“Pierre Henry, a composer whose experiments with electronically manipulated sound helped create the style known as musique concrète and anticipated the innovations of techno, died on Thursday in Paris,” writes William Grimes in Friday’s (7/7) New York Times. “Early in his musical career, Mr. Henry abandoned notes in favor of ambient sounds—dripping water, car horns, bird calls, locomotive engine—which he manipulated with a tape recorder in surprising ways. The sounds of the human body provided the sonic material for one of his earliest compositions, ‘Symphony for a Solitary Man’ (1950), written in collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer, considered the founder of musique concrète…. Mr. Henry was long associated with the avant-garde choreographer Maurice Béjart, with whom he collaborated on more than a dozen ballets.… Mr. Henry … absorbed rock influences as well [and] later worked with the British progressive rock group Spooky Tooth on the 1969 album ‘Ceremony,’ which takes the form of a rock ’n’ roll church service…. Before and after World War II, he studied piano and percussion with Félix Passeronne and composition with Nadia Boulanger. He took harmony classes taught by Olivier Messiaen, at which Pierre Boulez was a fellow student.”
Posted July 10, 2017
