Pierre Henry as seen by Yves Bigot

Pierre Henry
© Bernadette Mangin

photobooth
© Pierre Henry private collection

photobooth
© Pierre Henry private collection

Few artists can seriously be called a genius. Pierre Henry is one of them.

"If, in 1966, the Beatles had collaborated with Pierre Henry, as Paul Mc Cartney intended, the history of 20th century music would have been revolutionised," wrote the British reference magazine Mojo in 2001. It was, however, revolutionised, and not just once, by this adventurer of sound as liturgy, a prophet of modern music, who invented, generated and inspired no less than three major genres and artistic movements, while twice - thirty years apart - achieving the status of a hit parade star.

Already at the end of the war, the young Pierre Henry (born on 9 December 1927), a ten-year student of Olivier Messiaen, Félix Passerone and Nadia Boulanger at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, an orchestral musician on piano and percussion, signed his first film scores, Voir l'invisible (Jean-Claude Sée), and the one he would later apply to the historic L'Homme à la caméra (Dziga Vertov).

In 1949, he joined Pierre Schaeffer in the test studio of Radio Télédiffusion Française. Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950), their engineer-musician manifesto, founded musique concrète, intended to "deconstruct music so that the harmony of the spheres resounds". Maurice Béjart would take up this work five years later at the Théâtre de l'Etoile in Paris and Beaux-Arts in Brussels, an iconic collaboration that would last for fifteen ballets. Other prestigious choreographers followed suit and collaborated with Pierre Henry and his music: Georges Balanchine with the New York City Ballet, Carolyn Carlson at La Scala in Milan, Merce Cunningham, Alwyn Nikolais at the Hamburg Opera, Maguy Marin, etc. Visual artists also called upon his experimental music: Yves Klein (Symphonie monoton), Jean Degottex, Georges Mathieu, Nicolas Schöffer (Spatiodynamisme), Jacques Villeglé (Un monde lacéré), Thierry Vincens...

His Voile d'Orphée (1953), a major work of musique concrète, will appear in the soundtracks of the films L'Enfance d'Ivan (Tarkovski, 1962), Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980) and in the American series Ratched (2020). Haut Voltage, the first electroacoustic work, marked the emancipation of Pierre Henry, a leading figure at the head of the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, and then of his Apsome studio in the rue Cardinet. This sonic avant-garde reached its peak in 1963 with his Variations pour une porte et un soupir. Still heard in the Sopranos series, this work was a major influence on the English progressive rock of the 1960s and 1970s, led by Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Gong, John Cale, Brian Eno, and later Radiohead.

But it was with Le Voyage (1962), the first psychedelic composition (which expresses the soul), that Pierre Henry was to fascinate the rock generation of the Sixties and the hippies, who were fond of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that he illustrated: the Beatles ("Tomorrow Never Knows") and Jimi Hendrix (Are You Experienced?) in London, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (Freak Out) in Los Angeles, Jefferson Airplane (Would You Like a Snack?), the Grateful Dead, whose long instrumental dissertations he admired ("Drums/Space"), Quicksilver Messenger Service (the improvised passages in their version of "Who Do You Love?"), and David Crosby ("I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here") in San Francisco; later, Rodolphe Burger in Strasbourg (Cheval/Mouvement) Vangelis (Beaubourg), Quentin Dupieux, alias Mr. Oizo, in Paris as well, with Rita Mitsouko at Usine Pali Kao. « I listened to him in high school, at the same time as Jimi Hendrix," explained Fred Chichin, when the Rita invited him to the Cité de la Musique in 1997. « He opened up a world of sounds and gave us the desire for electro-acoustic music. He has a very physical conception of sound, unlike many contemporary composers, who deny the pleasure of movement, matter and bodies. He is extremely modern with his sound-system side - that's why the intelligentsia marginalised him. » ("Pense à ta carrière" on Cool frénésie, exactly repeats the intro to his "Psyché Rock").

This flirtation with rock was to take shape unconsciously in his Messe de Liverpool (1967) and on the airwaves of Salut les Copains, the barricades of May '68, at Castel's and in the discotheques of Saint-Tropez and the Côte d'Azur with the electronic Ypersound Jerks of his Messe pour le temps présent.

The former sold hundreds of thousands of copies under their famous silver cover, while the latter made history at the Avignon Festival thanks to the ballet of Béjart, his lifelong friend. The album Ceremony: An Electrical Mass, recorded with the excellent English blues-rock band Spooky Tooth (1969) and composed with their organist Gary Wright, was only an epilogue, crowned by a midnight concert at the Olympia on 2 September 1970.

But whereas the effect of Pierre Henry on the history of rock remains a well-kept secret among connoisseurs, techno, on the other hand, will claim him as its founding master. His hit "Psyché Rock", composed with Michel Colombier, will be used for everything, from Costa Gavras' film Z to Jean Becker's film with Vanessa Paradis (Elisa), from the American Mean Girls written by Tina Fey, Blow Dry, Happy Campers, Big Trouble with Zooey Deschanel and Sofia Vergara and the Australian Mr. Accident, to the insane plagiarism of the Futurama series. From the Mobi card advert to the New York Stock Exchange advert, or for Nescafé, Prada, Fiat, Mitsubishi and Coca-Cola, not to mention hundreds of more or less authorised samples. So much so that in 1997, the most prestigious DJs (William Orbit, Coldcut, St Germain, Dimitri From Paris, etc.) paid tribute to him with Metamorphose, an album of remixes of Messe pour le temps présent, which saw "Psyché Rock", revamped by Fat Boy Slim, become the anthem of dance culture, from Brighton to Ibiza. Solicited by the American group Violent Femmes, dealing with the Propellerheads, collaborating with the Swiss trumpeter Erik Truffaz, participating in the Libération project L'Amour foot (1998), performing like a rock star at the Olympia, at the Cigale, at the Montreux Jazz Festival as well as in Riga, at La Roque d'Anthéron, on the piazza Beaubourg, the Esplanade de la Défense, at Radio France, at the Centre Pompidou, at the Cité de la Musique, at the Saint-Eustache church, at the Carreau du Temple, at Bethnal Green, In his ninth decade, Pierre Henry continued to make the headlines with his very popular Concerts chez lui (1996, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010), which had the whole of Paris in a frenzy, his complete works in four boxed sets (Mix 01, 02, 03 and 04), his induction into the Pantheon of the Victoires de la Musique (1998), the Qwartz électronique d'honneur (2005) and the Prix du Président de la République of the Académie Charles Cros (2005). He continues to perform his incessant new creations, including Intérieur/Extérieur, Histoire naturelle, Une tour de Babel, the ambitious and mischievous Beethoven's Tenth Symphony remix, Les Sept péchés capitaux, Tam-tam du merveilleux, Dracula, Analogy and Dieu, recited after Victor Hugo by Jean-Paul Farré.

Until his death on 5 July 2017, he kept on composing, including four works (Multiplicité, La Note seule, Grand tremblement and Fondu au noir), commissioned by the Philharmonie de Paris, Radio France and the Ministry of Culture to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. His music continues to be played everywhere since then, the Philharmonie has reconstituted its legendary Son/Ré studio in the Rue de Toul at the Musée de la Musique, and his entire body of work is preserved in the Sound, Video and Multimedia Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Jean-Michel Jarre, who admired him and hoped to collaborate with him on Electronica (2015), dedicated Oxymore: Homage To Pierre Henry to him in 2022, an album composed using original sounds of Pierre (including his spoken voice) donated by Isabelle Warnier-Henry. Martin Gore, leader of Depeche Mode ("Brutalism Take 2") and Brian Eno ("Epica") have produced various remixes.