strophes for flute, and “Don” for piano (each withdrawn in turn), all of which feed“Don” for orchestra (1962, rev. 1989) and, much later, Éclat (1965). Similarly, the Troisièmesonate, while never withdrawn, remains unfinished; materials from its movements providethe organizational material for Figures-Doubles-Prismes and Domaines 1 and 2, as well as forother works later derived from these. For more detailed discussions of these borrowings, seePiencikowski, “‘Assez lent, suspendu’”; Edwards, “Éclat/Multiples”; Salem, “Boulez Revised”;and Tissier, “Mutations esthétiques.”

29. It is worth noting that the roots for Le marteaumay extend backward to an earlier proj-ect, namely Boulez’s desire to set to music Char’s “À la santé du serpent.” He provides an elab-orate breakdown of the text across three movements in a letter to the poet of August 31, 1948(letter no. 12). Char’s response was enthusiastic: “I’ve looked carefully at ‘À la santé du serpent’in the sense that, musically, you propose. . . . You therefore have my complete support for yourwork in advance. I’m sure that you’ll succeed and I look forward to it. As far as I’m concernedyou’re going to give this poem a new dimension”: letter of September 3, 1948 (letter no. 13:“J’ai examiné longuement ‘À la santé du serpent’ dans le sense que, musicalement, vous me pro-posez. . . . Vous avez donc mon complet accord d’avance sur votre travail. Je suis certain quevous le réussirez et m’en réjouis. Pour moi vous allez donner à ce poème une nouvelle dimen-sion”). Boulez nevertheless seems to have abandoned the project. See also Piencikowski, “. . .iacta est,” 52.

30. Decroupet outlines the entire chronology of the drafting of Le marteau with his char-acteristic penchant for detail. He provides an extended introduction: “Written on the bottomof an off-cut of the ink copy of the beginning of Structure 1b, the first sketch relating to


most basic form of harmonic multiplication to create blocs sonores of serialcontent. While it is difficult to provide a self-contained definition, indepen-dent of their particular generative process and uses, blocs sonores can be de-scribed as collections of pitch and interval content that are often organized asvertical clusters in Boulez’s matrixes; these objects are then used in his musicas reservoirs of pitch and interval content for harmonies, linear counterpoint,ornamental flourishes, smaller subgroups (dyads, triads), or larger conglo-merate textures that include multiple blocs sonores across several instruments.31

Although Boulez may follow a pregenerated program for these types of ma-nipulation, the examples from Le marteau help to demonstrate that his earlyuse of the term “bloc sonore” is connected not so much to a specific serialprocess as to a reconception of what might constitute “a series” more gener-ally (vis-à-vis Schoenberg’s ordered, dodecaphonic rows). In fact, the mul-tiple means of generating these objects highlight the possible (and diverse)kinds of inspiration for their conception: Cage’s work on the prepared piano,Stockhausen’s work in the studio, and Varèse’s renewed interest in electronicmusic.32 In what follows I limit myself to a single way in which multiplicationleads to the creation of blocs sonores sequences and matrixes.33

First, it is valuable to visually compare a bloc sonore with a Schoenberg-ian row. In most cases the first step in creating a sequence of blocs sonoresis to divide a linear row of ordered pitch material into five or six segments,following a pattern such as 3–2–4–2–1 (= 12 pitches in total). One thenstacks the pitches of each subgroup, such that the first three notes of therow are stacked, then the following two notes, and so on, as illustrated inExample 1. Significantly, such objects are already something nebulous,described by Boulez as “sound complexes,” “complex sounds,” “sonori-ties,” and “sound-blocks” in the span of just five sentences; one thing

[Le marteau] lays out, contrary to what Boulez wrote to Pousseur in the autumn of 1952, anambitious project setting different poems selected from Char’s collection”: Decroupet, PierreBoulez: Le marteau, 45–65, here 53.

31. See Salem, “Boulez Revised,” esp. chs. 6–7, for a myriad of examples. Perhaps themost notorious use of combined blocs sonores occurs in “Don,” as described in Adamowicz,“Study of Form,” especially in relation to Figures 5.9 through 5.12. For a concise introduc-tion to the way Boulez generates blocs sonores without using multiplication, see Piencikowski,“‘Assez lent, suspendu.’”

32. Piencikowski provides an alternative, and very useful, conception of these objects:“Furthermore, it was for Oubli signal lapidé that Boulez lit on the technique of employingblocks of sound with varying densities. This technique, a serialist transposition of the ‘gamuts’imagined by Cage, formed a middle ground between the craftsmanlike solution of the pre-pared piano and the sounds created by the newly emerging technology from the electronicmusic studio of West German Radio in Cologne”: Piencikowski, “. . . iacta est,” 56. See note38 for more on this point.

33. It is worth noting that Boulez uses alternative methods to generate bloc sonore se-quences in L’Orestie, Book 2 of Structures (ch. 2), and “Don,” although I do not discuss thesemethods here; see Salem, “Boulez Revised,” chs. 5–7; Piencikowski, “‘Assez lent, suspendu’”;and Adamowicz, “Study of Form.”


they are not (at least at their inception) is “chords,” because, in Boulez’swords, “quite apart from the historical cargo which goes with the wordchord, I attach no harmonic function in the strict sense to my verticalaggregates.”34

Yet, as simple as the process shown in Example 1 appears, Boulez’s technicaldefinitions are rather obtuse, not least because his explanations are wroughtwith jargon that borders on the tautological. In the essay “Possibly . . . ,”for example, he writes, “[t]ake the example of a twelve-note series dividedas follows: three notes, one note, two notes, four notes, two notes—hencefive sonorities,”35 but he omits the original row, leaving the reader to stum-ble over what makes these mere “sonorities” unique blocs sonores, and howprecisely they have been derived as vertical clusters from a linear row. InPenser la musique aujourd’hui another description conflates segmentationand the process of pitch multiplication, using the (French) word “com-plexe” to describe objects at every stage of the (transformational) process:

Take another example: the case of a homogeneous complex of pitches. Supposethat groupings of absolute values are made (still in the domain of the semitone,with the octave as model) and that the result is a succession of complexes ofvariable density—still fulfilling the essential condition of non-repetition—:3/2/4/2/1, that is, all the twelve semitones of the octave.

If the ensemble of all the complexes is multiplied by a given complex, thiswill result in a series of complexes of mobile density, of which, in addition, cer-tain constituents will be irregularly reducible; although multiple and variable,these complexes are deduced from one another in the most functional waypossible, in that they obey a logical, coherent structure.36

What Boulez implies is that, once the row is rearranged from a linear seriesinto five discrete pitch stacks, these blocs sonores can then be “multiplied” byone another, where “multiplied” means that each bloc sonore is transposed

Example 1 A row segmentation, resulting in five blocs sonores

34. Boulez, Stocktakings, 128; PdR1, 282. Note that Boulez specifically employs the word“chord” (“accord”) in order to relieve the term “bloc sonore” of its related historical baggageand corresponding functional limitations.

35. Boulez, Stocktakings, 128; PdR1, 282 (Boulez’s emphasis).36. Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, 39–40, Example 3 (Boulez’s emphasis). Boulez dis-

cusses the process more clearly later in the treatise, although he still fails to trace the processfrom an ordered twelve-tone row through its segmentation and subsequent multiplication:ibid., 79–80, Examples 32–34.


relative to the pitch and interval content of another bloc sonore. This resultsin a number of blocs sonores that vary in pitch content and density, “density”referring to the number of pitches in each bloc sonore.37

Examples 2a–c provide a visualization of this process, as the multiplica-tion of a bloc sonore first relative to a single pitch and then relative to anotherbloc sonore, and finally as the complex multiplication of an entire sequence ofblocs sonores relative to one of its terms. Thus, in Example 2a every note of thefirst term shown in Example 1 is transposed by the same interval above Bb. InExample 2b the same operation is executed twice, first according to Bb andthen according to C#; the resulting pitches are then combined into the prod-uct (which has only five pitches since the D b/C# is duplicated). This examplealso shows how, when the first term is multiplied by the second, its root, or“anchor,” is shifted down by a major third, from D n to Bb, which constitutesthe difference between the bottom note of each sonority. In Example 2cthe entire bloc sonore sequence of Example 1 is multiplied by its secondterm. In this final example it is best to conceive of the multiplier (term 2)in the first position, such that every subsequent transposition leaves the multi-plicand on its original anchor. Then, each of these products is also transposeddown by a major third. This additional step is the “complex” part of theoperation, and it constitutes applying the difference between the anchor ofthe first bloc sonore and that of the multiplier to the entire sequence as astandardized, secondary transposition. (The row shown in Example 2c cor-responds to row 2 in Example 4 below.)

Example 2a The multiplication of the first, three-note bloc sonore of Example 1 by B b

Example 2b Themultiplication of the first, three-note bloc sonore of Example 1 by the second,two-note bloc sonore

37. My rephrasing of Boulez is an attempt at clarification, not criticism. While oftencouched as a pedagogical method (suggesting that the reader should intuit the missing steps asa way of internalizing the process at hand), such examples have significantly slowed the under-standing of Boulez’s most interesting serial processes. One such example (relating both to blocssonores and to the interval-duration process used in “Antiphonie” and Le marteau) is relayed byO’Hagan, “Pierre Boulez: ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?,’” 57–58, 194–95.


