Elements of a biography

• The RTF’s (French radio and television broadcasting) Studio d'Essai
• Béjart and the theatre in motion
• The Apsome Studio
• Encounters
• Film
• Psychérocksessions
• ‘The House of Sounds, Pierre Henry in his home’
• Concerts and events

• Grandiose and delirious Dixième Remix
• Bach, the ‘space opera’ version with L’Art de la fugue odyssée
• Paroxysmes or the ‘phantom Africa’ of Roussel, Michaux and Leiris
• Le Fil de la vie, ‘Book of the beginning and of the end’
• Messe pour le temps présent, Grand Remix
• Electro pop orchestra
• Fondu au noir on La Note seule, ‘one night, one life’
• Demiurge of a joyful apocalypse

At the RTF's Studio d'essai, which he joined in 1949, he became the head of the GRMC ‘Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète’ (musique concrète research group) two years later. The use of the locked groove - the fragment of a scratched 78 rpm, repeated in a loop and detached from its context - became a new source of sound and intensified his interest in editing and mixing.

With the addition of reverberation effects, the sound object gradually takes shape and lays the foundations of musique concrète. In the 1950s, the founding work Symphonie pour un homme seul, co-written with Schaeffer, the Concerto des Ambiguïtés, Musique sans titre, Orphée 53 and Haut-Voltage were created. Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, he is watching the matter from above, exploring his instrument, the piano, preparing new sounds that he filters through machines with fabulous names such as the phonogène - which allows him to change the speed of a magnetic tape.

Elsewhere, in the middle of a space broadcasting demonstration, he is surrounded by futuristic rings suspended from the ceiling or metal circles on the floor (microphones and speakers ?). Beyond the scientific phenomenon, there is magic and trickery and even, joys of joys, some deliberate deception in this artisanal gesture.

Its fairytale procession fools us and draws us into an art of craftsmanship rivalled only by the visual montages of Max Ernst - who was also skilled in the art of collage, transformation and the most unexpected combinations!

Like the hand that is often present in Ernst's work, the expert hand of the drummer turned composer manipulates and experiments. ‘Félix Passeronne, my professor at the Conservatoire, taught me touch, the gesture that gives a quiver or a thunder. All these gestures come back in my sound recordings.’

In 1954, he met Maurice Béjart. Thanks to Béjart, he frees himself from musical writing and does not confine himself to a concrete sound: ‘From my relationship with Béjart, I gained a kind of instinct for the stage, even to the point of designing the lighting down to the smallest detail. In fact, from the 1970s onwards, Béjart’s sense of theatre has been present in all my concerts.'

The theatre, which until then had been somewhat limited in his music, developed into its own unique craft. The polyphony of the dancers' bodies is matched by the polyphony of the music; it is a theatre in motion, a ritual that reveals its own form and determines an action. The pair put on an impressive number of performances - more than fifteen, from Batterie fugace in 1950 to Tokyo 2002 in 2006. In between: Symphonie pour un homme seul (1955), Haut-Voltage (1956), Orphée Ballet (1958), Variations pour une porte et un soupir (1963) (which entered the repertoire of the Paris Opera in 2006), La Reine verte (1963) and, of course, the breathtaking Messe pour le temps présent, created in Avignon in 1967.

In 1971, Mouvement-Rythme-Étude, which brought together all the dance protocols, became Béjart's ballet Nijinski Clown de Dieu. The Pierre Henry-Maurice Béjart collaboration was a guarantee of quality and even success, which did not fail to arouse criticism. Doubts settled in the sceptical minds: ‘How can an artist dare to earn money?'.

Pierre Henry had no use for these accusations: for him, this was the price of his freedom of thought. To add insult to injury, his Electronic Jerks de la Messe, released as a single in 1968, made the charts. The narrow-minded world of contemporary music would never forgive him...

Excluded from the RTF following major disagreements in 1958, and thus deprived of his library of sounds, he had to start from scratch with the little equipment he had, which he installed at his parents' home: Pierre Henry, a pioneer of the home studio.

