Score: Universal Edition, 1957

The amount of authoritative literature available on this work, including Boulez’s own writings, makes it unnecessary to enter into further detailed discussion about its historical significance and structural organisation. But where appropriate to issues of conducting, such matters will be referred to. Score references relate to the 1957 Universal Edition.

In the journey which he made from the strict serialism and the ‘automatism’ of Structure I (1951) to Le Marteau sans maître (1954), Boulez made a giant leap of inventive perception. The composer himself describes the earlier work as a purely technical exploration of musical language ‘to bring everything into question again, make a clean sweep of one’s heritage and start all over again from scratch, to see how it might be possible to reconstruct a way of writing that begins with something which eliminates personal invention’. He is not out of step with many and diverse composers who see the material of a piece sometimes dictating its own direction. Finding a balance between subjective input and the independent life of a musical construct is common ground for many composers. What Boulez was seeking in Le Marteau was an aesthetic determinant produced by the flexible function of composition technique, ‘local indiscipline’ as he describes it. Serialism, as conceived in the Darmstadt years, became for him a ‘fetishism of numbers’ which he describes as ‘banal’. This is an extremely important observation for any conductor who is learning and preparing the work for performance. In an interview with Boulez during his seventy-fifth birthday celebrations, I asked him what had determined his path from the strict application of serialism in Structure I to the exotic world of Le Marteau. I quote his reply: ‘When I was a student I wrote canons and fugues. Now I am not a student I do not write canons and fugues!’

This explanation underlines a misconception in many history books, concerning the significance of serial techniques in the evolution of musical language in the twentieth century. It was a very brief investigation by young composers in a post-war period of renewal. An illustration of this can be seen in successive works of Stockhausen, in which a new concept is asserted in each piece.