Analysis of ‘Le Marteau sans maître’

I: Introduction

Le Marteau sans maître (“The Hammer Without a Master”) is a chamber cantata composed by Pierre Boulez from 1953 to 1955. It sets surrealist poetry by René Char to music for contralto and six instrumentalists. It is one of Boulez’s most famous and influential compositions.

He was already known as a composer of total serialist pieces. Originally, Le Marteau was a six-movement piece in 1953 and 1954, but in the following year he revised the order of the movements and interpolated three new ones. He would make further revisions to Le Marteau in 1957, since he always felt that his compositions were works “in progress.”

Four of the nine movements have the text of three poems by Char sung, one of them sung a second time, while the remaining five are instrumental ‘commentaries,’ as it were, of the poems. The poetic subjects of the movements are not each grouped together by poem; instead, they alternate with each other.

The first cycle, “L’Artisanat furieux” (“Furious Craftsmanship”), is made up of movements I (‘before’), III, and VII (‘after’). The second cycle, “Bourreaux de solitude” (“Hangmen of Solitude”), is comprised of movements II (commentary I), IV (commentary II), VI, and VIII (commentary III). The third cycle, “Bel Edifice et les pressentiments” (“Stately Building and Presentiments”), is made up of movements V (first version) and IX (again).

The instruments heard are alto flute, vibraphone, guitar, viola, xylorimba, tambourine, bongos, frame drum, finger cymbals, agogô, triangle, maracas, claves, small tam-tam, low gong, very deep tam-tam, and large suspended cymbal. The combinations of these instruments vary with each movement, just as the instrumental variations are from movement to movement in Pierrot lunaire, the Arnold Schoenberg composition that greatly influenced Le Marteau.

This link includes the text in the original French and in English translation. Here are links to recordings of the piece, with the score, and a live performance of it.

II: The Text

As I said above, the text is made up of three surrealist poems by René Char. Since the jarring, unnerving, non-rational images of surrealist art and literature are meant to give expression to the feelings of the unconscious mind, I will interpret the meaning of Char’s clashing, illogical imagery using free association, a psychoanalytic method meant to help bring out unconscious meaning. That is, I’ll be associating common themes among the freely expressed images Char used in his poems.

“Furious Craftsmanship” is the wildly striking hammer of the artisan who creates without any sense of conscious control, that is, a hammer without a master, as it would seem. Such an idea would seem to sum up the entire composition, a wild, uncontrolled expression of feeling, or one controlled unconsciously, by a master of whom we know nothing, as if he didn’t even exist.

“The red caravan on the edge of the nail” parallels “the head on the point of my knife.” With the caravan paralleling the head, we can see the violence, the furious craftsmanship, of the imagery, especially with the “corpse in the basket” immediately following the caravan on the nail’s edge.

The verse is full of incongruous images of one thing far too big for the other: a caravan on the edge of a nail? a corpse in a basket? work horses in a horseshoe? In these surrealist images, we see a reversal of the normal order of things; what is large is inside what is small.

This reversal of order suggests a desire for revolution, something keenly felt by many around the time of 1934, when Char wrote these poems (note also that Char was later part of the French Resistance against Nazi occupation in 1940). Surrealism was understood to be a revolutionary movement, as leader André Breton explicitly said it was; it was associated back then with communism and anarchism. Now, it would be more than a stretch to say that Boulez had any such ideological sympathies, but he certainly wanted to make complete breaks with musical traditions, and he was interested in many of the radical movements of the time; his choice of Char’s poetry was certainly a reflection of this radicalism.

Certainly one aspect of revolution–violence–is evident in this poetry. The head on the point of the knife is apparently a Peruvian one. The image “knife Peru” suggests the violence of Incan human sacrifice, in which boys and girls were chosen to be killed by strangulation, a blow to the head (there’s that ‘hammer without a master,’ or one held by a ‘furious artisan’ of sorts), suffocation, or being buried alive. None of this killing involves the use of a knife, but the “knife Peru” is sufficient in its association with sacrificial violence.

More violent associations are to be made in the second poem, “Hangmen of Solitude,” or lonely executioners. “The step has gone away, the walker has fallen silent,” indeed, if the trapdoor of the gallows has fallen, and the condemned is hanged. His body swings like a “Pendulum.” He has fallen silent “on the dial of imitation,” because to imitate is not to express one’s own ideas, but rather those of others.

I suspect that the notion of imitating others being tantamount to being silent must have resonated with Boulez, since he was known to feel disdain for any musician continuing any traditions, anything done before, hence his insistence on breaking with the musical past. To him, the older music was just “on the dial of imitation,” nothing new, tantamount to silence.