The versatility of the term “bloc sonore” also captures the multifarious usesof these objects in Boulez’s compositional process. His blocs sonores sometimesappear as single harmonic entities without function (differentiating them fromtonal chords), sometimes as reservoirs of pitches for linear, thematic content(differentiating them from clusters), and sometimes as individual or contra-puntal elements in textures that combine multiple blocs sonores simultaneously(differentiating them fromKlangfarbenmelodien). Boulez also trumpeted themalleability of these objects:

In reality there is considerable ambiguity in the use of such chords [sic], whichare “sound-blocks” tending to become distinct objects in their own right, withtimbre and dynamics as an integral part of the whole complex; hence the de-mand for a kind of super-instrument, whose sounds would be an actual func-tion of the work. This ties in with the current preoccupations of electronicmusic, which seeks the same end with pure sinusoidal sounds. . . . Since thedensity of these blocks can vary constantly from one note to ten or eleven, anactual concept of variability has been introduced into the series, which acts onthe elements that make it up, so that they cannot themselves be reduced to aunity. It is on this basis, with the addition of rhythm, that we can develop suchsound-blocks horizontally, while, since their transposition is crucially indepen-dent of the linear sequence, the process of development is absolutely free.38

Again, the term “bloc sonore” captures this functional modularity: since Bouleztreats these complexes with greater flexibility (of register, length, and selection)over time, they serve more as reservoirs of pitch material that can be further ma-nipulated than as discrete musical objects with entrainable sonic signatures.

A short extract from “L’artisanat furieux” illustrates the most transparentuse of blocs sonores as, simultaneously, a deep structural schema and the im-mediate, audible source for lyrical writing in Le marteau. Example 3 shows

Example 2c The product of a “complex multiplication” of Example 1 by the second term ofthat sequence (omitted pitch duplications appear in parenthesis)

38. Boulez, Stocktakings, 152–53; PdR1, 309–10. StevenWalsh reports that the reference toelectronic music stems from Boulez’s discussion with Stockhausen about his Studien I and II(1953): Boulez, Stocktakings, 152n9. Piencikowski has also shown that the electronic-acousticresonances in Boulez’s later descriptions of blocs sonores can be attributed to Varèse: Piencikowski,“Between the Text and theMargin,” 384–85; see also note 32 above. The “demand for a kind ofsuper-instrument” highlights the relevance of these connections.


Example 3 Pierre Boulez, Le marteau sans maître, “L’artisanat furieux,” mm. 20–30, withunderlying row content. A sound recording of this example is included in the online version ofthe Journal.


measures 20–30 of the score together with a bloc sonore underlay.39 Thesource of these objects (“domain Eπ”) is discussed below, but the readermay already see how the vertical pitch conglomerates are rearranged as lin-ear, melodic material. This passage, which is unusually clear in this regard,is but one example of the way in which blocs sonores provided Boulez witha much freer basis for melodic and harmonic manipulation than would anordered, twelve-tone row. It also highlights a local formal symmetry in thepiece as a whole: as the flute enters on a high E n (m. 27), Boulez switchesfrom one stack sequence to another (as indicated by the Greek letter namebelow each stack). He thus unites the deep structural patterns of the move-ment with a climactic peak on the musical surface—a feature of which thelistener would be unaware, but one of vital significance for the rigorous serialprocesses underlying the movement’s form.

Of course, Schoenberg’s music often uses rows as fodder for simulta-neities and pitch duplications. That is why this passage (and Boulez’s overtmention of Schoenberg above) highlights the act of tessera, or a Bloomiansort of completion through misreading and appropriation.40 Whatever one’sinterpretation of Schoenberg, the second stage of Boulez’s serial process,whereby segmentation is subject to multiplication, increases the “density” ofeach stack beyond the limits of dodecaphony by combining them throughtransposition. Hence, Boulez goes not only beyond Schoenberg’s originalconcept of the ordered twelve-tone row but beyond the limiting concept oftwelve tones itself, using multiplication to literally multiply the number ofpitches in his sequences while disregarding the chromatic gamut. It can bedifficult to describe these transpositional processes concisely, as there areseveral different ways of executing a transposition, and each introducesdifferent ramifications for the resulting pitch structure of the bloc sonoresequences. In what follows, I provide a quick gloss on some of these ramifi-cations by completing the journey from Boulez’s segmented twelve-tonerow to his (much larger) bloc sonore matrix.

In his discussion of the pitch-class sets at work in the multiplicationprocesses of Boulez’s music, Steven Heinemann provides a clear descrip-tion of basic multiplication.41 In short, he suggests three categories of

39. Examples from Le marteau (Examples 3, 5, and 7b) are derived from Pierre Boulez,Le marteau sans maître, für Alt und 6 Instrumente (London: Universal Edition, 1954, rev. 1957).

40. For Bloom’s definition of tessera, see note 25 above.41. Heinemann, “Pitch-Class Set Multiplication,” 75–76. Specialists may prefer the

more advanced models recently presented by Losada (“Complex Multiplication”) and Scotto(“Reexamining PC-Set Multiplication”); I cite Heinemann because his introduction to thebasic concept of multiplication seems the most approachable, although Losada and Scottohave both identified flaws in his method in relation to deeper music-theoretical questions asto whether or not Boulez’s process was based in pitch-class multiplication or transpositionalcombinatoriality, questions that do not concern me here.


multiplication—simple, compound, and complex. For our purposes it iseasier to reduce these categories to two, simple and complex. These aredefined not by the basic rule of thumb that a given bloc sonore is trans-posed according to every interval of another bloc sonore, but rather bywhether or not the fundamental bass note of the transposition operation(the anchor) is transposed according to a secondary operation.42 In simplemultiplication there is a single process for multiplying the blocs sonores; here,“simple” means “one-step.” In both compound and complex multiplicationthere are two operations—a simple one, and then a secondary transpositionto alter the bass note (and the rest of the corresponding bloc sonore) by an-other interval. The derivation of this interval is the fundamental differencebetween compound and complex multiplication and is not relevant to mydiscussion here. (It is also one aspect of Heinemann’s method that has beencritically updated by later scholars.) When a complex multiplication is re-peated across an entire bloc sonore sequence, a basic, twelve-note segmen-tation such as that shown in Example 1 becomes a multiplied bloc sonoresequence, exemplified in Example 2c. What can be a little confusing is thateven the untransposed segmentations of Example 1 would still be defined asblocs sonores by Boulez: the precise form of transposition is less a factor intheir “objectivity” than their varied treatment as “sound complexes” in hisworks.

Example 4 illustrates a “domain,” or a kind of single matrix generated bymultiplying every term of a bloc sonore sequence by every other term. Here,the top sequence is the one shown in Example 1, and the second the oneshown in Example 2c. Each of the subsequent rows follows suit, the thirdrow featuring all the terms of row 1 multiplied by the third term, the fourthrow those terms multiplied by the fourth term, and the fifth row those termsmultiplied by the fifth term. It may be seen that in each row Boulez gener-ates the second transpositional operation according to the difference be-tween the bass note of the first bloc sonore and that of the multiplier asstated in the top, unadulterated bloc sonore sequence. In the case of row 2 ofthe matrix (Nυ, or Example 2c), this is the difference between D n and B b, ora major third; in row 3 the difference between the bass note of the multiplier(term 3 in row 1) and the multiplicand (term 1 in row 1) is a tritone (A b

42. Losada has done much to evolve the current understanding of the way in which iso-morphic relationships between the various secondary transpositions in Boulez’s bloc sonorematrixes relate directly to the structural organization of some of his works, including the firstmovement of Structures 2 and, more recently, parts of Domaines. She also coined the term“anchor note” to describe the lowest note of the blocs sonores in such organizational schema,these notes being of considerable importance to her penetrating models. See Losada, “Isographyand Structure,” here 136ff.; Losada, “ComplexMultiplication”; and Losada, “Between Freedomand Control.”


and D n), so the secondary transposition of that row shifts every bloc sonore bya tritone, and so on.43

Ultimately, complex multiplication turns out to be an elegant solution tosome inherent limitations of simple multiplication. First, complex multiplica-tion allows a controlled manipulation of the anchor, or bass note, of each blocsonore, which turns out to have been an important structural consideration inBoulez’s compositional process.44 Second, because complex multiplicationtransposes entire sequences by a fixed interval, it also allowed Boulez to shift

Example 4 One of five “domains” from Boulez’s bloc sonore matrix for Le marteau sansmaître

43. While multiplying every term of the top sequence should create five new rows below,Boulez opts to delete the first of these (which would consist of term 1 × 1, 1 × 2, etc.), sinceeach of its terms beyond the first is represented in the subsequent rows on account of thecommutative property of multiplication (term 1 × 2 begins row 2, term 1 × 3 begins row 3,etc.). Boulez’s use of complex multiplication nonetheless creates other pitch duplicationsbetween rows (indicated by the numbered boxes), which allows for the kind of “commonchord” switch between rows seen in Example 5 below.