While visiting Barclay's and Decca's record labels, he notes the technical superiority of their recording equipment over that of the French radio. At the age of 31 together with his friend Jean Baronnet he founded his own studio, Apsome, on rue Cardinet in Paris - the first self-financed private electroacoustic music studio in Europe.

There he made countless ‘lucrative works’ – even in 1958 making music for a girdle called Scandale! – in order to equip his studio, all while also working on major projects such as Le Voyage (1962) and Variations pour une porte et un soupir (1963).

A radical innovator: after having created several ‘hits’ that marked his time - Symphonie pour un homme seul and Messe pour le temps présent - he did not stop there. He extended his activity through new, always fruitful collaborations with visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers and documentary filmmakers, when not solicited by advertising of course.

Through a chance encounter, the poet Henri Michaux introduced him to a record of Japanese music. He immediately had locked grooves made from it; these sound loops that he sampled and used regularly in his sound frescoes, from Musique sans titre (1950) to Voyage initiatique (2005). While in contact with filmmakers, he created new scores, when they are not directly taken from his catalogue: Jean-Claude Sée’s Aube (1950), Jean Grémillon’s Astrologie (1953), Henri Decoin’s Maléfices (1962) - his first 45 rpm - Marcel Carné's Les Assassins de l'ordre (1971) and Ken Russell's Au-delà du réel (Altered States) (1980).

There were extraordinary correspondences between Pierre Henry and visual artists, particularly those of the New Realism movement, such as the Symphonie Monoton n°2 (or Monochromie) given as a wedding present to Rotraut and Yves Klein in 1962: a tribute to the inventor of the monochrome as a painting method, a single sound stretched over an hour and eighteen minutes. Elsewhere, the abundance of colours finds an echo in the paintings of Georges Mathieu. His art of repetition intermingles with the works of Arman, to whom the Variations pour une porte et un soupir are dedicated. Pierre Henry befriended Raymond Hains and François Dufrêne: the performance art of the Nouveaux Réalistes was in line with his sonic rituals.

He even collaborates with Dufrêne, whose Lettrist background and taste for puns encouraged his creativity. The poet's characteristic voice and the play of his 'cry-rhythms' run through the fantastic universe of several pieces of work in the 1960s: Souffles I and II of Le Voyage, La Noire à soixante (1961), Granulométrie (1967), Fragments pour Artaud (1970) and many more.

As far as documentary filmmakers are concerned, Pierre Henry is in tune with Painlevé's world. In Les Amours de la pieuvre (1965) his music creates a commentary, a dramaturgy, and renders obsolete the pompous orchestral scores that until then had interfered with documentaries. An untiring experimenter he improvises sounds from his own brain waves using the ‘corticalart', an electronic system invented by Roger Lafosse in 1971.

The silent cinema of the 1920s also stimulated his imagination: one only has to listen again to the sounds created for Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, symphonie d'une grande ville (1927) or for Dziga Vertov's L'homme à la caméra (1928). In this feast of tamed noises synchronised with the image on the big screen, the composer is in osmosis with the natural musicality of the cinematographic technique, between overprinting, superimposition, acceleration and slow motion.

He most definitely reinvented a historically dated avant-garde but his sonic gesture still captures, seventy years later, the original enthusiasm, invention and formidable taste for experimentation of the emerging cinematography.

From the mid-1960s onwards, Pierre Henry's reputation spread across borders. In 2001 Mojo (a famous British rock magazine) stated that the history of 20th century music would have been turned upside down if the Beatles had collaborated with Pierre Henry as Paul McCartney may have intended in 1966. Like other rock musicians, he had been impressed by the recording of Variations pour une porte et un soupir, published in the collection ‘Prospective 21e siècle’. The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was recorded using techniques similar to those of musique concrète (editing, mixing, timbre effects, re-recording, locked groove...)

