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Without colour: flat, neutral tone.
Printed above the staff or over the voice, usually at a soft dynamic, for a passage that should sound blanched. It lasts until a new character word restores expressive colour.
It asks for a deliberately colourless, neutral tone: little or no vibrato and no expressive inflection, as if the feeling has drained away — what singers call voix blanche. Boulanger asks for it where a song returns to its opening tempo. Use it as a contrast; a whole piece sans couleur loses its point.
Boulanger, Clairières dans le ciel, “Parfois, je suis triste”, voice, m. 38: “sans couleur”, at p, with “Tempo I.” in the same bar.
Sans couleur is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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