44. It should be remembered that, while many of these operations may seem distancedfrom the musical surface, scholars such as Losada, Decroupet, Scotto, and others stress thesignificance of such connections between Boulez’s different multiplication procedures andthe resulting structures of his compositions. Boulez seems to have had no desire that theserial processes behind his works should ever be analyzed by his listeners, to the extent thathe described Le marteau as unanalyzable prior to the release of Koblyakov’s study. A com-poser’s statements should not, however, stand in the way of scholarly inquiry.


a whole sequence in such a way as to alter its register or color palette, usuallyin relation to a specific, potentially isographic pitch or interval relationshipbetween sequences. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the multiplica-tions differ in their commutativity. Just as regular multiplication is commuta-tive, so complexmultiplication ensures that different products contain similarpitch content. In short, complex multiplication allowed Boulez to create ma-trixes involving certain patterns and duplications, such as those highlightedin Example 4. These patterns and duplications became very relevant toBoulez’s work, as can be seen in the harmonic overlaps and “pivots” betweenthe two different bloc sonore sequences shown in Example 5, where Bb acts as apoint of symmetry between two readings of the same bloc sonore sequence.(For the source of the sequence, see Example 6.)45

Despite the density of my explanations, Le marteau (and Oubli signal la-pidé) use Boulez’s clearest, cleanest, and most transparent bloc sonorematrix.I have transcribed it fully as Example 6.46 It presents a total of one hundredand twenty-five blocs sonores derived from a single twelve-tone row. I repro-duce the matrix here in order to make a very simple point: creating it requireda great deal of work. (Boulez’s subsequent matrixes were even more de-manding, as they contain more convoluted isographic relationships.) It seemslikely that one reason why Boulez made only a few such matrixes (all ofthem in the 1950s, as far as I can tell) and then reused them in various waysfor the next several decades is that, while resulting in a massive amount ofmusical potential, they were actually very tedious to produce.47 This is notto say that he does not create other adaptations of these core products, orthat he does not have side-sketches of other matrix alternatives—he does.48

Nonetheless, these alternatives are usually mere adaptations, such as partsof the original matrixes transposed, or featured in retrograde, or recycled

45. Of course, Example 5 does not feature bloc sonore isography; it merely shows a pitchclass shared between two different blocs sonores. Nonetheless, it still highlights Boulez’s consis-tent concern with common-tone connections and various pitch-register relationships.

46. This matrix and its counterpart (which is based on the inversion of the original series)play a part in a number of later works, including “Don,” “Tombeau” and cummings ist derDichter. The relationship between intervallic redundancy and unique pitch content and/orregistral distribution is important for the structural implications of the process, and is celebratedby Boulez in his later writings (for example, “‘. . . Near and Far’” and Boulez on Music Today).A facsimile of Boulez’s sketch for the matrix is reproduced in Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le mar-teau, sketch 1.2.a.

47. My current belief is that Boulez made only three matrixes from scratch according tothese methods (the other two usually being associated with the Troisième sonate and Book 2 ofStructures), and then reused or altered them in different ways in later works. This assessment isbased on a survey I made of all available Boulez manuscripts at the Paul Sacher Foundation in2011–12.

48. Two specific examples come to mind: a complicated secondary matrix created for“Don” and various side-sketches used in Dérive 2. The former is discussed (and a diplomatictranscription provided) in Salem, “Boulez Revised,” ch. 7.


in some way, rather than being entirely new multiplications of bloc sonoresequences.

Last but not least, others have noted the “modal” (à la Messiaen) inter-vallic characteristics of Boulez’s blocs sonores. As an important component ofa work for multiple voices that uses a broad spectrum of registers, the blocssonores of Oubli can be compared to the layered densities of Structures 1a;

Example 5 Pierre Boulez, Le marteau sans maître, “L’artisanat furieux,”mm. 9–16, with un-derlying row content. A sound recording of this example is included in the online version of theJournal.


Example 6 A bloc sonore matrix designed for Oubli signal lapidé and used in Le marteau sansmaître


similarly, the blocs sonores of Le marteau preserve a number of key tritonerelationships within the work’s multivoice polyphony.49 As Peter O’Haganhas observed,

the appropriation of one of Messiaen’s modes as the series for Structures 1ais hardly an isolated gesture of homage to the composer of Modes de valeurset d’intensités (1949). When the chordal structures of Oubli signal lapidéand related works are examined, the extent to which the morphology (to usea Boulezian term) relates to that of Messiaen becomes clear. Thus many ofthe chords can be categorized in terms of Messiaen’s modes 2 and 3, withtheir division of the octave into cells of minor and major thirds respectively.This is not to imply a diminution in the strikingly original features of Boulez’sstyle, but an acknowledgement of the extent to which his innovations sit withinthe framework of a musical tradition.50

It is in fact Boulez’s ability to imbue so many layers of serial manipulationwith precise intervallic control that links the otherwise disparate soundworlds

Example 6 continued

49. Consider, for example, Griffiths’s description of registral “knots” (a term borrowedfrom Ligeti) in Structures 1a (Griffiths, Boulez, 23), or Piencikowski’s observation (paralleledby O’Hagan: see below) that Boulez’s harmonies are reflected in the modal signature of Mes-siaen’s Modes de valeurs et d’intensités (Piencikowski, “Nature morte avec guitar,” 72, and“Inscriptions”). For more on the intervallic content and character of the blocs sonoresused in Le marteau specifically, see Decroupet and Leleu, “‘Penser sensiblement’ la musique.”

50. O’Hagan, “Pierre Boulez and the Foundation of IRCAM,” 312.


of Structures, Oubli, and Le marteau, revealing their disguised Messiaenichalos. Beyond the harmonic signature of these blocs sonores, the additional di-versity of the master matrix provides Boulez with a gamut of possible pitchreservoirs that far exceeds any dodecaphonic row or magic square. In effect,it was only through the tremendous “discipline” required to create thesemass multiplication tables that Boulez liberated himself to apply these blocssonores as harmonic, melodic, or polyphonic music. Regardless of the degreeof serial planning and the potential for deep, isomorphic organizationalstructures, Boulez contrasts his objects with the “ordered” rows of Schoen-berg and flaunts the possibilities of “local indiscipline” in his blocs sonores toopen up the realm of compositional gesture through the use of such amor-phous, adaptive pitch sets.

The Flights and Frustrations of a Traveling Composer

The serial intricacies described above in relation to the bloc sonore matrixof Le marteau (not to mention its underlying structural role in several ofthe work’s movements) already reveal the time and effort spent on deepstructural (or organizational) aspects of the composition. But it is the ef-fects of Boulez’s schedule on the design and completion of the work thatbecome increasingly clear when one considers that he actually finished thefirst harmonic tables in time for use in the earlier Oubli, and that most ofthe movements of Le marteau are actually rather limited in length andscope.51 Everything about this work, from its often languid presentationof short, surreal texts to its extended instrumental commentaries and mas-sive coda, suggests a composer whose thoughts were left to roam while hisability to compose was suspended for considerable amounts of time. Thetrajectory of the work confirms this impression: the brevity and focus ofthe first composed movement, “L’artisanat furieux” (1952), which ex-tends to no more than three pages, stands in stark contrast to the elabo-rately scored final movement, composed three years later and extendingto nineteen pages, or about eight minutes in performance.52 It is as if thelong gestation of the work built up slowly over time, ultimately spillingover into the realm of self-borrowing and replication as Boulez raced toprepare the work for its intended premiere.53

51. The fact that descriptions of his bloc sonore sequences and references to Oubli signal la-pidé are present in the essay “Possibly . . .” (largely drafted in 1951) indicates how early Boulezconceived of these processes and their potential for future works.

52. The final movement was in fact not ready for the premiere of (an incomplete) Lemarteau on June 18, 1955, which suggests that from start to finish the work took over fouryears.

53. The final movement of Le marteau is an early example in Boulez’s oeuvre of the delib-erate reuse of compositional ideas, complete with overt references to the instrumentation, affect,


Early in 1954 Boulez wrote to Stockhausen about his frustration with thedemands of his theater responsibilities in Paris and of the Domaine Musicalin particular:

I can but praise your promptitude [in writing], and you can but blame my tar-diness. My only excuse is the crazy work I have here. The concerts went verywell. But what work! I won’t get into that again. It destroyed my work period.Between the organization of the concerts and the journal issues,54 I could dopractically nothing for myself; which makes me, in this moment, more thannervous.55

Later in the same letter he reiterated, “As for the concerts, they continue togo well. But what work! And at what cost! It’s monstrous. It can’t be doneagain—and I for one won’t do it again—under these conditions.”56 Hence,even before his departure for South America the tone of Boulez’s letters wasaffected by the stress of the final Domaine concerts of the 1953–54 season.While he and Stockhausen remained intimate friends, Boulez became in-creasingly angst-ridden as he realized that time was running out. In particu-lar, negotiations over finding a quartet for the final concert of the year forceda rapid back-and-forth of perfunctory letters that ironically reveal the depthof the composers’ friendship, each proving a reliable friend in a pinch despitea number of problems and terse replies. In spite of these tensions, the warm,playful tone of their correspondence returned as soon as time allowed.

A letter from Boulez to Cage of July 1954, written at the height of thetour, reveals similar frustrations with the Domaine Musical and his increas-ingly demanding schedule:

My poor John, I haven’t had time to write to you much this year and youmust think I am the last word in ingratitude. To think that you welcomed meso well when I was in New York and that I haven’t written to you since.57

melody, and harmony of prior movements of the cycle, and may reflect the pressures of this“rush” on his compositional method.

54. The initial intention was that Boulez would organize and publish an issue of a journal tocoincide with every Domaine Musical concert. The difficulties that attended the first issue,however—including the poor quality of the translation of Stockhausen’s contribution—causedBoulez to abandon plans for subsequent issues. His profuse apology to Stockhausen, whichalludes to his having been much too busy to oversee the translation himself, is recorded in aletter of July 20, 1954 (letter no. 62).

55. Letter of April 22, 1954 (letter no. 59): “Je ne puis que louer votre super-exactitude,et vous ne pouvez que blâmer mon retard. Ma seule excuse est le travail fou que j’ai ici. Lesconcerts se sont terminés très bien. Mais quel travail! Jamais plus je ne recommencerai. Cela m’adémoli ma saison de travail. Pris entre l’organisation des concerts, des numéros de revue, je n’aipratiquement rien pu fair pour moi; ce qui me rend, en ce moment, plus que nerveux.”

56. Ibid.: “À propos des concerts, ils ont très bien marché. Mais quel travail! et quel déficit!C’est monstrueux. On ne peut pas recommencer—moi même d’ailleurs je ne recommenceraipas—dans ces conditions-là.”

