Le Marteau sans maître ... René Char (2025) - Score Only by Thomas Oboe Lee Small Ensemble - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1699637

You cannot escape as a graduate student in composition from Pierre Boulez's "Le Marteau sans maître." It surely was a ground breaking chamber work in the mid-fifties for contralto, alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone and various percussion instruments.

The scholarly and critical reactions to Le Marteau were all over the map. Igor Stravinsky praised the work as an exemplar of "a new and wonderfully supple kind of music." Richard Taruskin found "Le Marteau exemplified the lack of concern on the part of the modernist composers for the comprehensibility of their music." Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote that the work featured "nothing so vulgar as a melody or a steady beat." Howard Goodall, a British composer of musical theater and film music, said "While Boulez's iconoclasm was attractive to some composers of twentieth-century classical music, most neutral listeners then as now found both his polemic and his music thoroughly impenetrable.”

My version has nothing to do with Boulez. As a matter of fact, Boulez cheated and took a short cut. He used only three lines from René Char's poem "Le Marteau sans maître."

1. L'Artisanat furieux
2. Bourreaux de solitude
3. Bel Édifice et les pressentiments

I on the other hand have set all 18 poems of "Arsenal" from "Le Marteau sans maître." I then divided the 18 poems into six parts, or movements.

Première partie
I. La Torche du prodigue
II. Vérité continue
III. Possible

Deuxième partie
IV. Tréma de l’émondeur
V. Robustes météores
VI. Transfuges

Troisième partie
VII. Masque de fer
VIII. Un levain barbare
IX. À l’horizon remarquable

Quatrième partie
X. Singulier
XI. Leçon sévère
XII. Bel édifice et les pressentiments

Cinquième partie
XIII. La rose violente
XIV. Voici
XV. L’amour

Sixième partie
XVI. Sosie
XVII. Dentelée
XVIII. Les poumons.