Do you notice a mistake?
Born in Paris to a family that loved classical music, Pierre Henry spent his childhood in a village in the greater Paris region, at the edge of a forest whose sounds fascinated him. Alongside the early flowering of his musical gifts, these mental sound-pictures of nature inspired Henry to peruse and investigate the unexpected and the unknown.
A pianist and a percussionist, Henry studied at the Conservatoire national de musique de Paris from 1937 to 1947. Thanks to the percussive instruments he played (most unpitched), of all his peers, he was one of the rare ones able to spontaneously imagine musical gesture – not the gesture required by an abstract composition, but gesture as the manipulation of sound matter, broad, powerful and unruly – that purely academic composition alone could not bring to life. He also imagined the acoustic instruments he played at the time (piano and percussion) as generators of sound. In 1947, he began “preparing” pianos and building experimental instruments:
“Touching, tapping, striking, brushing… I ended up installing a whole complex of instrument-objects in my home. All of these devices allowed me to invent new sounds, to find fairly unusual effects. And so I decided to become a composer. With different sounds. To be an inventor of sound1”.
Shortly after Henry joined the Studio d’essai de la Radiodiffusion française (which would soon be renamed the Groupe de recherches de musique concrète, or GRMC), Pierre Schaeffer asked Henry to join him in an ongoing collaborative partnership. At that time, musique concrète (that is, music made using acoustic sounds captured by microphone) existed in opposition to the electronic music (that is, music made of sounds that had been produced by electronic devices) being made at the public radio studios of Cologne (the WDR) by Herbert Eimert, Gottfried-Michael Koenig, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1956, Pierre Henry opted to describe musique concrète as electroacoustic, instead – and, indeed, both he (with Haut voltage) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (with Gesang der Jünglinge) had already moved past this dialectical opposition between the two.
The 1950s were formative for Pierre Henry. Composed at the beginning of that decade, Symphonie pour un homme seul was doubly emblematic: it was collective, co-signed with Pierre Schaeffer, and, above all, it premiered during a concert performance of musique concrète in which the composer controlled in real time the projection of the piece in the performance space. This active participation in the “performance” of his pieces remains a core feature of Henry’s work. Starting with his “first opus,” Musique sans titre (1951), the composer decided to organize the new field of electroacoustic music by creating “sound dictionaries.” At the 1953 Donaueschinger Musiktage, Le voile d’Orphée unveiled three of the building blocks of his creative work: two relating to language (extended temporalities and hollowed-out spatial perspectives) and the third relating to his poetics (death and its rituals).
Three new building blocks followed: in 1955, he began collaborating with Maurice Béjart. For twenty years, they worked together to meld pieces intended for concert performance into choreographic music. In 1956, Haut voltage marked a turning point in the history of electroacoustic music, in which Henry combined musique concrète and electronic music, as well as vocal and instrumental music, in a single composition. And in 1958, Orphée ballet, one may observe the process by which Henry would organize a universal sound world from the plant and animal realms as well as that of human beings.
More practically, in 1958, Pierre Henry left the GRMC (of which he had been the artistic director since 1953) and founded APSOME, his own electroacoustic studio. With no commissions, he made his living in commercial work (providing technical assistance for studio recordings, music for advertisements, and sound creation for feature films). He also served as sound director on tour with Béjart and his Ballets du XXe siècle (at the time based at the Théâtre royal de La Monnaie, in Brussels). Henry’s compositions for these performances, which were meant for large audiences, led him to seek out humanistic expressiveness (one might almost say expressionism).
In this vein, Pierre Henry began making the experience of electroacoustic music into a major event. This took the form of stage events, as in his “reclining concert,” which was performed in 1967 at the Bordeaux Sigma festival (he directed sound from a centrally located boxing ring, while the audience lay around the ring on mats, and were invited to dance during the intermission). There were other types of events, as well: a contract with the record label Philips led to Jerks électroniques, which was a surprise commercial success among the pop hits of the time. At the same time, his major studio works were released in the celebrated collection Prospective du XXIe siècle.
By the early 1970s, Pierre Henry was the only composer of his time to see wide success both in the emblematic institutions of contemporary art music (the Festival de Royan, for example; or at the Semaines musicales internationales de Paris, where he gave his first long-form performance, Apocalypse de Jean, which lasted for more than twenty-four hours) and in popular music venues (such as L’Olympia in Paris). During the 1970s, he set compositional research aside in favour of multidisciplinary experimentation. This included Corticalart, instant electronic music made from the electromagnetic waves emitted by the brain; a cybernetic opera titled Kyldex that used “lumino-dynamic” sculptures by Nicolas Schöffer; a “spontaneous and danced concert” titled Enivrez-vous with Carolyn Carlson; and a musical, cinematographic, and light performance titled Futuristie that paid tribute to Luigi Russolo, one of the founders of Italian Futurism.