57. Nattiez points out that Boulez was “so busy that he [had] forgotten the precedingletter,” which was Boulez’s letter to Cage of June 18, 1953: Boulez and Cage, Boulez-CageCorrespondence, 147n4.


But if you knew the work [for the Domaine Musical] I have had this year! . . .For I did absolutely everything from arranging the programs to hiring theinstruments (not to mention such things as contacting artists or taking careof lodgings). . . . We still don’t know whether we can carry on next season.P[ierre] Souvtchinsky and Madame Tézenas are organizing themselves to tryand form a committee.58 We need about 1½ million francs (if not 2 million)before we can hope to begin. It is not an easy sum to find. Moreover, we haveto find a secretary.59 For I don’t mind telling you that I am not keen to loseall my time as I have done this year. Practically speaking, I have been able todo absolutely nothing from December to April. . . . You can easily imaginethis season’s disastrous history as far as my work goes.60

Boulez’s tone is perhaps less intimate than in his earlier correspondence withCage, but the psychological toll of his frustrations is still obvious.61 Further-more, despite his efforts to maintain “as much of my time as possible forwriting,” Boulez admitted in his next letter to Cage, of July–August thatsame year, that “I have alas very little—by which I mean none at all—timeto work for myself.”62

According to his correspondence with Stockhausen, Boulez was indeedleft with little time to notate Le marteau, and may have been sufferingfrom a bout of depression as new responsibilities and travel obligationsdrained his creative energies.63 In a moment of passionate confessionBoulez shared his reflections on the previous year during a stop in Salvador,Brazil:

It’s frightening to see how age creeps up on one, and how few discoveries andfew works one has produced. Right now, I’m absolutely sick of the times.Having been bled white since last November has rendered me nervously hy-persensitive to everything, to every day spent without having been able to do

58. Suzanne Tézenas was a patron of the arts and a constant supporter of Boulez. She orga-nized the patronage of the Domaine Musical from 1955 to 1973. See Boulez and Cage, Cor-respondance et documents, 350.

59. Boulez later employs Michel Fano as secretary, with problematic results; see the letterfrom Boulez to Stockhausen of October 23, 1954 (letter no. 68).

60. Boulez and Cage, Boulez-Cage Correspondence, 147–48 (letter no. 45); Boulez andCage, Correspondance et documents, 239 (letter no. 46). In fact Madame Tézanas had raised1 million francs by as early as October 23, 1954; see the letter from Boulez to Stockhausen ofthat date (letter no. 68).

61. Boulez’s friendship with Cage likely continued for years after their supposed falling outaround 1954. Boulez nonetheless began to show growing impatience with Cage’s ideas andgoals in letters to other friends (and in his published writings) at this time, a shift that is welldocumented in Piencikowski, “. . . iacta est.”

62. Boulez and Cage, Boulez-Cage Correspondence, 149, 151 (letters nos. 45 and 46);Boulez and Cage, Correspondance et documents, 241, 244 (letters nos. 46 and 47).

63. Peyser notes a corresponding “withdrawal” from social interaction during these years,although the observation is somewhat undermined by Boulez’s candid correspondence withStockhausen: Peyser, Boulez, 131.


anything. This journal, these concerts, what a burden! I’m not prepared toview them with the same attitude of complete devotion next year; in any case,I’m going to safeguard my composition time.64

This confession comes at the end of a letter in which Boulez also complainedabout his Darmstadt obligations, finally deciding to skip the festival becausethey were no longer going to perform his Le visage nuptial as promised.65

He also conveyed genuine anxiety over completing Le marteau in time forits originally scheduled premiere. (The premiere was ultimately delayed onaccount of problems in securing a guitarist, not to mention Boulez’s inabil-ity to finish the work.)66 His disgruntled preoccupation with European con-cerns is obvious, even after being in South America for a number of weeks.

Boulez’s mood can also be inferred from specific references to Le mar-teau in his correspondence with Stockhausen in this period. Although mostof the work had been written by the time he left on tour, several movementsremained unfinished.67 Before departing he alluded in February to the needto take the work abroad with him:

My curiosity about these countries having been satisfied,68 I would now preferto go somewhere tranquil and work, work—I hope to steal as much time aspossible from the performances in order to finish the piece for Donaueschin-gen, which has not advanced at all since February. . . . During the tour, I’mgoing to work very seriously on Le marteau sans maître, which Rosbaud is togive on October 16 at Donaueschingen.69

64. Letter of August 4, 1954 (letter no. 63): “Je suis effrayé de voir comme l’âge vient, etcombien encore peu de découvertes, et peu d’œuvres on a produit. En ce moment, je suis ab-solument malade du temps. Cette saignée à blanc que j’ai éprouvé depuis le mois de Novembrejusqu’à maintenant, m’a rendu nerveusement hypersensible à tout à tout jour dépensé sans avoirpu rien faire. Cette revue, ces concerts, quelle charge! Je ne suis pas prêt à les envisager sous lemême angle de l’entier dévouement l’année prochaîne; je vais sauvegarder tout de même mapart de composition.” The reference to “cette revue” is to the journal Domaine musical.

65. Boulez claims that this was the fault of the publisher, Heugel, who had failed to providematerials in time to prepare the performance; see his letter to Stockhausen of August 4, 1954(letter no. 63). Le visage nuptial was revised by Boulez in 1951, but was not performed untilDecember 4, 1957, under Boulez’s own direction. It was later revised again from 1985 and waspremiered by Boulez and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London on November 16, 1989.

66. Boulez refers to these problems over the course of several letters. They are also notedby several commentators, including Mosch, “Pierre Boulez: Le marteau,” 96, and Campbell,“Pierre Boulez: Composer, Traveller, Correspondent,” 14.

67. Decroupet provides a detailed description of the progress made on individual move-ments of Le marteau during these years: Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le marteau, 60–65.

68. Boulez is undoubtedly referring to his earlier tour to South America with the troupe,in 1950.

69. Letter of April 22, 1954 (letter no. 59): “Ma curiosité étant satisfaite à propos de cespays, je préférerais maintenant aller au calme et travailler, travailler—J’espère grignoter le plusde temps possible sur les spectacles pour finir l’œuvre pour Donaueschingen qui n’a pas avancédu tout depuis Février. . . . Pendant le voyage, je vais travailler très sérieusement auMarteau sans


His tone changed when in July he gave an account of his progress duringthe tour:

I hope you had a nice holiday. Here, the work has sometimes been mind-numbing. Teaching the choir parts of Christopher Columbus to amateurs whohaven’t the slightest notion of solfège, one soon becomes nauseated by the in-eptitude. As for the loss of time, I can no longer even think about it withoutturning pale. I’m terribly behind with my piece for Donaueschingen. And Ireally can’t do any better. We have finally come to the end of the tour; I can’tsay I’m sorry about it.70

At the end of the trip he finally reported in August that he was returning tocomposition: “Last letter of the journey home. The tourism is over—Anotherbullfight in Barcelona. And the journey will be at an end . . . thankfully! I’malready back at work on Le marteau sans maître.”71

It thus seems safe to say that Boulez composed little between Februaryand late August of 1954. The ramifications were significant: even though thepremiere of Le marteau was delayed, Boulez still failed to finish the workin time for its rescheduled performance the following summer. Meanwhile,he canceled his trip to Darmstadt and (finally) spoke of the need to take abreak.72 Given the competing pressures and the sheer volume of privatecomplaints, it is just as telling that Boulez said so little about the compositionof Le marteau and its musical features, limiting himself to concerns abouttime and energy and to issues related to its performance, signaling a lack ofengagement with the work’s compositional processes. This was not generallyhis practice in his correspondence with Stockhausen and Cage, in which dis-cussions of musical works were often accompanied by detailed descriptionsof innovative features.

Despite Boulez’s resentful comments regarding distractions and obliga-tions, these letters also reveal the sincere pleasure he took in traveling, not

Maître, que Rosbaud doit donner le 16 Octobre à Donaueschingen.” This was obviously thefirst scheduled premiere, which was later canceled.

70. Letter of July 20, 1954 (letter no. 62): “J’espère que vous avez passé de bonnes va-cances. Ici, quelquefois le travail a été abrutissant. Apprendre les chœurs de Christophe Colombà des amateurs qui n’ont aucune notion de solfège, cela arrive à être écœurant d’ineptie. Quant àla perte de temps, je n’ose même plus y songer sans pâlir. Je suis épouvantablement en retardpour l’œuvre de Donaueschingen. Et vraiment, je ne peux pas faire mieux. Enfin, nous arrivonsà la fin de la tournée; j’avoue ne pas en être fâché.” Boulez’s complaints about the choir are arecurring theme; see also the letter to Stockhausen of June 9, 1954 (letter no. 61).

71. Letter of August 10, 1954 (letter no. 64): “Dernière lettre du retour. Le tourisme estfini—Encore une corrida à Barcelone. Et le voyage sera enterré . . . heureusement! Je me suisdéjà remis au travail sur le ‘Marteau sans Maître.’”