Apart from the Beatles, one would be surprised by the number of pop artists or groups who were deeply influenced by Pierre Henry's music: from Soft Machine to Gong and Frank Zappa to Jimi Hendrix.

Similarly, the psychedelic band Pink Floyd could not have ignored La Reine verte (1963) when they recorded Ummagumma in 1969 and two years later 'Echoes' on the album Meddle. And, from pop to techno, it took a ten-year leap for the younger generation to rediscover him and crown him the pope of electro music.

At first a little embarrassed and even annoyed to see that the electronic jerks of his Messe (co-written with Michel Colombier) continued to live on without him: first pirated, lifted and then savagely transformed by DJs, he finally observed this phenomenon with philosophy.

Psyché Rock is once again touring the world, revisited by Fatboy Slim, William Orbit, Coldcut and others - who pay tribute to him with the album Métamorphose (1997) and followed by Psychérocksessions (2000) now reissued. Thirty years after the Messe, the circle is complete: Pierre Henry lends himself to the game and ‘puts a layer’ over his own remixes and those of William Orbit, for a new Fantaisie Messe pour le temps présent (1967/1997).

No more than he is the musician of an era, Pierre Henry is not a composer of ‘contemporary music’, at least not in the somewhat restrictive sense of the term. Otherwise, what other composer would have had the idea of inviting listeners to discover his works in his home, as friends? Designed like a huge Tower of Babel where thousands of sounds are archived, his home address in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, also his Son/Ré studio, created in 1982, first supported by the Ministry of Culture and the City of Paris, then by the Sacem (Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music).

It is here in this House of sounds, first on the initiative of the Festival d'Automne and then under the patronage of the Spectacles vivants du Centre Pompidou that the most faithful listeners, no more than sixty at a time, regularly gather in the evenings. From the basement to the second floor, from the kitchen to the bedroom via the bookshelves, the listener enters the heart of Pierre Henry's sound. All the more so as the concrete paintings of the musician on the walls remind us that his mind wanders as much through the history of instruments and machines as through his music, modulated from his console and spatialised throughout the house thanks to the installation of almost eighty speakers.

In 1996, the doors opened for six weeks for the premiere of Intérieur/Extérieur, followed by Dracula in 2002 and Voyage initiatique three years later. The Festival Paris quartier d'été took over in 1998, then again in 2008, in 2009 with Dieu (where he reunited with the actor Jean-Paul Farré who wanders from one room to another) and finally in 2010.

At his side those close to him work in the shadows; they are the ones who, in some cases for almost forty years, ensure that the evening runs smoothly and assist him in his travels for the organisation, technical aspects and broadcasting: Isabelle Warnier, Bernadette Mangin and Étienne Bultingaire.

A master of ‘happening' (in French meaning: with audience interaction), Pierre Henry recreates the methods of listening ‘at home’ as he did forty years earlier in 1967 during a ‘concert couché' at the Sigma in Bordeaux, or on the occasion of a twenty-six hour marathon concert given the following year in Paris at the invitation of Maurice Fleuret.

Should the Olympia Hall be reserved for popular music? No indeed! In the company of the rock group Spooky Tooth and Thierry Vincens’ psychedelic 'cinéformes', he took part in a full-scale show with Ceremony (1969). Three years later, as a loyal maestro of ‘animated sounds’ on the Cirque d'Hiver ring in Paris, he premiered an electronic version of the Deuxième Symphonie (1972) and the following year took over the stage of the Hamburg Opera for the ‘spatio-lumino-dynamic and cybernetic’ show Kyldex, co-created with the artist Nicolas Schöffer and the choreographer Alwin Nikolaïs (1973).

Large-scale projects are multiplying, such as Futuristie; a tribute to the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, composed for the inauguration of the new hall of the Théâtre national de Chaillot in Paris in 1975. Les Noces chymiques, a ‘fairy tale ritual’ based on the seventeenth-century alchemical story by Jehan Valentin Andreae (1980), for the Salle Favart, in Paris.

