Contingency and order: Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetics in Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître
Stéphane Mallarmé’s ideas and formal innovations had a profound influence on Pierre Boulez’s music of the 1950s. The attention to the text’s visual appearance on the page, the understatement loaded with meaning, the fluidity of the form, and the juxtaposition of contingency and order which Pierre Boulez found in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Le Livre (The Book) not only moulded his Le marteau sans maître but also determined his evolution as a composer.