72. Boulez continually ridicules Darmstadt throughout this period, especially sinceWolfgang Steinicke was requesting that he lecture on composition together with HansWerner Henze and Bruno Maderna, a trio he thought nonsensical. See especially his lettersto Stockhausen of April 22, June 9, August 4, and August 10, 1954 (letters nos. 59, 61, 63,and 64).


least on account of his interest in other cultures and in foreign music and in-struments. Hence, his letters to Stockhausen often resemble entries in ajournal, with long asides and occasional digressions that show him at hismost perceptive. Even the more mundane aspects of travel are shared as fod-der for further conversation:

I have seen the Pacific and Valparaiso. Went down to the port at night, ratheramusing. Now five of us have left the others in Buenos Aires to take the boat,and have come as guests to Bahia and Recife (air trip) for a well-deserved rest(Ah! Christopher Columbus in rehearsal, nothing more formidable). We arethus “in the tropics.” It’s very nice. I’ll tell you about it on my return.73

He also commented on people, both in recording meetings with oldfriends (“Imagine, in Rio I saw Gabrielle Dumaine, who has been in Brazilfor six months, as professor at the Escola Livre de São Paulo directed byKoellreutter”),74 and in reflecting on the level of culture and the artistictastes of major cities: “In S. Paulo people are very interested in all the cur-rent trends. I’ve met painters, poets, and even musicians! Interesting, veryinteresting—especially the painters and the poets. Well versed in E[zra]Pound, Joyce, and Cummings, Mallarmé. It’s certainly in São Paulo thatone finds the most fascinating milieu in Brazil.”75 He even describes thebeauty of plane rides through the Andes: “The trip to Bahia and Recifewas terrific. A great deal of flying. We flew over a virgin forest!! We havefilled our eyes with exotic landscapes.”76 Finally, Boulez bragged aboutcollecting rare instruments, this being one of several indications that hiseyes and ears remained open while abroad. He writes to André Schaeffner,“I have brought back a whole collection of ‘exotic’ instruments: woodenbells, double bells in iron, an Indian flute, a small Indian guitar, a framedrum, bells, and a birimbao,” confirming both the ethnomusicologicalinfluence of his mentor and the source of new percussive combinations in

73. Letter of August 4, 1954 (letter no. 63): “J’ai vu le Pacifique et Valparaiso. Descente dansle port la nuit, assez marrante. Maintenant, à cinq, nous avons laissé les autres à Buenos-Airesprendre le bateau, et nous sommes venus invités à Bahia et à Recife (voyage avion) pour un reposbien mérité (Ah! le Christophe-Colomb à répétition, rien de plus redoutable). Nous sommesdonc ‘sous les tropiques.’ C’est bien beau. Je vous raconterai cela à mon retour.”

74. Letter of June 9, 1954 (letter no. 61): “Figurez-vous qu’à Rio, j’ai rencontré GabrielleDumaine qui est au Brésil pour six mois, professeur à l’Escola libre de Sâo Paulo dirigées [sic]par Koelreutter [sic].” Gabrielle Dumaine was a soprano who performed many of Messiaen’sworks. Hans-Joachim Koellreutter was a German composer and teacher who spent most of hislife in Brazil, becoming one of its most prominent musicians.

75. Ibid.: “On s’intéresse beaucoup à S. Paulo à tout le mouvement actuel. J’ai fait la con-naissance de peintres, de poètes et même de musiciens! intéressants, très intéressants—surtoutles peintres et les poètes. Connaissant très bien E. Pound, Joyce, et Cummings, Mallarmé. C’estcertainement à Sâo Paulo qu’est le milieu le plus passionnant du Brésil.”

76. Letter of August 10, 1954 (letter no. 64): “Le voyage à Bahia et Recife était formidable.Beaucoup d’avion. Nous avons survolé la forêt vierge!! Nous avons rempli nos yeux de paysagesexotiques.”


both Le marteau and L’Orestie.77 Given Boulez’s other struggles in thisperiod, these playful asides are testament to his genuine desire to exploreforeign cultures.

My discussion of Boulez’s letters began not with his trip but with his frus-trations “since last November,” or the fall of 1953. Nearly a year later, hewas already preparing the next run of Domaine Musical concerts while initi-ating his most involved Compagnie commitment, L’Orestie. His attitude,however, had changed. Arranging and organizing the concerts had becomeeasier, the delays to Le marteau were taken in stride, and Boulez appearedto be reveling in taking charge of the promotion and performance of hisfriends’ most recent compositions. In many ways he had crossed an invisiblebut tangible boundary between old and new responsibilities and, more sig-nificantly, old and new agendas as a composer. As described below, thisturning point is reflected in Boulez’s public writings, too, although these re-quire a little more deciphering than his private correspondence.

Untangling the Aesthetics of blocs sonores

If Le marteau is in part a musical reflection of Boulez’s attitude and activitiesas a touring professional, then his writings from the same period attest to theadditional influence of various European figures on his aesthetic and histori-cal outlook. Essays from 1954, including “The Composer as Critic” (“Pro-babilités critiques du compositeur”), “‘. . . Near and Far’” (“‘. . . auprès etau loin’”), and “Current Investigations” (“Recherches maintenant”), mapa trajectory from Boulez’s meditations on his changing role at Darmstadt tohis renewed confidence as the lead polemicist of the serial avant-garde.These writings document Boulez’s reaction to his own expanding repertoryof serial techniques, his growing reliance on literary influences, and evenhis transition from an emerging enfant terrible to the precocious mentorof Stockhausen, Pousseur, Cage, and others. These essays also reflect thebroadening professional experiences that prompted him to reevaluate thetone of his leadership.78 Together with his correspondence, they elucidate

77. Quoted in Piencikowski, “Between the Text and the Margin,” 384n16. Boulez alsomentions collecting instruments in his letter to Stockhausen of August 10, 1954 (letter no. 64).Decroupet writes that the increased battery of percussion in the third “Commentaire” of Lemarteau (the last to be composed) is “doubtless owing to” Boulez’s acquisition of these instru-ments at the end of the tour (Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le marteau, 62), and Edward Campbellprovides fresh insights on this topic from an interview with Boulez conducted in 2013(Campbell, “Pierre Boulez: Composer, Traveller, Correspondent,” 23). For more on Boulez’sinterest in non-Western music in general, see Pereira de Tugny, “‘L’autre moitié de l’art.’”

78. Although Boulez later expressed distaste at being seen as a leader of a school or at theforefront of the avant-garde, earlier correspondence suggests that he rallied his colleagues andpromoted a set of guiding principles at the beginning of the 1950s. For additional commentary


Boulez’s inward reflections as a composer, a critic, and a figurehead for serialinnovation during the early 1950s.

The essays in question also introduce three key binaries in Boulez’s aes-thetics that show how his ideas slowly evolved from polemic “statements offact” to more nuanced arguments that tie the directives of serialists to thespeculative concerns of composers. Oppositional pairs are used to describethe way in which composers of the past and present balance “strict” and“free” composition, “theory” and “practice,” and the acts of “organization”and “composition”—all concepts presented as binary oppositions, but ulti-mately treated by Boulez as continuums of mixed behaviors. Furthermore,these terms obliquely relate to Boulez’s long-standing mantra that freedomarises from discipline, especially when he tacitly suggests that composersthroughout history have developed their expressive abilities by shifting theirposition on each continuum according to the musical system of their time.One senses the presence of blocs sonores as a key ingredient in Boulez’s ownproprietary mixture of serial methods and creative drive.

These essays were written at a time when Boulez’s hubris was temperedby the trials and tribulations experienced during the long gestation of Lemarteau, and before the growing, even threatening influence of Stockhau-sen and Cage at Darmstadt in the later 1950s had reignited his polemics. Forexample, they feature less aggressive assessments of other composers thanPenser la musique aujourd’hui, particularly in relation to Boulez’s invitationto those composers to discover their individual musical identities. This iswhy it is so important to contextualize polarizations such as “strict” versus“free”: in the early 1950s Boulez provides these metrics as a means by whichcomposers might self-critique their own projects across a myriad of continu-ums, not as “either/or” binaries but as varied mixtures of “both.”79 It is on-ly later, through conflations of Boulez’s use of binaries with those used byparallel movements in mid-century French structuralism, that his categoriesappear cold, limiting, and polarizing—a conflation that is encouraged by hisincreased use of mathematical logic and linguistic terms and by the causticcriticism of Penser.80

on the way Boulez’s perception of this role changed throughout the decade, see Piencikowski,“Le franc-tireur et les moutons.”

79. Boulez’s use of such continuums in his writings would be in direct contrast to the “either/or” binaries at the heart of Saussure’s brand of structuralism; this is not to suggest, however, thatoppositional structures in his music do not help to generate meaning through contrast and repeti-tion. For summary considerations of skeptics and promoters of the degree of overlap betweenBoulez’s thinking and the actual intricacies of the French structuralists, see Goldman, “Structural-ists contra Serialists?”; Salem, review of The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez; Salem, review ofBoulez, Music and Philosophy; and select chapters of Goldman,Musical Language of Pierre Boulez,Nattiez, Battle of Chronos and Orpheus, and Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy.

80. The influence of the logician Louis Rougier on Boulez’s thinking just prior to his writingof the Penser lectures is recognized by many scholars, and is concisely articulated in Decroupet,“Comment Boulez pense sa musique.”


Finally, when compared with Boulez’s earlier and later writings, thosecontemporary with Le marteau are admittedly seen to be less obsessed withdiagramming the syntax and “morphology” of music and more concernedwith overwriting (or writing over) dead influences. In these years, opposi-tional pairs such as “strict” versus “free” provide a means for articulating theflexibility of Boulez’s approach to serialism, in which blocs sonores constitute atheoretical alternative to Schoenberg’s supposedly “rigid” rows. In addition,his continuums serve to historicize his brand of serialism by demonstratinghow these same fundamental dichotomies were relevant to composers andstyles of previous centuries. The combination of such binaries with Boulez’sdeep belief in an evolutionary development of compositional practice leadsto some of his most revealing and reasoned prose, while offering more in-sightful points de repère along his path to a mature, individual style.