In 1982, he adapted John Milton's Paradise Lost with the writer François Weyergans and performed it in the gardens of the Musée de la Chaussure in Romans-sur-Isère. A vinyl record followed, in a version co-written with Gilbert Artman and the group Urban Sax: Paradise Lost (Philips) - another ‘collection piece’!

Walking through vast open spaces, he placed a myriad of speakers. In 2000, for the 20th International Piano Festival of La Roque d'Anthéron, the old quarries of Rognes were used for a Concerto sans orchestre with the soloist Nicholas Angelich. Liszt is on the agenda, his rarefied, stripped-down and melancholic piano of the last period mirrored in the depth and aquatic vertigo of an electro lament.

In July 2007 came Utopia a new creation for an exceptional place, the Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans, built at the end of the 18th century by the visionary Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.

Pierre Henry had never been so close to the architecture of a place, with its resonances of stone, wood or metal that clash and merge. Light is the third character in this abstract architecture that hints at Piranesi, it glides along the stones, glances at a surface, and swirls between the joists. The ground rises up and exhales its deep resonance.

Nature is a theme, again and again, with Histoire naturelle ou les roues de la terre, a likely response to Apocalypse being performed in a wide variety of spaces, from its creation at the Maison de la Radio in 1997 to the grandiose glass and concrete site of the esplanade at La Défense in August 2007, without forgetting the planetarium of the Cité des Sciences in Paris and the Festival d'Avignon. Captured on record this ecological Histoire naturelle reflected the composer's interest in ‘earthly sounds and voices from around the world'.

The composer can also be the instigator of gigantic events inspired by techno raves, such as the Tam-Tam du merveilleux on the piazza of the Centre Pompidou in 2000. Nearly 4,000 people, young and old, came to defy the torrential rain. A cap on his head, Pierre Henry leads a merciless fight against the elements, like a captain at the heart of a storm. With a smile on his face, he stands his ground. The plastic sheets covering the speakers are lifted and from the heart of the piazza he mixes live a new symphony of rhythms; the storm is defeated, the sun appears...

Following Tam-Tam, Pulsations revives his characteristic rhythms. Pierre Henry blurs his sources over and over, while he enjoys mimicking himself like the mischievous illusionist he is... Is this meowing the vocals of a famous Aztec singer? Is that cataract a raging river or a trickle from a tap? Is that squeaking sound coming from the bowels of the earth or is it the door of an old dresser? And those cries... children playing near the house?

After all didn't he at their age observe animals with a magnifying glass and capture their calls with rudimentary contact microphones? And isn't this new version, even more sputtering, psychedelic and sexed-up, reminiscent of Giorgio Moroder's rubbery robotic disco?

Logically, this adventurer of sound, a precursor of the remix, could only set about... reinterpreting his own works! After Messe pour le temps présent he took up his 1979 Dixième Symphonie de Beethoven, premiered in the Beethovenhalle studio in Bonn and gave it a new version in Paris, Salle Pleyel, nine years later. The work shocked the traditional classical music audience, which was resistant to this: Beethoven to the power of 10…

A decade later he reworked his score again, enriching it with current rhythms: ‘A faster pace, with beats, electronic trances, out-of-phase flickers, filter movements, frequency additions, reverb doubling’. This time, the success of this Dixième Remix is spectacular and the result is as grandiose and delirious as the model. Pierre Henry had already used the music of his ‘classical’ colleagues: Schubertnotizen, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the birth of the Viennese composer, and enjoyed a ‘schubertiade' between Ravel, Debussy and Saint-Saëns, in the form of Phrases de quatuor (1994).

Since then, he has been amicably borrowing from some glorious ancestors: Liszt with Concerto sans orchestre (2000), Debussy with Par les grèves (2002), Wagner with Dracula (2002), and the Italian Renaissance with a beautiful Carnet de Venise for the Folle Journée de Nantes (2002). Three years later this time in Amiens, the centenary of Jules Verne's death inspired him to write Comme une symphonie, envoi à Jules Verne. One of his most fantastic compositions in which, after Beethoven, he dissects, repeats in a loop and reassembles fragments of the nine symphonies for ‘a musical action’ capable of evoking the extraordinary journeys and the insane race around the globe of Jules Verne's characters.

