A00760 - Pierre Henry, Composer Who Found Music in Sounds
Pierre Henry, Composer Who Found the Music in Sounds, Dies at 89
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The composer Pierre Henry at work in a studio in 1950. He used tape recorders and other equipment to alter sounds.CreditJean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet/Getty Images
Pierre Henry, a composer whose experiments with electronically manipulated sound helped create the style known as musique concrète and anticipated the innovations of techno, died on Thursday in Paris. He was 89.
Early in his musical career, Mr. Henry abandoned notes in favor of ambient sounds — dripping water, car horns, bird calls, locomotive engines — which he manipulated with a tape recorder in surprising ways. The sounds of the human body provided the sonic material for one of his earliest compositions, “Symphony for a Solitary Man” (1950), written in collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer, considered the founder of musique concrète.
For his cantata “The Veil of Orpheus” (1953), Mr. Henry altered a human voice to produce inhuman registers, an effect that the critic Harold Schonberg, writing in The New York Times, called “not only valid but actually exciting.”
Mr. Henry was long associated with the avant-garde choreographer Maurice Béjart, with whom he collaborated on more than a dozen ballets, including “Arcane” (1955), “High Voltage” (1956), “The Voyage” (1962) and “Nijinsky, Clown of God” (1971).
Mr. Henry began incorporating electronics into his work in the late 1950s. He absorbed rock influences as well, most notably in his “Mass for Today,” written with Michel Colombier for a ballet by Mr. Béjart. A whiff of “Louie, Louie” and the Rolling Stones song “Get Off of My Cloud” could be detected in “Psyché Rock,” the music for one of the dances, which Christopher Tyng reworked into the theme song for the animated television comedy series “Futurama.”
Mr. Henry later worked with the British progressive rock group Spooky Tooth on the 1969 album “Ceremony,” which takes the form of a rock ’n’ roll church service, and with the Violent Femmes on his 1997 album “Intérieur/Extérieur” and on their album “Freak Magnet” (2000).
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Mr. Henry in Paris in 2002.CreditRaphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images
Pierre Georges Henry was born on Dec. 9, 1927, in Paris. A sickly child, he grew up in the countryside of Seine-et-Marne, where his father, a doctor and homeopath, and his mother, a pharmacist, had him educated at home.
Before his 10th birthday he entered the Paris Conservatory, where, before and after World War II, he studied piano and percussion with Félix Passeronne and composition with Nadia Boulanger. He took harmony classes taught by Olivier Messiaen, at which Pierre Boulez was a fellow student.
In 1949 Mr. Schaeffer hired Mr. Henry as a percussionist for the studios of French Radio and Television and invited him to join the Club d’Essai (Experimental Club), which Mr. Schaeffer had founded six years earlier.
Over the next decade, Mr. Henry wrote “The Well-Tempered Microphone,”“Variations for a Door and a Sigh” and “The Ambiguities Concerto” for piano,” which combined natural and altered piano sounds. He also wrote the soundtrack for Jean Grémillon’s short film “Astrology, or the Mirror of Life” (1952), the first time musique concrète was used in the cinema.
In 1958 Mr. Henry broke with French Radio and Television and, with the sound engineer Jean Baronnet, created the first private electronic studio in France. He began using electronic music in “Coexistence” (1958) and “Investigations” (1959), and in the 1960s embarked on a series of meditative compositions, including “Liverpool Mass” (1968), commissioned for the consecration of the Cathedral of Christ the King, and “The Apocalypse of John” (1968).
In the large-scale work “Futuristie,” written with the Canadian composer Bernard Bonnier, Mr. Henry paid homage to the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, the author of the manifesto “The Art of Noises.” “Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony,” from 1979, knitted together isolated chords, arpeggios and rhythmic components from Beethoven’s nine symphonies into a single grand tribute.
To coincide with the release of Mr. Henry’s “Intérieur/Extérieur,” the Philips label invited the duo Coldcut, William Orbit,Fatboy Slim and other artists to do remixes of “Mass for Today.” The results were released on the album “Metamorphosis.”
In 2007, Mr. Henry donated his archive to France’s National Library. There was no information available on his survivors.
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Whirs, Beeps and Mating Calls: The Music of Pierre Henry
The French composer Pierre Henry, who died on Thursday, was a pioneer of musique concrète, which records existing sounds and turns them into musical collages. His mechanical techniques were an analog precursor to the digital sampling that is widely used in music today.
“All of it must have been due to my fondness for noises,” he told the magazine Hyperreal. “I had started my career as a percussionist quite early, beating on anything around me: furniture, the tables, the drums. I arrived at the moment of creating a noise, and went on to create something entirely new, an unheard sound that was much more complex and extraordinary.”
Pierre Henry at a Paris studio in 2007.CreditStephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Henry’s “Psyché Rock” coupled rock with electronic tones, whirs, beeps and distortion to create a psychedelic sound. “Psyché Rock,” which has been remixed by Fatboy Slim and William Orbit, inspired the theme song for the animated television series “Futurama.”
Mr. Henry scored several ballets and films, including documentaries. His jangling, often discordant soundtrack is a striking accompaniment to the alien mating rituals of two amorous cephalopods in this clip from the filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s short 1967 documentary “The Love Life of an Octopus” (“Les Amours de la Pieuvre” in French).
In 1950, Mr. Henry worked with musique concrète’s originator, Pierre Schaeffer, to create “Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul” (“Symphony for a Solitary Man”), a composition that used sounds to portray a man and his daily activities. It was the basis of a ballet by Maurice Béjart about a character who is a slave to his environment, his desires and his limitations.
In 1963, Mr. Henry composed “Variations for a Door and a Sigh,” an entire album that used the sounds of a creaking door, a human breath and a musical saw.
Mr. Henry collaborated with rock groups like Spooky Tooth, in the 1960s, and the Violent Femmes in the late 1990s. His electronic and ambient sounds added an unsettling element to more traditional instrumentation on Spooky Tooth’s religion-themed 1969 album, “Ceremony.” Many years later his work was remixed by a new generation of electronic musicians.
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