“‘. . . Near and Far’” provides an excellent starting point for discussingthese themes and their relation to the blocs sonores of Le marteauwith greaterspecificity. The essay begins with a simple, straightforward statement:

It seems that the present generation can take leave of its predecessors: it hassucceeded in defining itself precisely and explicitly enough not to have to ac-cept patronage or be haunted by the past any more. The main driving forcesbehind the recent evolution of music are well known; there is no need to re-mind ourselves again of the specific differences of attitude they represented. Itwas up to us to unmask these apparent contradictions, and resolve them intoa possible synthesis.81

This is amature assessment, even for the precocious Boulez, whoonly a year ortwo earlier was calling others “useless” on the grounds of their compositionalaffiliations.82 Having broken with the past he confidently writes of synthesis,likely in the Hegelian sense of resolving opposing camps of dodecaphonicpractice by sublating them into a communal, contemporary style while shed-ding their outdated baggage.83 “Us” is still an exclusive camp—Boulez refersonly to composers who share his ultraprogressive orientation—but the tone isreflective rather than combative, and implies the need for coordinated action.

This is a good point at which to caution against any kind of direct corre-spondence between isolated statements by Boulez and Bloom’s revisionaryratios. Passages such as these, in which Boulez explicitly acknowledges thepast, are actually the least wrought with “anxiety of influence”; if anything,this represents Bloom’s kenosis, or a humbling in relation to one’s influences

81. Boulez, Stocktakings, 141; PdR1, 297.82. The phrase appears in Boulez’s essays “Possibly . . .” and “Schoenberg Is Dead,” al-

though with a different nuance in each: Boulez, Stocktakings, 113, 214; PdR1, 265, 150.83. For more on the Hegelian overtones in Boulez’s use of such binaries, see Campbell,

Boulez, Music and Philosophy, esp. ch. 3. For more on Boulez’s use of binaries (which is notalways related to Hegelian dialectics), see Nattiez, Battle of Chronos and Orpheus, 81–83, andGoldman, Musical Language of Pierre Boulez, ch. 2.


by distancing oneself from them rather than seeking a comparative (or com-bative) opposition.84 Here, Boulez has a clear vision of the way in which hisproject is actually separate and different from that of his predecessors, even ifhis confidence in his persuasive powers remains tempered.

The multifarious connotations of the title phrase “near and far” also pro-vide a richer exegesis of Boulez’s self-reflections.85 A reference to an article byPierre Souvtchinsky, the phrase refers to “a creator—who, through his arrival,his presence, the affirmation of his gifts, his judgement, makes everything nearand far suddenly visible with renewed clarity.”86 Souvtchinsky—whose influ-ence on Boulez’s musicological development cannot be overstated—clarifiedthe necessity for a self-conscious, critical, and historical artistic psychology.87

The artist is called on not just to create a new style but to evaluate it against“the near and the far”: its contemporary reception and its historical relevance.

Boulez clearly accepted Souvtchinsky’s challenge. Taking an omniscientposition over modern music despite his relative youth, he describes threenew horizons. First, he argues for a poetics of modern music based onstructural possibilities over and above any natural principles or “moribundtradition.”88 Next, he muses on the role of the composer in the evolution ofmusical styles, shifting between a commentary on the way musical systemsdevelop and propagate and a long discussion of the merits and dangers ofanalysis for the modern composer, wherein the role of analysis becomes “todefine [ourselves] ever more precisely in relation to [our] antecedents.”89

Finally, the last portion of the essay looks ahead, listing a number of analyticaldiscoveries that could guide the future of modern music. Significantly for ourpurposes, these discoveries include an elaborate description of blocs sonoreswith many hidden references to Le marteau.90 Together these perspectives

84. In Bloom’s words, “3. Kenosis . . . is a breaking-device similar to the defense mecha-nisms our psyches employ against repetition compulsions; kenosis then is a movement towardsdiscontinuity with the precursor. . . . The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his ownafflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be apoet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor’s poem-of-ebbing that the pre-cursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems”:Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 14–15.

85. For a “deciphering” of the many layers of meaning embedded in this title, see Pienci-kowski, “De-ciphering Boulez?,” 68–72.

86. Pierre Souvtchinsky, “À propos d’un retard” (1954), quoted in Goldman,Musical Lan-guage of Pierre Boulez, 9.

87. For more on Souvtchinsky’s relationship with Boulez, see Campbell, Boulez, Music andPhilosophy, ch. 2.

88. Boulez, Stocktakings, 142; PdR1, 298.89. Boulez, Stocktakings, 145; PdR1, 301. While the English translation of this essay uses

the first-person singular (“to define myself . . . my antecedents”), the original French uses thefirst-person plural throughout, which is relevant to points made above and below.

90. In a footnote to the essay in Stocktakings translator Stephen Walsh notes the ratherexplicit connections drawn by Robert Piencikowski between Boulez’s descriptions, Le marteau,and later discussions of these features in Boulez on Music Today: Boulez, Stocktakings, 152n8.


reveal a musician fresh from retreat, converting his own journal of self-reflection and discovery into a map for other aspiring composers.91

The most striking lines in “‘. . . Near and Far’” occur not at the end ofBoulez’s analytical descriptions but at the beginning of them. Citing a num-ber of composers, who include Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann,and Ravel, Boulez attempts to describe the dynamic, varied balance between“strict” and “free” composition that may be observed throughout musichistory. The language here reflects the necessary exchange between formalmodels and individuated works: in an earlier passage Boulez writes, “therecan no longer be any traffic with pre-existing schemas,” whereas here he ac-knowledges that “it is no accident that with the Viennese School we findstrict canonic forms reappearing, together with the passacaglia and variation:they provide the sort of common ground where ambiguity can flourish andallow the divergence between strict and free invention to reappear.”92 Next,he practically reinvents the role of the series, in a passage in which the com-positional advances of Le marteau may be seen to lie buried:

A pitch series can be imagined in a number of different ways. And it is crucialto recognize that it is not the succession of the elements it combines thatconstitutes the serial phenomenon. The series is not an order of events, buta hierarchy—which can be independent of that order. It is in this sense thatharmonic regions—using the same interval relationships—can, for example,within a certain set of transpositions, group series into families. Equally it is inthis sense that the horizontal and vertical dimensions become combined undera single principle of distribution. . . . One thus sees emerging a notion of “free”and “strict” style, specifically defined in relation to those forms acknowledgedas most representative of these two styles in the history of music.93

In relating this veiled description of unordered, vertically stacked blocs sonoresback to his description of “strict” and “free” composition (“the series is notan order of events, but a hierarchy—which can be independent of that or-der”), Boulez integrates his recent experiments in Le marteau with the“near and far” of postwar music. With the benefit of hindsight one can alsoconnect these statements to his later use of “indiscipline” in Le marteauas a negotiation of strict and free applications in his own organizational

I regard this section of the essay as the most revealing and multifaceted discussion of bloc sonorearchitecture in all of Boulez’s early writings.

91. This is the important difference between “‘. . . Near and Far’” and Boulez’s talk of theprevious year, “Tendencies in Recent Music” (“Tendances de la musique récente,” 1953, butnot published until 1957). In many respects “Tendencies” follows a similar trajectory to “‘. . .Near and Far,’” but in a much more mundane, less reflective way that combines a literal assess-ment of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, andWebern with Boulez’s increasing interest in electroacousticmusic and the possibilities of sound complexes, timbre, and other types of sonic object.

92. Boulez, Stocktakings, 142, 151; PdR1, 298, 308. Boulez’s many criticisms of Schoen-berg’s use of “classical” forms add layers of influential anxiety to this kind of rhetorical flip.

93. Boulez, Stocktakings, 149–50; PdR1, 306.


procedures. Boulez’s blocs sonores thus appear at the center of a complexnexus, an elegant synthesis combining a maturing historical perspective,changing aesthetic positions, and, above all, his own appropriation of do-decaphonic and serial methods during the early 1950s.

What is perhaps less obvious is the way these ideas resonate with Boulez’sprivate conversations with contemporary composers. In particular, his cor-respondence with Stockhausen reveals the extent to which their preoccu-pations were shared. It is easy to attribute a desire to incorporate newfreedoms into serial music to Stockhausen: he is the one who writes aboutimprovising at the piano, whose Studien I and II spark Boulez’s imagina-tion, and who muses with inarticulate language on statistics, improvisation,spaces, fields, and rotations.94 At the same time, we know that Boulez’s firstbloc sonore matrix predated at least some of these discussions, and that hisown interest in new formal possibilities and improvisatory techniques was fu-eled by his reading of Mallarmé, Joyce, and others, not to mention his earlyfascination with Cage’s prepared pianos and his ongoing enthusiasm forworld music. Seen in this light, Boulez’s essay becomes a risky, even vulner-able expression of new ideas that he had discussed privately with others, butthat were as yet untested in public.

“The Composer as Critic” represents a second phase of aesthetic develop-ment, providing a penetrating commentary on the way the modern compos-er uses analysis as a catalyst for self-criticism. Drafted for the inaugural (andonly) issue of Domaine musical: International Bulletin of ContemporaryMusic just prior to Boulez’s theatrical tour, this essay is surprising in itslack of references to composers. Instead, Baudelaire is cited continuously,as Boulez describes the symbiotic relationship between the “critical” and“creative” drives of the modern artist—terms that map onto his own binaryof “theoretical” versus “practical” concerns for modern composers.95 For thisreason, the essays of any artist “may turn out to be a critical commentary, or a

94. See especially their letters of November–December 1953 (nos. 35–40), in which Bou-lez and Stockhausen continually discuss the latter’s electronic works (Studien I and II) and theuse of terms such as “statistique,” “improvisation,” “espaces sérielles,” “espaces statistiques,”“Feld,” and “rotation en valves.” While Boulez often takes Stockhausen to task for the vague-ness of these terms in relation to music, the same terms appear throughout Boulez’s writings ofthis decade (sometimes in connection with the concept of the bloc sonore), and with increasingfrequency toward the 1960s.