In 1982, Henry received his first public funding (from the French Ministry of Culture, which was supplemented in 1993 by the City of Paris) which helped him to found Son/Ré, his new personal studio. This allowed him to expand his creative reach in three directions: he continued creating long-form pieces; he returned to creative projects for the radio (various radio plays for the WDR, including Christal/Mémoire, in 1988, after Marcel Proust, and Schubertnotizen, in 1994; and for Radio France, including Pierres réfléchies in 1982, Hugosymphonie in 1985, and Les chants de Maldoror in 1993); and concerts performed in his home. In 1992, a commission from the Cité de la Musique for Le fil de la vie provided a kind of summing up of his more recent creations, between voyage d’introspection (“introspective voyage”) and décomposition de certaines de mes œuvres (“deconstruction of some of my works”).
From the 1950s onward, Pierre Henry’s approach of working with sounds and not with notes, which he shared with Stockhausen and Xenakis, made him more of a visual artist or a filmmaker than a normative composer – even an avant-garde one. He was a pioneer in the then completely open field of electroacoustic music. He was path-breaking on many levels – formal, technical, aesthetic, and expressive – and the path he traced was both highly personal and field-defining. His work crackled with the dynamic tension between his invention in the studio and the gesture of performing his work by broadcasting it in a given space (a task he rarely left to anyone else). He insisted, “I want people to have the impression that the speakers are musicians 2”. Because, to him, composition was a form of assembly, he refused to create sound installations. And, because he honoured the fragility and the non-reproducibility of the concert, he was a total performer, at once ensemble, soloist, orchestra, and conductor.
Pierre Henry was always a solitary figure, with no antecedents and no descendants. His only inheritance was that of the artist-creator-demiurge, in the image of 19th century precursors such as Baudelaire, Berlioz, and Flaubert – but above all Beethoven and Hugo. Similar to his contemporary Stockhausen, he was a great believer in the ceremony of the concert: “The ceremony of the concert, like that of creation, resembles a prayer, a mass3”. Seeing, as a musician, the concert as the horizon and the end that shaped all works to come, he cultivated its ritualistic side (hence the many sacred texts and masses he set to music) and its demiurgic force (hence his predilection for cosmogonies). Henry believed that musique concrète was both a theatre of sound, a “mise en scène4”, and “rediscovered opera5” in which voice – largely metaphorical or hidden – is omnipresent. Setting up loudspeakers (at maximum dispersion, concentrating them in a single façade) is assuredly a scenographic gesture that changes the identity of the work with every change of venue. Rendered mobile and unpredictable in its different territories, the work is more of a process, nourished by successive graftings, than a complete and circumscribed object from which the composer might become detached. Incompletion is at the heart of each of his works, and Henry was committed to carrying out each of the steps in their becoming.
During the first two decades of his creative activity, Pierre Henry invented a music that, while often perceived as incongruous, was intimately connected to surrealism (which, just after 1945, experienced a resurgence in popularity) and with the abstract/concrete dialectic that haunted the arts at that time. From the beginning, Henry distanced himself from pure abstraction: echoing the Nouveaux Réalistes painters (an artistic school founded in 1960), who maintained at least minimal links with figurative art, in his compositions Henry always produced sound that was connected to a concreate image. As his vast catalogue shows, he composed very little in the way of abstract work. Two of these pieces, Antiphonie and Vocalises, made use of serial techniques. Molding electroacoustic sound matter was not, for Henry, a break with the classical music he had learned during his Conservatory years, and indeed he composed masses, operas, symphonies, and variations.
It is clear that Pierre Henry heard nature with rare acuteness:
“My first shock was not Messiaen, it was nature; and Messiaen was organized nature. […] I always imagined the sounds of nature […]. But for me they were more of a source than a ceremony. They allowed me to hear new sounds inside of myself […]. There was a kind of amalgamation, of transmutation that occurred within me. You hear the sounds of nature once, but then after you hear them again inside yourself. You hear them again when you are alone, and that is when they are the most surprising6”.
This idea of transmutation signifies that Pierre Henry never honoured the primary meaning of the sounds he recorded in situ: he redirected and channelled them, as a painter in the studio would, evoking nature from memory. In this sense, he created a fictional version of nature, or rather the representation of “natural nature” – in this sense, his poetics resembled the Baroque view of nature. He took a similar approach with the sounds of acoustic instruments, which he recorded in order to transform them. And although Pierre Henry continued to critique the musical instruments of the classical tradition for their imprecise and delayed transients, his preferred instruments indicate certain auditory tropisms: flute, tuba, cello, and, above all, plucked string instruments (harpsichord, harp, etc.). As is true of all composers seeking to carve out a place for the (microcosmic) human in the macrocosm, he dreamt of a kind of universal organ. The very picture of melancholy…
In his early years, Pierre Henry built his musical language out of brief, monothematic sound units (bidules, or “thingies”) and multiple creations that he mixed and broadcast live for French public radio. To move through this lawless electroacoustic land, his first, primordial step was to classify and catalogue the sounds that would structure his work.