His haughty attitude toward the music of the past was not limited to the likes of Mozart or Beethoven. The music of even his own teacher, Olivier Messiaen, which is more than often enough plenty avant-garde, was the object of his contempt. Boulez called Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine “brothel music,” and he said the Turangalîla-Symphonie made him vomit.

So any kind of imitation was anathema to Boulez. In the third Char poem used in Le Marteau, we find the line, “Man the imitated illusion,” which must have affected Boulez similarly to “the dial of imitation.” All of this being said, though, one must find it curious, and perhaps a tad hypocritical, of Boulez to be so fiercely judgmental of “imitation,” when one considers how he stuck to serialist techniques for so much of his career as a composer, instead of quickly shifting away from them in search of other avenues of experimental expression. His early-acquired aptitudes in mathematics must have been what sustained his interest in serialism for so long.

Back to the poem. Apart from its association with the swinging body of the hanged condemned man, “The Pendulum” can also be seen as an upside-down hammer–which normally would move in an overhand arc down to what it would hit–instead moving in an ‘underhand’ arc, if you will. The pendulum is thus like an arm, throwing in an underhand motion its load of reflex, or instinctive, granite.

In any case, that pendulum–whether representing the swinging body of a man hanged, or an upside-down hammer swinging up to hit, perhaps, a head, like those of the child sacrificial victims of the Incas whom I mentioned in my discussion of the previous poem–is just another symbol of violence in these poems. Boulez would condemn to either a metaphorical hanging, a blow to the head, or a knifing, all those musical imitators, those who won’t try to produce something truly new in music.

Now that “instinctive load of granite” that’s thrown by the pendulum could be of the material used to build the “Stately Building” of the third poem, where we’re heading now.

Could the words “I hear marching in my legs” be those of the condemned, hanged man…that is, his spirit after having been killed? “The dead sea waves overhead” suggest a drowning man looking up at them. The “child” on “the wild seaside pier” seems to be looking down at the drowning “Man the imitated illusion,” because the child, with his “pure eyes,” is alive, above the water, in being natural and original, not imitating anyone, as the drowned, hanged, or sacrificed ones do. The child, in his wild naïveté, has not yet been corrupted by an illusory society of imitation.

Perhaps the condemned hear marching in their legs because they refuse to admit they lack the originality that Boulez insists they must have to justify their existence. The condemned imagine they have the needed originality, so they must still be alive; and yet, those “Pure eyes in the woods,” the natural world where creativity is real, original, and not a mere imitation of past art, “are searching in tears for a habitable head,” that is, those pure eyes weep over how difficult it is to find an original head worthy of living in.

Those judgmental hangmen are truly in solitude, lonely executioners, for they can find no kindred spirits who want to join them in their avant-garde experimentation. Small wonder Boulez had fallings-out with not only Messiaen, but also fellow avant-gardists John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Boulez must have had many presentiments about the beautiful buildings his peers were making around him–never experimental enough for his so lofty standards.

III: The Music

I’ll start by making some general observations.

Just as both the surrealist text and the serialist music of Le Marteau are unconventional, so is the choice of instrumentation. Boulez’s choice of vibraphone, xylorimba, guitar, and percussion suggest anything but Western classical tradition. Rather, they suggest African and Far Eastern music: the vibraphone is like the Balinese gendèr; the xylorimba, the African balaphone; and the guitar, the Japanese koto. None of this is to imply, however, that Boulez was trying to imitate these musical styles.

Now, this mixing of East and West implies that Le Marteau has a universal quality to it; that paradoxically, while its experimental post-war modernism may be alienating to many in the audience, this implicit mixture of European and non-European cultures makes it a music for everyone.

Tied to this idea of universality in the choice of instruments is how the voice and instruments also comprise a continuum of sonorities. This continuum ranges from the fluid, legato sound of the voice and alto flute, on the one side, to the staccato, percussive sounds of the xylorimba and drums, on the other side.

This continuum could be heard thus: the voice and alto flute (breath); then the viola, which coupled with the flute represent monody; then the guitar, coupled with the viola when played pizzicato, provide plucked strings; then we have the long resonances given by the guitar and vibraphone; and the struck keys of the vibraphone and xylorimba mesh with the striking of the frame drum and bongos. This continuum of one extreme of sound to the other, with every intermediate sound, thus represents another kind of musical universality in that it includes, in a sense, every kind of sound.

