Student Report: John Donohue SP '99
Pierre Henry: Beyond Schaeffer
When musique concrete is mentioned the first name that comes to mind is Pierre Schaeffer. He coined this term to describe a new form of music which he developed that was based on the acoustical manipulation of recorded sounds. Schaeffer was not a musician, though, he was a telecommunications engineer1 who lived through Nazi occupation of France. His revolt from the German atonal contemporary music led him to this new territory. Unfortunately, most of his music was not of a caliber to convince classical snobs of the validity of using found sounds instead of instruments.
Much of Schaeffer's successful work was in collaboration with another French composer, who unlike Schaeffer was a classically trained musician. This artist was Pierre Henry. The two worked together on one of Schaeffer's most successful works Symphonie pour un Homme Seul. Pierre Henry became one of the leading figures in music concrete after this and soon surpassed Schaeffer. Instead of confining himself to a narrow field of development and experimentation Henry expanded his musical endeavors in many directions.
Pierre Henry was born in 1927 in Paris. He was unhealthy as a child and did not attend school but instead had private tutors. Of his musical beginning Henry says, "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.2" By 1944 he was studying at the Paris Conservatory and taking lessons from very important musical figures in the twentieth century. His piano and percussion teacher was Passeronne, and his theory and composition lessons were with Olivier Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger.
In 1949 Pierre Henry won a commission to compose the music for a television documentary "Seeing the Invisible."His earlier work had been traditional instrumental music. Later that year he began work with Schaeffer on the Symphonie pour un Homme Seul. This consists of ten movements which are meant to invoke the sounds a man hears walking alone at night.3 All of the sounds are created by the human body. Most or all of Henry's music is programmatic and his titles are the key to understanding the theme of each piece. In 1951 he joined the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete which was based in Schaeffer's state funded studio Radiodiffusion Francaise. This year Henry and Schaeffer collaborated on another major piece, Orpheus. This was an opera for voices and musique concrete. This piece wasn't performed in its entirety until 1953 in the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany.4 In good tradition this debut was met with public outrage.
By 1952 Henry was the director of the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete and he remained in that position until 1958. Pierre Henry was also a film afficionado and in 1952 he wrote the score to Astrologie which was the first commercial film in France to have an electro- acoustic score. This was a first move towards later audio/visual compositions that Henry wrote. In 1952 he also wrote Antiphonie which was a contrast between two sound groups.
Pierre Henry became more interested in techniques outside of the strict musique concrete that Schaeffer theorized, and in 1958 he broke away from the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete and established his own studio, the Studio Apsome. This was the first private electronic music studio in France.5 He wanted to incorporate synthesized sounds with other musical techniques that had been developed. One key aspect of the career of Pierre Henry is hybridization of ideas and technology. His compositions of 1959, Entity, Coexistence, and Investigations used elements of synthesized sounds along with the found sounds of musique concrete.6
The early 1960's were an interesting time in Henry's career. He did a project with a rock group, Spooky Tooth, although he didn't like the heavy bass and reverb laden vocals.7 In 1962 he wrote a major piece, Le Voyage, which was entirely synthesized. In 1963 Variations for a Door and a Sigh were composed using found sounds in variation to create a seventeenth century French suite. The next year Henry made some popular success with his recording Jerks Electronique which sold over 150,000 copies.8
In the later sixties Henry wrote some religious works including the Messe de Liverpool in 1967-68. He also composed a piece based on the book of revelations L'Apocalypse de Jean. Both of these recordings have narration which remains intelligible over the intricacies of his electroacoustic composition. In 1971 he wrote a large scale audio/visual work which depicted brain waves as electronic sounds and images. This was Mise en Musiaue du Corticolart. He has also written other audio/visual works like L'Homme a la Camera which is based on a film of the same name. In 1973 Henry wrote La Dixome (the tenth) which is based on excerpts from Beethoven's nine symphonies which are manipulated into a tenth.
Many of Pierre Henry's compositions have been choreographed for ballet by Maurice Bejart. These include Astrologie, Variations for a Door and a Sigh, Le Voyage, Mass for Today, and Symphonie pour un Homme Seul. Henry actually toured globally with Bejart's dancers as their sound technician.9
One common theme of Henry's work is death in a literary sense. Le Voyage is based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, while Le Livre des Morts Egyptien is based on the Egyptian book of the dead. He also wrote L'Apocalypse de Jean which describes the apocalypse. Formally his pieces are not anarchistic although their electronic nature may make it seem that way. Several pieces are based on classical forms like Symphonie pour un Homme Seul and Variations for a Door and a Sigh. Henry says, "one of course has to compose with a direction, a lucid idea. One has to have in mind a certain construction, a form.10" Since traditional devices like harmony and melody are obscured one thing that is left is rhythm. "There is always a beat in my music. The beat is what I find more interesting than something asymmetrical. Everything has to be natural for me.11"
Henry has very distinct views on technology. When he began work on electronic music the only medium was disque souple, or soft disk. This was very difficult to work with and precarious because it was easily damaged and couldn't overcome generational loss. Next came magnetic tape which was the most important medium for musique concrete. Now with the widespread use of digital technology things have changed again. Of digital Henry says:
"There are many things we can do with digital sound such as uncovering the original sound. All sounds become original sounds, the sound of the beginning. That's interesting but there is a betrayal in the sense that digital sound is not as good as analogical sound. It has less strength, less impact, less presence. Therefore it's necessary to mix analog, that is, old equipment with new equipment. We can't get rid of old equipment. We still need to have the future connected to the past.12"
Again Henry is talking of the need for a hybrid between two schools of thought. Henry adds,
"I have always struggled to have the sounds retain their transparency. Now I have conquered these problems, thanks to digital techniques. It is possible to make a perfect copy, but I am worried about the machines doing the work that I should be doing. . . The computer works instead of you . . . I think that we now live in a dangerous age because the composer should certainly not work with a tap, that he can open or close.13"
The dedicated work of electronic music composers has led to more widespread use of electronic techniques in everyday life. However this mass commercialization has done nothing to elevate the art form or endeavors of its predecessors. Henry sees this music as, "absolutely disgraceful on the radio, at the cinema, in adverts. And I see that at the moment there is one sound. Not sounds. One single sound, everywhere, It's a sound that has been standardized.14"
The career of Pierre Henry has gone from humourous pieces to contemplative works on ponderous subjects. He went from being a frail child to an avant garde composer to a rock star and back again. It was his musical sensibility, intricacy, and openness to new techniques that made him a much greater composer than his predecessor Schaeffer. And it was his ability to write for film, or recording, or live performance, or opera, or ballet which truly set him apart from other composers for electroacoustic music.
Bibliography: Ernst, David. Musique Concrete. Boston, Massachusetts, Crescendo Publishing Company, 1972. Kostka, Stefan. Twentieth-Century Music, 2nd ed. Upper Saddle Tiver, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1999. Russcol, Herbert. The Liberation of Sound: An Introduction to Electronic Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1972. Smolders, Ios. "Interview with Pierre Henry." Vital. 1995. Online. htt p://www.hyperreal.org/intersection/zines/intervs.henry.html (4/19/99). Stolba, Marie. The Development of Western Music: A History. Boston, Massachusetts, McGraw-Hill, 1998. Online. http://www.furious .com/perfect/pierrehenry.html (4/19/99) Online. http//ar ts.ucsc.edu/EMS/music/music/landmarks/henry.html (4/19/99)