A suit of light with folds that create as many curved spaces and convulsive reflections as a time machine in which Pierre Henry combines the musical time of the symphonist Bruckner with the historical, scientific and premonitory time of the novelist. 

In the same year for the Cité de la musique (Paris) he presents Orphée dévoilé, a final reinterpretation of one of his most colourful works - and the ‘stumbling block' of his collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer between 1951 and 1953, which is framed by Voile(s) d'Orphée I and II (1953).

A new stage in this great ‘space opera’: Bach, sucked in, compressed, and revisited in an Art de la fugue odyssée, premiered in the church of Saint-Eustache as the opening piece of the seven-concert series ‘Œuvres de Liturgie' in the Summer of 2011.

The tender melodies of the oboe, the Cantor's favourite instrument, but also the musical phrases of the orchestra, the organ and the keyboard music wind their way into a virtuoso counterpoint, like the movement of whirling dervishes.

Pierre Henry borrows Tim Burton's fearsome pneumatic gun from Mars Attacks! and points it at Bach. Under high pressure, he is blown up, shaken and stretched like a laughing gas released into the atmosphere. Aeroelectronic Bach?

In 2012 Paroxysmes rediscovers the ‘phantom Africa’ of Raymond Roussel, Henri Michaux and Michel Leiris which inspired the composer seven years earlier for his Voyage initiatique ('Pierre Henry chez lui 3'). The work was created in Tasmania in January 2012 under very special conditions, as from his Parisian home in the 12th arrondissement Pierre Henry was connected by video to the Mona Foma festival in Hobart.

A long-time fan of the Frenchman, Brian Ritchie, ex-bassist of the group Violent Femmes and artistic director of the festival, offered him some sounds following Intérieur/Extérieur: those taken from a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute. A distorted tribal song, mixed with sequences of Lettrist phonemes and interrupted by the tinkling of the sanza: the whole piece is immersed in a molten organic matter. Driftwood, the mind wanders and is invaded by the images - a sweet possession between two worlds...

Is this the final blow or the next step? The search for inner peace that unravels Le Fil de la vie (2012) takes place under the watch of mocking birds. From chirping to hissing, the natural space soon becomes a mechanical universe, driven by the unstoppable movement of a wheel. It is clearly that of a bicycle and then of a car: but what are the strange shadows emerging, trickling and threatening? That of the ‘ghostly cart’ which collects the souls of the deceased, in a clatter of dangling bones?

Surrounded by smoke, the sound is as if muffled, wrapped in Brian Ritchie's Japanese flute, and swayed by the sepulchral gong of those Australian fences hit by Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor. In this inky night the third eye of consciousness awakens: a comatose voice stretches out the words of an incomprehensible phrase: ‘A chime in the mind, a choir mantra, life...’ A huge drum whose timbres ricochet off the thought, Le Fil de la vie is a lantern of the dead whose mysterious vocabulary derives from the mineral and magical ritual of the leading compositions of the 1970s, Gymkhana, Mouvement-Rythme-Étude and Pierres réfléchies.

Never has Pierre Henry's past as a drummer been so present, in this enchantment of metal and stone. An organic whirlwind comparable to that of Histoire Naturelle, where the music of the most distant lands, from Africa to the Far East, resounds: the syncretism of a world that is at once human, animal, vegetable and mineral: ‘This is the Book of the Beginning and of the End', the thrilling future tense of a modern-day demiurge.

Here he is again four years later tirelessly bent over his console for a commission from the Cité de la musique-Philharmonie de Paris called Continuo, where he unrolls new threads for a ‘tapestry of theme sounds’. Macerated ball bearings, rubbing drums, spindly breaths and wild calls: is the composer's imaginary orchestra drawing a new rainbow or is it drawing its final bow? Yet the heart of Continuo continues to beat faster than ever when the composer premieres it on 8 and 9 January 2016 at the Cité de la Musique.