95. In truth, Boulez distinguishes his terms from theory and practice when he writes that“the common concept of the theory and the practice of an art as existing in watertight compart-ments is part of the old academic tradition that tries jealously to preserve similar distinctionsbetween form and content, ‘studies’ and finished ‘works’”: Boulez, Orientations, 106; PdR,104. Nonetheless, the “critical” and “creative” in Boulez’s parlance merely reflect a more fluidexchange between the theoretical, aesthetic, and practical/creative concerns of the artist; forhim, “the insistence on distinguishing creative artists from theorist-artists turns out to be nomore than hypocritical nonsense”: Boulez, Orientations, 110; PdR, 108.


kind of incantation murmured over a new work as it comes to birth”—aphrase that immediately pairs this essay with Le marteau.96 There is little rea-son to attribute any consistent causal relationship to this music-text dialogue,although it is clear that the success or failure of individual musical works oftenled Boulez to either drop or further develop certain aesthetic positions in hiswritings.97

Other themes of “The Composer as Critic” correspond evenmore directlyto the historical ambitions of “‘. . . Near and Far.’” Boulez again discussesanalysis and its role in showing a “lack of respect” for his own work and thatof others. These critiques are not “sallies” or “squibs,” Boulez reminds us.Instead, they reflect a Cartesian doubt, a radical questioning of the methods,intentions, and resulting musical rhetoric of a given composer or work, in-cluding Boulez’s own.98 That these comments appear as Boulez intensely re-views the compositions of his friends is no coincidence. In corresponding withCage, Pousseur, and Stockhausen about such works as Music of Changes andSonatas and Interludes, Prospection for three pianos, and Kontra-Punkte,Studie I, and Studie II, Boulez developed as a critic and analyst. The experi-ence also shifted his tone more generally: whereas his critiques of Schoenbergwere often too caustic for others to swallow, his criticisms here are as reflectiveof his own failures (such as the troubled premiere of Polyphonie X in 1951) asthey are of the shortcomings of others.99

Boulez also continued to pair constructive criticism with his broader his-torical agenda. He calls for “a valid, positive contribution to the develop-ment of a language and a system of poetics [that] would remain, havingonce accomplished its aim, as a simple historical document—and one abso-lutely essential in order to obtain a definitive picture of the present age.”100

This reference to criticism as “a simple historical document” indicates a sub-tle change in Boulez’s own aesthetic project, from a theory of compositionthat is self-evident, evolutionary, and even obligatory for all composers to anevaluation of postwar aesthetics as a contrived, historical phenomenon

96. Boulez, Orientations, 106; PdR, 103–4. Boulez himself is notorious for such writings.His correspondence with Cage produced descriptions of Polyphonie X and Structures 1 longbefore the compositions were actually drafted, and later writings on Le marteau, the Troisièmesonate, and Pli selon pli (among other works) speak to the value of this kind of verbal explorationof his musical ideas with others.

97. I discuss relationships of this type in Salem, “Boulez Revised,” especially with regard tothe failure of Polyphonie X and the misfire premiere of Poésie pour pouvoir, among other works.

98. For astute recent commentaries on the role of Cartesian doubt in Boulez’s aesthetics,see Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy, ch. 3, and Goldman, Musical Language of PierreBoulez, ch. 2.

99. I discuss the reception of Polyphonie X in Salem, “Integrity of Boulez’s Integral Serialism.”100. Boulez, Orientations, 107; PdR, 105. The essay stresses that such a volume would

replace journalistic infighting with “clear statements based on actual experience of the worksthemselves.” Penser is Boulez’s first manifestation of this desire. He later takes up issues of mu-sical poetics in his Leçons de musique.


defined by its musical works and reflective of its context rather than itsauthors.101 There is little doubt that he saw his own blocs sonores as pre-cisely this kind of contribution.

Another striking passage evokes further biographical resonances: “Themost irrefutable proof of [the vitality of the twelve-note system] lies in thefrequency of [attacks against it]: cut off one of its heads and ten grow in itsplace, while critics thunder and composers fulminate and composer-criticsgo on explaining with intellectual ardour or exhausted nervous systems.”102

Here, Boulez’s description reveals his own nervous state, a preoccupationseen in a letter to Stockhausen quoted above.103 As the years pass, it seemsas if the source of Boulez’s exhaustion is no longer just his schedule but theneed to continually defend his aesthetic principles, to the point where med-itations on Le marteau and dodecaphonic technique may reveal the concreteeffects of postwar politics on his creative drive.

Finally, a third essay from 1954, “Current Investigations,” completes theprogression from personal meditations to the reenergized polemics of a res-olute leader. The essay begins with coy witticisms regarding “enlightenedmanifestos” and “articles of faith” before settling on a clear objective: todefine the word “dodecaphony” and its relation to the word “series” andto settle, once and for all, the bickering of confused critics.104 But Boulezquickly switches from passive to aggressive when he condemns composersfor treating the organizational power of serialism as a musical language initself. Indeed, the essay is not so much about resolving what serialism is, asa call for serialists to distance themselves from the “monstrous all-purposemill” that results from conflating “organization” with “composition.”105

While condoning the abandonment of thematic material, he admits thatthis has led to a new monotony, a bland schematization of music, because“perpetual variation—on the surface—produced a total absence of variation

101. Bystanders and exceptions being the “useless” composers of two earlier essays of1952, “Possibly . . .” and “Schoenberg Is Dead.”

102. Boulez, Orientations, 107; PdR, 104. Note Boulez’s focus on dodecaphonic ratherthan serial systems here. This matches his predilection for dodecaphonic rows in Le marteau.

103. Letter of August 4, 1954 (letter no. 63); see pages 132–33 and note 64 above. Boulezmentions the upcoming publication of “Current Investigations” around the same time, in aletter of October 16, 1954 (letter no. 67). In fact, the phrase of the essay that is translated hereas “with intellectual ardour or exhausted nervous systems” reads “l’esprit en feu ou les nerfsdétendus,” which perhaps implies numb nerves more than an exhausted nervous system. Thisis less a criticism of the translation than an admission of the merely figurative correspondencebetween Boulez’s letter to Stockhausen and the content of the essay.

104. Boulez, Stocktakings, 15; PdR1, 331.105. Boulez states this rather vividly: “Webern only organized pitch; we organize rhythm,

timbre, dynamics; everything is grist to this monstrous all-purpose mill, and we had better aban-don it quickly if we are not to be condemned to deafness. One soon realizes that compositionand organization cannot be confused without falling into a maniacal inanity, undreamt of byWebern himself”: Boulez, Stocktakings, 16; PdR1, 332.


on a more general level.”106 Serialism remains a viable style, but it must beguided by musical instincts, not autonomous processes.107

In turning from reflection to critique, Boulez performs an about-facewith regard to integral serialism. He now specifically attacks the kind of“perpetual variation” found in his own experimental Structures 1a, in which,for “each new pitch, a new duration received a new dynamic.”108 The list ofnegatives continues: do not use themes or thematic rows, do not confuseorganization and composition, and avoid absolutely “formal concepts and‘architecture’ of the past.”109 New directives take the place of these out-dated techniques: “The real task in this field is to develop a dialectic operat-ing at each moment of the composition between a strict global organizationand a temporary structure controlled by free will”; “These reflections on mu-sical composition lead one to hope for a new poetics, a new way of listening”;and finally, “Let us claim for music the right to parentheses and italics . . . aconcept of discontinuous time made up of structures which interlock insteadof remaining in airtight compartments.”110 These and other statements areunited in one respect: they direct composers toward compositional creati-vity and away from too literal a use of rule-based dodecaphonism. Theyalso provide another illustration of the dynamic relationship between wordand deed. One need only compare Boulez’s desire for interlocking move-ments with Figure 1 to see how the design of Le marteau—itself the productof years of development—is a prime example of his new approach to musicalform.111

Indeed, the structure of Le marteau is clear from the titles of its move-ments despite their convoluted order: three different vocal cycles, each withseparate instrumental and vocal components, are interlaced as a series of ninemovements. What is less obvious is that Boulez used a unique form of serialderivation to produce the blocs sonores for each cycle. For example, whereas“L’artisanat furieux” focuses on blocs sonores generated from the matrix de-scribed above (Example 6), “Bourreaux de solitude” uses a different meth-od of bloc sonore generation. The two “rotations” of the row for “Bourreaux

106. Boulez, Stocktakings, 17; PdR1, 333.107. Campbell’s discussion of this essay, placed in the midst of Adorno’s writings and

commentaries on contemporary music at Darmstadt, is a stimulating reflection on its broadercontext: Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy, ch. 4, esp. 75–80. Campbell notes thatAdorno’s name does not appear in a single essay written by Boulez during the 1950s, despiteAdorno’s continual recognition of Boulez: ibid., 80.

108. Boulez, Stocktakings, 17; PdR1, 333.109. Boulez, Stocktakings, 18; PdR1, 334.110. Boulez, Stocktakings, 17, 18, 19; PdR1, 333–34, 334, 335.111. For more on how and when Boulez determined the final order of the movements,

see Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le marteau, 63. The schema shown in Figure 1 is adapted fromJameux, Pierre Boulez, 286.


de solitude” shown in Figure 2 demonstrate one such alternative method.112

Within each matrix Boulez “clumps” the pitches into blocs sonores, usinga process that can be described in two different ways: by grouping thepitches according to the intervals between them, or by rotating the rowoutside each axis according to a single pitch (here “4” and “5”) and theninserting that pitch at every intersection point. Each results in a “dodeca-phonic”matrix. The clumps are then stacked and used similarly to those inExample 6 to form the basis for polyphonic music. Examples 7a–b showhow two rows from rotation 4 provide the pitch and rhythm content forthe beginning of “Bourreaux.”