“Putting sounds in the right place looks simple. It’s actually inextricably not: my classification systems are like an opera written by Borges. Classification! My library of Babel! It’s always incomplete, always starting over, dynamic despite its irredeemable imperfection, classifying is the one motor behind my creation. For me, classifying is creating. I actually classify my classifications. Every three years, I rip up my catalogues and write new ones with new parameters and new postulates7”.
The fundamental divergence between Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry is clear: where, with his Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects), the elder Shaeffer thought as an engineer and a scientist, his disciple created, improvising with virtuosity (particularly when one considers the rudimentary technologies available to him at the time), inventing sounds and processes. Doubtless an echo of the belief in infinite progress that dominated at the time, the processes that Henry chose were essentially ones of proliferation across unlimited and mobile landscapes in an organic and constant gesture of expansion. From the perspective of the art of composing, Henry’s work helped to abolish multiple dialectics: between the musical and the material, between musical material (what makes “the work”) and the acoustic and social space in which that material is projected, between the intimate and the other, between the human and the cosmic.
In the mid-1970s and perhaps in resonance with emerging environmental concerns, Pierre Henry felt that he had conquered all available territory. With this in mind, he re-deployed his efforts in three different directions. He intensified his aesthetic approach and his quest for beautiful, or good, sound (“du beau son8”). He undertook several personal retrospectives, such as Parcours-Cosmogonie in 1976, which is nearly nineteen hours long: “all of my work prior to 1976 is chopped into pieces and reorganized thematically. The idea of classification becomes a real dramatic argument9”. Finally, since that time and in another parallel with Stockhausen (starting with Stimmung in 1968), Henry sought to conquer ever-longer durations and ever-vaster poetic and cosm(ogon)ic spaces.
A Pierre Henry cosmogony is less a rigorously constructed order (à la Stockhausen) as it is a vast space across which (as in a book by Mallarmé) work-rituals are scattered like constellations. For the most part, these emerge from a total alterity: works created by other artists. In this act, through which he measures himself against his alter egos, Henry is not so much stimulated by sounds as by text, both literary and visual: “My library is the source of my rituals10”. His work from this period draws nourishment from many places. Myths: Orpheus. Sacred texts: the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bible (the four Gospels and the Apocalypse). And various poets and prose writers: Artaud, Caillois, Flaubert (The Temptation of Saint Anthony), Hugo (God), La Fontaine, Lautréamont (Les chants de Maldoror), Michaux, Milton (Paradise Lost), Proust, Rimbaud (A Season in Hell), and Vian. His collaborations with living alter egos were numerous, as well. Choreographers: Maurice Béjart, of course, as well as Carolyn Carlson, Merce Cunningham, Maguy Marin, and Alwin Nikolais. Filmmakers: Marc Allégret, Luis Buñuel, Marcel Carné, Henri Decoin, Jean Grémillon, Alain Resnais, Jean Rouch, Ken Russell, Dziga Vertov, and François Weyergans. And visual artists: Arman, Jean Degottex, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Georges Mathieu, and Nicolas Schöffer.
For Pierre Henry, speculation is a matter of aesthetics and not of language, in which the initial, tactile experience as well as the lived one (physical, mental, social) of the musician remain primordial, absolute. To these aspects, a third and highly consequential one is added: since his tumultuous parting from his mentor Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry always chose to work in his own studios (similar to the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, in his studio on the Rue Jenner), in solitary isolation: far from the network of cultural institutions that are the public services of culture, separate from the major centers of electroacoustic music in France (INA-GRM and IRCAM). Because of this, the music world’s perception of Pierre Henry is warped and fragmentary. Based on a residual portion of his work, two successive generations of young people (around 1970, the first embraced his Jerks électroniques, making it a commercial success; and around 1990, the techno music movement recognized him as one of the fathers of sampling and is still inspired by the iterative aphorisms, danceable rhythms, and astringent colors that were his hallmarks) adopted Henry as a kind of founding father. By contrast, when one traces the history of music after 1945, the academic world struggles for even a mention, let alone a reasoned defense, of the work of Pierre Henry within its own theoretical discourse. Given that Henry’s music could only be heard when the composer organized a broadcast of it, opportunities to discover it were rare, making the composer seem, falsely, to be a harbinger, who, far from the madding crowd, dispensed wisdom from his grotto home.
Between a historical overview of the musical avant-garde since 1945 and the global culture industry market, the singular poetry of Pierre Henry hovers, fleetingly. His name in the stormy “silent generation” remains unspoken.
Do you notice a mistake?