In our post-modern era, when serial music seems as dead as a dodo, Le Marteau Sans Maître has lost none of its charisma. In this classic from 1955, Boulez convincingly demonstrated that serial music is possible, as long as one manages to seduce the listener to forget melody and harmony in favor of the movement. French composers, who grew up with the gracefully undulating Gregorian chant, succeeded
… better than the Viennese expressionists of Freud's time. Boulez was of course indebted to Schönberg and Webern, but he had also listened to Debussy's arabesques and Messiaen's rhythms and birdsong. Le Marteau's success, however, must have been mainly due to Boulez's genius instrumentation art, which, despite all modern means, had something very Eastern and archaic. Igor Stravinsky described Le Marteau at the time as the 'only work of significance', but the nestor of the avant garde at the time and the 'angry young man' were not yet mixed up. (HJ)more
