Pierre Henry - Le Voyage (1967)

Pierre Henry (ur. 9 grudnia 1927 w Paryżu) – francuski kompozytor, współtwórca muzyki konkretnej.

W latach 1948-1959 Henry pracował w Club d'Essai, studio RTF utworzonym przez Pierre'a Schaeffera. W tym okresie napisał razem z Schaefferem utwór Symphonie pour un homme seul oraz pierwszą kompozycję muzyki konkretnej, która pojawiła się w filmie komercyjnym – był to krótki metraż Astrologie ou le miroir de la vie.

W 2009 roku Henry był gościem Festiwalu Warszawska Jesień, gdzie wykonano jego utwory.

US edition cover

Pierre Henry (born 9 December 1927) is a French composer, considered a pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic musi Pierre Henry was born in Paris, France, and began experimenting at the age of 15 with sounds produced by various objects. He became fascinated with the integration of noise into music. He studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen, and Félix Passerone at the Paris Conservatoire from 1938 to 1948 (Dhomont 2001).

Between 1949 and 1958, Henry worked at the Club d'Essai studio at RTF, which had been founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1943 (Dhomont 2001). During this period, he wrote the 1950 piece Symphonie pour un homme seul, in cooperation with Schaeffer; he also composed the first musique concrète to appear in a commercial film, the 1952 short film Astrologie ou le miroir de la vie. Henry has scored numerous additional films and ballets.

Two years after leaving the RTF, he founded with Jean Baronnet the first private electronic studio in France, the Apsone-Cabasse Studio (Dhomont 2001).

Among Henry's works is the 1967 ballet Messe pour le temps présent (Dhomont 2001), a collaboration with choreographer Maurice Béjart that debuted in Avignon (Rubin 2001). In 1970 Henry collaborated with British rock band Spooky Tooth on the album Ceremony (Rubin 2001, 308).

Composer Christopher Tyng was heavily inspired by Henry's "Psyché Rock" when writing the theme to the popular animated cartoon show Futurama. The theme is so reminiscent of the Henry's song, it is considered a variation of the original (Cohen 2001). (wikipedia)

Pierre Henry's early masterpiece, 'Le Voyage' (1962), based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead - the Bardo Thodol - is finally available on vinyl again after decades out of print. It revolves around seven pieces dealing with the soul's journey between death and reincarnation in the next life. It is one of the first works composed by Henry at the Apsone-Cabase Studio, a new, electronically equipped facility which he set up after realising that if he wanted musique concrète to evolve, he would have to move away from the Club d'Essai studio at RTF, set up with his colleague and peer Pierre Schaeffer, and begin experimenting with electronics. The result is a remarkably involving and immersive experience shifting away from the more dynamic angular architectures of his concrète incursions to an interdimensional soundscape of scurrying oscillator patterns, drones and strange tones with a weighted sense of gravity. Two pieces of heavy-breathing manipulations, 'Souffle 1 & 2' bookend a passing through rich bass drones, alien bleeps and discordant, metallic creaks reminding of more recent work of Oren Ambarchi, Mika Vainio or Sunn 0))), but, of course this was made 50 years earlier... (source)