All the plinking and plunking in this substantial work may at first hearing get on your nerves and strike you as self-indulgent. But Le Marteau sans maitre is critical to the modern repertoire, in some respects the starting point for several of the most interesting compositional ideas of this half-century. Listen to a recorded performance before hearing it live, just to get the lay of the land; then, in the concert, try to recall to amazing scope of the whole as its constituent parts go by, each of them foreshadowing, or reflecting, or somehow commenting on what goes before and after.

Le Marteau sans maitre is not a true orchestral work, but rather a chamber composition for singer and six instruments. I include it here because of it’s importance to recent music history, and because orchestral percussion players have a field day with the piece. Watch for it on one of the chamber programs of your local symphony orchestra.

For the texts of Le Marteau sans maitre, Boulez selected three short poems from the collection of that title by Rene Char, a surrealist provencal poet admired for his terse, aphoristic verses and vivid imagery. The poems are declaimed by the singer in movements 3, 5, and 6. “Furious Artisans” deals in images of a forced-labor camp: a caravan, a corpse, the workhorses, a knife, dreams. “Beautiful Building and Premonitions”: the hollow sound of waves, a pier, child, man, tearful eyes searching for a skull to dwell in. “Hangmen of Solitude”: footsteps receding, sundial, a pendulum, a tombstone. You’re supposed to know the text before hearing the work: the composition consists of dreamy reflections on dreamy poems, and one perceives the meaning as through a glass, darkly. The poems are nothing more (nor less) than the source of the work, writes Boulez, both “at the center, and absent.”

“L’Artisanat furieux” (no. 3) comes with a prelude (no. 1) and a postlude (no. 7). The song is a brief, rather quiet duet of singer and flute; the prelude a brisk, vivacious quartet; the postlude a trio of the same general structure but terser still. The percussion player is silent in all three of these movements. The two setting of “Bel edifice et pressentiments “(nos. 5 and 9) share such figurations as the wide leaps with grace notes and long trills and flutter tonguing, not to mention certain chordal similarities. In the double much of the singing is wordless and the accompaniment quite percussive. But it is “Bourreaux de solitude” and its three commentaries (nos. 2, 4, 6, and 8) that lie at the heart of the work. Number 6 –the deepest, most intense, and longest movement –is slow and dark with constant reminders, in the drums, of the footsteps and the ticking of the clock.

Other principles of order dictate the arrangement of the movements, allowing the work to cycle and interpenetrate itself with cross-references of all sorts. But for the relatively inexperienced listener, the first interest of Le Marteau sans maitre will be in the composer’s choice and deployment of performing force. In conscious imitation of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, no two of the instrumental movements is for the same combination of players. The tone qualities of the instruments and voice are radically different, yet all but the percussion battery are prevailingly in the alto range. The warm sultriness of the viola and flute (and sometimes the singer), contrast strikingly with the sharper modes of attack of the others. Note, especially, the hypnotic percussion patterns, which come and go in waves, the Indonesian effect of the gongs, bells, and tam-tams. Enjoy this austere yet strangely luxuriant world, with its abrupt changes of direction, wispy melodies, spasmodic and sometimes vicious rhythms. The sheer sound of it is quite unlike any other piece.