The “Furious Craftsmanship” cycle, or movements I, III, and VII, uses this tone row, according to Lev Koblyakov: 3 5 2 1 10 11 9 0 8 4 7 6, though Ulrich Mosch argues that this sequence is really the inversion of the basic set. In any case, this tone row is grouped into five sets according to five rotations of the pattern 2-4-2-1-3 (one must recall Boulez’s mathematical predisposition); so the first rotation would be 3 5-2 1 10 11-9 0-8-4 7 6, for example. The other groupings of the row would then be 4-2-1-3-2, 2-1-3-2-4, 1-3-2-4-2, and 3-2-4-2-1, with the second rotation being 3 5 2 1-10 11-9-0 8 4-7 6, for example.

In the “Hangmen of Solitude” cycle, that is, movements II, IV, VI, and VIII, Boulez associates particular pitches with particular durations, as Steven D. Winick observed. So C gets a sixteenth note, C-sharp gets an eighth note, D gets a dotted eighth note, etc.; in other words, as the pitch rises by a half-step, so does the associated duration increase by a sixteenth note.

As if all of this weren’t complicated enough, Boulez occasionally swaps the durations of a couple pitches, this being an example of his wish to employ what is called “local indiscipline,” which allows for some freedom and flexibility, or “a freedom to choose, to decide and to reject,” as Boulez himself said. As a result of such complexities and variations, it can be virtually impossible for the listener to decipher all of these serializations.

Along with coordinating serialized pitches and durations, he also assigns dynamics and attacks similarly. Starting on D, with its dotted eighth note, Boulez groups pairs of rising chromatic pitches six times (D and D-sharp, E and F, F-sharp and G, etc.), and he assigns a dynamic to each pair, from pp to ff.

What’s more, the first note within a pair gets a particular attack–legato for p and pp, accent for mf and mp, and sforzando for f and ff. Yet again, while these are largely discernible enough to be understood as deliberate, he complicates matters further with his use of “local indiscipline.”

The ninth and final movement is in a number of ways an amalgam of the previous movements. It’s broken up into three large sections, the first of which includes variations of quotations from the central movements of all three cycles (III, V, and VII, but in reverse order), as well as repeating the text from the fifth movement. Also, all of IX’s tempi are taken from previous movements.

IV: Conclusion

So, while all of this music is so meticulously planned, to the untrained ear, it sounds like an atonal, arrhythmic chaos of dissonance. There is a dialectical relationship between this precise planning and the ‘chaos’ that it seems like. As in all of total serialism, the arrangement of pitches, durations, dynamics, attacks, accents, etc., is all completely divorced from conventional notions of ‘expressivity.’ One cannot tap one’s toe to this music; it’s hard to hum the wide leaps that the contralto does in the piece. Yet Le Marteau is among Boulez’s most acclaimed works, and is considered a landmark of postwar twentieth-century music. People have connected with it, in spite of itself.

The music, in its impossible complexity, its planning to the minutest, most mathematical detail, and its seeming randomness, makes it a perfect counterpart to the text, with its surreal expression of the unconscious mind. Like the unconscious, the music is a mystery that takes a long time to unravel. How the unconscious expresses itself, hiding in plain sight and coming out in such forms as seemingly nonsensical dreams and parapraxes, seems random and meaningless; but a skilled, patient psychoanalyst can go through all of these seemingly inexplicable expressions and find meaning in them, just as a music analyst can find order in Le Marteau.

This is why I say that the music of Le Marteau is symbolic of the unconscious mind, verbally expressed, like the talking cure, through the three Char poems. In Lacanian language, the music represents the inexpressible, undifferentiated, traumatic world of the Real, while the text represents the verbalized world of the Symbolic.

Boulez, in so painstakingly working out the character of every note (pitch, duration, dynamic, attack, instrumentation, etc.), is in a musical sense making the unconscious conscious. Unlike all the other composers he had such disdain for, those who were, in his opinion, just mindlessly following in the clichéd footsteps of their previous followers of even more clichéd music, Boulez broke with tradition and with unconscious instinct (i.e., the tapping of the toes, the humming of a flowing melody). He would have nothing to do with “the dial of imitation”; he would have no society with “Man the imitated illusion,” for in his opinion, the imitation of previous art is the illusion of art.

The irony of the mallets hitting the keys of the vibraphone and xylorimba, and of the sticks hitting the drums in his piece–those ‘hammers without masters’ striking irregular rhythms (indeed, a casual look at the score will reveal changes in time signature with almost every, if not absolutely every, bar)–is that each tap is planned with fussy attention to detail. Those hammers really are with masters.