Boulez's Künstlerroman: Using blocs sonores to Overcome Anxieties and Influence in Le marteau sans maître

Author:

Salem Joseph

Abstract

Previous scholarship on Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maître celebrates the analytical basis of the piece, with particular emphasis on Boulez's concept of the bloc sonore and its role in Le marteau's design. This article synthesizes aspects of this scholarship with Boulez's personal reflections from the years 1953–55, many of which remain unpublished to this day. Utilizing Boulez's correspondence with Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, as well as his own published writings and the sketches for Le marteau, I present the story of an artist on the path to self-discovery. I also shift the discussion of blocs sonores away from viewing them as musical objects necessary for the analysis of Le marteau to recognizing their significance as a cultural and aesthetic concept at the heart of Boulez's artistic development at this time. Finally, I use the literary trope of “anxiety of influence” to relate Boulez's own maturation to his struggle to escape the shadow and influence of Schoenberg. By humanizing a work that is often cited for its analytical virtuosity and poetic audacity rather than the network of biographical circumstances behind its creation, I attempt to reorient our ears from the rigidness of integral serialism to the broader significance of Boulez's score.

Publisher

University of California Press

Subject

Music

Reference121 articles.

1. I would like to thank Christopher Brody, Julia Doe, and my anonymous reviewers for the helpful suggestions made during the drafting of this article. References to Boulez's essays are to English translations, followed by the new standard French collections, most often using the abbreviations “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 Stockhausen are 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 unattributed translations are similarly my own.

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

3. While many textbooks give space to both works, Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music and Robert P. Morgan's Twentieth-Century Music clearly emphasize the analytical traits of Book 1 of Structures over those of Le marteau, and although Joseph Auner provides more extensive discussion of Le marteau in his Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, his analytical examples come primarily from Structures 1a (and, as usual, from Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités). A major (and welcome) exception within textbook coverage is found in Paul Griffiths's Modern Music and After (3rd ed.). Within more subject-specific coverage, Martin Iddon, in his New Music at Darmstadt, provides more citations of Structures 1a than of any other work by Boulez, but notes that this piece was “aberrant in terms of the ways in which Boulez generally operated” (83). Meanwhile, Mark Carroll (Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe) and M. J. Grant (Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics) both focus more on the analytics of Structures 1a than those behind Le marteau or blocs sonores, although Grant is clear 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 in Western Culture (4th ed.), barely touch on Boulez.

4. Bloom's elaboration of this concept is usually discussed through reference to his texts The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry and A Map of Misreading. A number of music theorists have been attracted by Bloom's ideas over the years, prompting a reaction by Richard Taruskin that is especially thorough in its exploration of the possible application of Bloom's work to music: Taruskin, “Revising Revision.” More recently Michael L. Klein has provided a very adept rethinking of Bloomian concepts in relation to music in his two books Intertextuality in Western Art Music and Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject.

5. 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 terms are provided at relevant points below. Together these ratios form a loose narrative trajectory that follows the poet from his or her first misreading of an influence to an appropriation of it via 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.

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