Sound of the Future?

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Uncountable Hours. In dealing with music's four basic elements, Boulez has all but jettisoned conventional melody, turned harmony virtually inside out, distilled rhythm to a subtle juxtaposition of sound and enhanced silence, invoked Balinese gamelans and other Oriental sources for new wrinkles in tone color. Le Marteau begins with a flurry of seemingly unconnected tones from viola, alto flute and vibraphone, leading into a pointillistic passage that introduces guitar and xylo-rimba in now-and-then sirums and clacks. In another section, the flute meanders insouciantly over an animated background of xylorimba and bongo drums. One movement is a lullabylike colloquy between singer and flutter-tongued flute, reminiscent of Schoenberg's 1912 bombshell Pierrot lunaire. Never earsplitting, Boulez' music seldom rises even to a forte. His rhythm is less a matter of meter than of pulse; the music surges forward in rhythmic eagerness, draws up in silence to catch its breath, surges on, halts, proceeds.

To achieve Columbia's shimmering recording of the nine-movement. 29-minute cantata, Avant-Garde Specialist Robert Craft conducted Contralto Margery Mac-Kay and six Hollywood virtuoso instrumentalists in "uncountable" hours of rehearsal, 15 hours of actual recording. Busiest man in the group: the percussionist, whose "kitchen" includes small cymbals, regular cymbals, maracas, tambourines, claves, bells, tam-tam, triangle, gong. Not for lazy ears, the piece demands great concentration from listeners, but rewards with a fascinating foretaste of what may very well become the music of the future.