Another surprise, and a big one at that, is the return of the iconic Messe pour le temps présent partly thanks to Hervé Robbe, a former student of Béjart. The choreographer revives the original 1967 dance (he was ten years old at the time) and then, after a long silence, the second creation of the evening: the Grand Remix of Messe pour le temps présent.

Pierre Henry has once again shaken up his sound library; the trance starts again and continues with new remixes. The cloned original tracks, already revised and modified by techno (Métamorphose and Psychérocksessions) are then enriched a second time by their author (Fantaisie Messe pour le temps présent) struggle and move around on stage: ‘like blurred memories, surges of past events', according to Hervé Robbe.

Is it a big remix or a large crash? Just big by itself, as the dance is constantly reinventing itself, jostling with the rhythms of the Fantaisie, the Messe and the Dixième Remix - like a rave party factor 4, expanded to infinity.

In 2015, his work escaped him... but for the better! Thierry Balasse and his company Inouïe recreate Messe pour le temps présent in a version for electronic instruments, voice and pop orchestra that combines the recordings with the soundtrack of the ballet.

Two years later, the ‘dreamlike landscapes’ of his Dracula were revisited by a ‘classical’ ensemble, Le Balcon and its conductor Maxime Pascal, at the Athénée. In 2002 his Dracula was intended to be a ‘sound film' without images, guided by the memory of horror films, in particular those of Terence Fisher as well as Murnau's Nosferatu, captivated by the splendour of black and white and the mystery of its intertitles.

Sound amplification being the cornerstone of Pierre Henry’s creation and one of the specificities of the ensemble Le Balcon, why not mix the original electroacoustic composition with a live orchestra of some twenty musicians?

Using two synchronised conductors supplied by Pierre Henry: Augustin Muller and Othman Louati, the Doctors Frankenstein of this magnetic storm, give life to a new kind of creature for sound orchestra and speaker orchestra. Dracula dies and is resurrected.

Before his death on 5 July 2017 he had had time to complete several commissions for the Philharmonie de Paris, Radio France and the Ministry of Culture in the run-up to his ninetieth birthday (despite having lost his sight) with the help of his assistant Bernadette Mangin.

Fondu au noir is thus joined by the creations of the ultimate La Note seule (September 2016/February 2017), Grand tremblement (March 2017) and Multiplicité (October 2016/April 2017).

The latter was created at the Nuit blanche on 7 October 2017 at the Cité de la musique in Paris, renamed for the occasion ‘Hommage à Pierre Henry, une nuit, une vie' (Tribute to Pierre Henry, one night, one life). From 8 :30 pm to 6 :30 am Thierry Balasse, Nicolas Vérin, Jonathan Prager and Adrien Soulier took turns playing fifteen of his compositions. Grand Tremblement and La Note seule were performed in public for the first time during the anniversary and tribute weekend ‘Pierre Henry (1927-2017), a pioneer' at Studio 104 of the Maison de la Radio in Paris (8 to 10/12/2017).

Among these posthumous tributes was a new version of the Dixième Symphonie (thanks to Editions Ona) based on the Bonn version (1979). This time instrumental, using a web of notes cut out and glued onto large panels at the time.

In November 2019, its creation brings together one hundred and fifty instrumentalists, seventy choir singers, a solo tenor and three conductors. Arranged in a U-shape in the modular hall of the Cité de la Musique a new stirring of sound, as tumultuous and chaotic as Beethovenian fire can be, as exalted as Pierre Henry's compositions: demiurge of a joyful apocalypse that crushes themes so that nothing stops and that, on the contrary, everything perpetuates itself to infinity.

‘The sound alone with my thoughts and what I'm going to do with that sound forever. It is both hell... and something extraordinary.’