... Au delà du hasard (Beyond Chance) is a composition for three women's voices (SSA) and four instrumental groups, by the French composer Jean Barraqué, written in 1958–59. It is the second part of a projected but unfinished cycle of works based on Hermann Broch's 1945 novel The Death of Virgil, and uses texts written by the composer based on a quotation from Broch's novel, in the French translation by Albert Kohn. A performance lasts about forty minutes.
After completing the first draft of Le Temps restitué in December, 1957, Barraqué temporarily set aside his Mort de Virgile project in order to collaborate with Jean Thibaudeau and on two dramatic projects (Invitation au voyage and Echelle visuelle). The projects foundered, and Barraqué used some of the music he had composed for them in ... Au delà du hasard. The manuscript score was completed on 22 December 1959, and the composer later added a dedication to André Hodeir, on 12 June 1961. The work was first performed on 26 January 1960 on a concert of the Domaine Musical at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris. The performers were Yvonne Loriod (piano), Ethel Semser, Marie-Thérèse Cahn, and Simone Codinas (vocalists), Hubert Rostaing (clarinet), the Jazz Groupe de Paris (musical director André Hodeir) and the Ensemble du Domaine Musical, all conducted by Pierre Boulez. The score was published in 1967 by Aldo Bruzzichelli in Florence.
The composer described ... Au delà du hasard as
The work is in thirteen movements, performed without a break:
The score is prefaced by a quotation from Albert Kohn's translation of Broch:
This text deviates significantly in structure from Broch's German original, which is a quatrain in alternating hexameters and pentameters. The main text of the composition, written by Barraqué as a commentary on another citation from Broch, is in a style that recalls in places the techniques of French surrealism. The Broch quotation, arriving only in the tenth movement and after a noisy announcement by cymbals and gongs, is sung at first very quietly by the three singers, as if disclosing a secret: "Blinded by dream and made by dream to see, I know your death, I know the limit fixed for you, dream's limit, which you deny. Do you know it yourself? Do you want it so?".
Seamlessly weaving together excerpts from the Polieri-Thibaudeau scores with new material, Barraqué used his technique of proliferating series to obtain new tone rows from the one originally used for the theatre music:
C–F–A–F–B–E–E–G–A–B–D–C.
In this case, the method involved comparing the inversion of the row:
C–A–G–C–E–D–B–E–B–F–F–A
Observing that this is equivalent to permuting the original row in the order 1–3–8–12–6–11–10–7–5–4–2–9, applying the same permutation to the inverted row produced
C–G–E–A–D–F–F–B–E–C–G–B,
a row that includes three conventional triads: C minor (notes 1–3), D major (notes 4–6), and C minor (notes 9–11). These chords, not chosen deliberately by the composer but engendered "automatically" by the method, gave Barraqué "serial permission to re-encounter elements of the tonal past, as figures in a dream".