Pierre Boulez at 100: Pt. 2: Sound, Word, Image

Yesterday, March 26 2025, began the centennial celebration of serialist defender, Pierre Boulez. He was an ambassador of the avantgarde, a celebrator of poetry, and an instigator who helped establish one of the great sonic laboratories of sound innovation, IRCAM. 

The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music. This part takes his poetic imagaination.

As Boulez got his bearings as a young composer, the connections between music and poetry came to capture his attention, as it had Schoenberg. Poetry became integral to Boulez’s orientation towards music, and his teacher Messiaen would say that the work of his student was best understood as that of a poet.

Sprechgesang, or speech song, a kind of vocal technique half between speaking and singing, was first used in formal music by Engelbert Humperdink in his 1897 melodrama Königskinder. In some ways sprechgesang is a German synonym for the already established practice of the recitative in operas as found in Wagner’s compositions. Arnold Schoenberg used the related term Sprechstimme as a technique in his song cycle Pierrot lunaire (1912) where he employed a special notation to indicate the parts that should be sung-spoke. Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg used the technique in his opera Wozzeck (1924). Schoenberg employed it again in his Moses and Aron opera (1932).

In Boulez’s explorations of the relationship between poetry and music he questioned "whether it is actually possible to speak according to a notation devised for singing. This was the real problem at the root of all the controversies. Schoenberg's own remarks on the subject are not in fact clear."

Pierre Boulez wrote three settings of René Char's poetry, Le Soleil des eaux, Le Visage nuptial, and Le Marteau sans maître. Char had been involved with Surrealist movement, was active in the French Resistance, and mixed freely with other Parisian artists and intellectuals. Le Visage Nuptial (The Nuptial Face) from 1946 was an early attempt at reuniting poetry and music across the gap they had taken so long ago. He took five of Chars erotic texts and wrote the piece for two voices, two ondes Martenot, piano and percussion. In the score there are instructions for “Modifications de l’intonation vocale.”
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His next attempt in this vein was Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master, 1953-57) and it remains one of Boulez’s most regarded works, a personal artistic breakthrough. He brought his studies of Asian and African music to bear on the serialist vortex that had sucked him in, and he spat out one of the stars of his own universe. The work is made up of four interwoven cycles with vocals, each based on a setting of three poems by Char taken from his collection of the same name, and five of purely instrumental music. The wordless sections act as commentaries to the parts employing Sprechstimme. First written in 1953 and 1954, Boulez revised the order of the movements in 1955, while infusing it newly composed parts. This version was premiered that year at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Baden-Baden. Boulez had a hard time letting his compositions, once finished, just be, and tinkered with it some more, creating another version in 1957.

Le Marteau sans maître is often compared with Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. By using Sprechstimme as one of the components of the piece, Boulez is able to emulate his idol Schoenberg, while contrasting his own music from that of the originator of the twelve tone system. As with much music of the era written by his friends Cage and Stockhausen, the work is challenging to the players, and here most of the challenges are directed at the vocalist. Humming, glissandi and jumps over wide ranges of notes are common in this piece.

​The work takes Char’s idea of a “verbal archipelago” where the images conjured by the words are like islands that float in an ocean of relation, but with spaces between them. The islands share similarities and are connected to one another, but each is also distinct and of itself. Boulez took this concept and created his work where the poetic sections act as islands within the musical ocean.

​A few years later, he worked with material written by the symbolist and hermetic poet Stéphane Mallarme, when he wrote Pli selon pli in (1962). Mallarme’s work A Throw of the Dice is of particular influence. In that poem the words are placed in various configurations across the page, with changes of size, and instances of italics or all capital letters. Boulez took these and made them correspond to changes to the pitch and volume of the poetic text. The title comes from a different work by Mallarme, and is translated as “fold according to fold.” In his poem Remémoration d'amis belges, he describes how a mist gradually covers the city of Bruges until it disappears.

Subtitled A Portrait of Mallarme Boulez uses five of his poems in chronological order, starting with "Don du poème" from 1865 for the first movement finishing with "Tombeau" from 1897 for the last. Some consider the last word of the piece, mort, death, to be the only intelligible word in the work. The voice is used more for its timbral qualities, and to weave in as part of the course of the music, than as something to be focused on alone.
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Later still Boulez took e.e. cummings poems and used them as inspiration for his work Cummings Ist der Dichter in 1970. Boulez worked hard to relate poetry and music together in his work. It is no surprise, then, that the institute he founded would go far in giving machines the ability to sing, and foster the work of other artists who were interested in the relationships between speech and song.

.:. .:. .:. ​This was in part, an excerpt from my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere. 

The celebration of the Pierre Boulez centennial will continue tomorrow in an exploration of the founding of IRCAM.

Pierre Boulez: Part I: Musical Formations