Here again we are reminded of Bloom. If earlier examples highlight Bou-lez’s ability to somewhat “complete” Schoenberg by embracing but alsoreorienting his goals (an emphasis on Bloom’s tessera), then Figure 2 andExamples 7a–b might emphasize Bloom’s daemonization, or a movementtoward an alternative model based less on a total reinvention by the youngmusician than on an open meditation upon the power of the original model,which exists separately from Schoenberg’s influence.113 In Boulez’s reima-gining of the twelve-tone matrix, for example, he morphs the matrix into

Figure 1 Schema outlining the movements of Le marteau sans maître in the order of perfor-mance while also showing their distribution as “cycles”

112. A facsimile of these tables is reproduced in Decroupet, Pierre Boulez: Le marteau,sketches 1.1.c and 1.1.d.

113. In Bloom’s words, “4. Daemonization, or a movement towards a personalizedCounter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s Sublime. . . . The later poet opens himself towhat he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper,but to a range of being just beyond that precursor. He does this, in his poem, by so stationing itsrelation to the parent-poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work”: Bloom,Anxiety of Influence, 15.


Figu

re2

Two“rotatio

ns”of

therow

for“Bou

rreaux

desolitud

e”

something resembling his harmonic blocks, even while the design of the ma-trix itself—and its application in the music—actually follows Schoenberg’s or-dered, sequential presentation of twelve-tone rows in various transpositions.Schoenberg is less completed or denied than “removed,” the matrix appear-ing as an unavoidable result of historical progress and Boulez’s own uniqueinspirations. Incidentally, Schoenberg is never mentioned in “Current Inves-tigations,” in which Webern is rather the “chief predecessor elect.”114

Boulez privately announced the publication of “Current Investigations”to Stockhausen:

I’m sending you moreover—despite the definite promise I made myself aboutit—an article I’ve written for La nouvelle revue française, November issue, toappear in a fortnight. It will certainly remind you of some of the conversationswe had in Cologne—including what you taught me, a little piece of recent er-udition. It’s a self-critique! It’s why I’ve adopted offhandedness as its principaltone . . .115

Boulez’s reference to tone (and his rather rare use of an ellipsis) may signalthe type of decompression that accompanied the end of his struggles. Havingreturned from his tour abroad, announced his next major compositionalproject, and spent a focused, productive sojourn in Cologne with one of histrusted allies,116 Boulez was reveling in his recovery from a year of work,

Example 7a Conversion of rows 2 and 6 from the left-hand rotation in Figure 2 to standardnotation (note the use of both numbers and spaces)

114. Boulez, Stocktakings, 16; PdR1, 332.115. Letter of October 16, 1954 (letter no. 67): “Je vous envoie par ailleurs—malgré la

promesse formelle que je m’en étais faite—un article que j’ai écrit pour la N.R.F., no. de Novem-bre qui va paraître dans quinze jours. Il vous rappellera certainement quelques-unes de nos con-versations à Cologne—y compris ce que vous m’avez appris, petite érudition de fraîche date.C’est une ‘auto-critique’!; c’est pourquoi j’ai adopté la désinvolture comme ton principal.”

116. Boulez spent nearly a month with Stockhausen at the Cologne studios. In a letter ofAugust 10, 1954 (letter no. 64), he provides Stockhausen with the dates August 28 to Sep-tember 28, but these are changed at the last minute (letter of August 30, no. 65) to Septem-ber 1 through 21–22.


stress, and perhaps even self-doubt. Within a month he would have mostlyplanned and paid for the next year of DomaineMusical concerts, though fur-ther delays to the Renaud-Barrault production of L’Orestie would presentnew obstacles. While he still had to wait nine months for the successful pre-miere of Le marteau, he remained poised for new challenges. However faciletheir former relation to Bloom, Boulez’s anxieties were now focused as muchon his present colleagues as on his own maturation, shifting his horizonsfrom a myopic past and a hypothetical future to the pluralities of postwarexperimentalism.

Example 7b Pierre Boulez, Le marteau sans maître, “Bourreaux de solitude,”mm. 1–3, pitchand rhythm reduction with underlying row content. A sound recording of this example isincluded in the online version of the Journal.


“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

It remains tempting to coalesce the overlapping themes of Boulez’s letters,music, and writings into a late-stage Künstlerroman. In each of these areasone sees the artist coming of age a second time, replacing not only histeachers and their methods, but even the domineering busts of the SecondViennese School—and all with the furor of an adolescent. Correspondingdevelopments in Boulez’s compositional method and aesthetics make theyears between the premiere of Structures 1a and Le marteau as much a re-presentation of the maturing artist as they are a personal confrontation withthe challenges of evolving a compelling, marketable musical voice, as wellas an acceptable, if still dogmatic, aesthetics.

Of course, the almost literal parallels between Joyce’s coming-of-age storyand Boulez’s life should not be taken too seriously.117 There may be somebenefit, however, in using these parallels to explore the possible links betweenthe aesthetics of Boulez’s earlier years and his rapid musical development inLe marteau. From his Catholic upbringing to his mutable faith in dodeca-phonicism, Boulez never struggled with the idea that freedom is an extensionof discipline, even as his adherence to the dogmas of various influences andinstitutions wavered continually in his twenties and early thirties.118 His focuson self-discipline as a way of avoiding an absolute faith in the series, numer-ological approaches, and past musical forms is telling, not least because itshows his inherent tendency to become skeptical about any rigidly definedsystem over time. Thus, it is not that Boulez suddenly breaks free from hisearlier aesthetic positions or influences in these years; rather, he expandsthem, making space for personal expression, liberating himself by using blocssonores to locate freedom within discipline instead of in opposition to it (likeCage) or as a reprieve from it (like Stockhausen). In finding his own solutionto the dialogue between strict and free composition, theory and practice, andso on, Boulez resolves a primary sociological tension of the postwar years onhis own terms, protecting the role of the series with his blocs sonores, but leav-ing behind his earlier experiments with dodecaphonic technique as souvenirsfrom an apprenticeship.

As Le marteau demonstrates, Boulez’s first instinct is to dig ever deeperinto obscure serial operations in an attempt to bypass Schoenberg’s naturalorder of the row. While this trend continues in 1955 with Boulez’s very next

117. For an example of just how far one can stretch such parallels, see Peyser, Boulez, 81.The fact that Boulez was heavily influenced by Joyce, particularly in relation to his Troisièmesonate (first conceived around 1955), certainly adds other resonances to the comparison, notleast because Boulez often thought deeply about his aesthetic and intellectual relationship tothe artists he studied, such as René Char, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Klee.

118. I argue elsewhere that Boulez’s aesthetic position also wavered, suggesting that Penserwas a form of overcompensation for his own doubts about his first attempt at a serial aesthetics:Salem, “Boulez Revised,” esp. 230–46, 252–61.


dodecaphonic works, such as his Troisième sonate and Book 2 of Structures,the following year also introduces a number of more basic serial processesthat have a lasting effect on his compositional methods, here expressed bythe rapid, mostly through-composed textures of L’Orestie and the transcrip-tion and borrowing that are essential to the “Improvisations” in Pli selon pli.In later years his method makes room for a greater variety of simplified pro-cesses over and above more convoluted derivational techniques.119 Giventhis narrative, it might be argued that Boulez’s true break from the influenceof Schoenberg, Webern, and Messiaen was not in the audacious premiere ofStructures 1a, but in the trials and tribulations that brought forth Le mar-teau and a return to lyric writing using a voice all his own, resonating out-ward from his newly derived blocs sonores.

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119. Others may disagree. I find it difficult, however, not to view the serial processes ofBoulez’s later works as far more focused on proliferation of simple permutations of given setsand series over and above the intense, nearly organicist mappings found in his Structuresbooks and the Troisième sonate in particular (a point perhaps reinforced by his abandonmentof a third Structures book and his shift to new organizational methods in the second chapterof Structures 2). Forthcoming work by Catherine Losada presents an alternative to my inter-pretative bias by exploring Boulez’s continued use of intricate, concrete serial relationships at“background” and “foreground” levels inDomaines: Losada, “Between Freedom and Control.”


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Abstract

Previous scholarship on Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître celebratesthe analytical basis of the piece, with particular emphasis on Boulez’s con-cept of the bloc sonore and its role in Le marteau’s design. This articlesynthesizes aspects of this scholarship with Boulez’s personal reflectionsfrom the years 1953–55, many of which remain unpublished to this day.Utilizing Boulez’s correspondence with Karlheinz Stockhausen and JohnCage, as well as his own published writings and the sketches for Le mar-teau, I present the story of an artist on the path to self-discovery. I alsoshift the discussion of blocs sonores away from viewing them as musical ob-jects necessary for the analysis of Le marteau to recognizing their significanceas a cultural and aesthetic concept at the heart of Boulez’s artistic develop-ment at this time. Finally, I use the literary trope of “anxiety of influence” torelate Boulez’s own maturation to his struggle to escape the shadow andinfluence of Schoenberg. By humanizing a work that is often cited for itsanalytical virtuosity and poetic audacity rather than the network of biographicalcircumstances behind its creation, I attempt to reorient our ears from therigidness of integral serialism to the broader significance of Boulez’s score.

Keywords: Boulez, Le marteau sans maître, blocs sonores, multiplication,Stockhausen, correspondence


boulez s künstlerroman: using blocs sonores to overcome ... · references to boulez’s essays are...

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