Pierre Henry in 2004 © Anne Selders
‘Here begins the land of ghosts...’. This intertitle, one of the first picture seen in Murnau's silent film Nosferatu of 1922, amused Pierre Henry… He even saw in it the very definition of his art. If, according to Julien Gracq, ‘Wagner is an infinite source of emotional orgy', the expression also applies to Pierre Henry, whose work captivates us by the richness of its imagination and its diversity. Whether it is destined for the stage, the cinema, the ballet or television, or whether it is immortalised by a record. The display of his work is structured by collections and musical genres, categories and classifications that Pierre Henry has always organised himself: "Always unfinished, forever renewed, dynamic despite its inevitable imperfection, classification alone is the motor of my creation. For me, to classify is to create." (*)
(*) Pierre Henry – Journal de mes sons – Paris, Séguier, 1996 ; réédition suivie de Préfaces et manifestes – Arles, Actes sud, 2004, p. 23.
HIS COLLECTIONS
The chronology of this abundant work, starting with his first sounds in 1944, is dizzying, with a catalogue of no less than 219 opuses or Music works, 205 ‘Applied music’ - ballet, cinema, stage, visual art, radio and commercials - more than 160 pieces of ‘Music for lucrative works’, not signed by P.H. - recordings and albums, sound illustrations and sound effects for a film, special effects, etc. Just under a hundred ‘Drafts and projects’, many of which have since been revived.
Last but not least, the numerous Record editions bear witness to the many creations and performances that have marked the composer's career, EPs, LPs and CDs, without neglecting special publications, limited editions, new digitisations and unpublished works. Finally, a selection of Texts by and about Pierre Henry sheds light on his creation.
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THE GENRES
Pierre Henry's work is a galaxy where genres intertwine, as is the case with Symphonie pour un homme seul, premiered in concert in 1950 and performed the following year in its ballet version, choreographed by Merce Cunningham and then three years later by Maurice Béjart - the Henry-Béjart association subsequently increasing the number of exchanges between concert and ballet.
If these two categories are well known, on the other hand, we discover here the first scores, from before musique concrète : ‘Chamber music’ between 1945 and 1951, including a Premier quatuor pour violon, harpe, vibraphone et piano from 1949.
The ‘Stage and Theatre Music’ series began in 1950 with a text by Adamov directed by Jean-Marie Serreau and Roger Blin, in 1954 L'Amour des quatre colonels by Peter Ustinov and, more recently, Schattenzonen (meaning grey areas) by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, with Ingrid Caven in 2003.
Film music has been at the forefront of Pierre Henry's career since 1949. Jean-Claude Sée's Voir l'invisible was followed by compositions for Jean Grémillon, Jean Rouch, Enrico Fulchignoni, Jean Painlevé, not forgetting the silent films of Walter Ruttmann - Berlin, symphonie d'une grande ville - and Dziga Vertov, L'Homme à la caméra, as well as borrowings from Messe pour le temps présent for Costa-Gavras's ‘Z’ (1969), Voile d'Orphée for Ken Russell's Au-delà du réel (1979), and Variations pour une porte et un soupir in the series The Sopranos (1999).
A close collaborator of visual artists, Pierre Henry creates from the sculptures, paintings and installations of Nicolas Schöffer (Spatiodynamisme and Kyldex), improvises for Georges Mathieu, composes for Yves Klein (Symphonie Monoton/Monochromie), Thierry Vincens, Jean Degottex (Investigations on three different occasions, between 1959 and 2008), as well as for his friend Jacques Villeglé, between 1999 and 2008.
As an illustrator for albums, he has been supporting children's stories since the 1950s, as well as readings from the Gospels and the Psalms, with his sounds even used in recordings by Urban Sax, from the rock group Violent Femmes or by trumpeter Erik Truffaz - in More, in 2000.
His talent for editing engulfs the listener's imagination, even more so when the audience is listening to radio programmes thanks to interludes created for the occasion. A few examples are his Journal de mes sons carried by the voice of Florence Delay (2000) or a series of radio programmes, such as Maldoror/Feuilleton, based on the surrealist work by the comte de Lautréamont, cut into 50 episodes for the French national public radio channel France Musique in 1992.
Spanning ten years, from Boldoflorine (1954) to L'Art cinétique et la mode (1967), pieces of ‘Music for ads’ are part of the important body of work essential to the financial wellbeing of the first private electroacoustic music studio in Europe, conceived by Pierre Henry in 1959 and named Apsome. There is a great diversity in advertising music such as La gaine Scandale (a girdle), la Banque Populaire (a bank) and even a French pâté, the Pâté Olida, or a car brand, the Simca 1300.
To this highly diverse corpus ‘Music for sound effects and stock catalogue’ and ‘Urban music’ is added: two versions of announcements for the first two lines of Mulhouse’s 'Tram Train', inaugurated with in situ works by Daniel Buren and Tobias Rehberger in May 2007.
The ‘Event-based music’ is linked to performances, such as in Lille in 1977: with the astonishing audiovisual Metamorphoses using laser beams (group Laser Graphics), Corticalart (at the mixer, Pierre Henry's head was covered with electrodes!), magnetic tapes and live voice - that of Anne Wiazemsky - to which Michel Asso's electronics on a synthesizer was added.
Another example: these alternative Métamorphoses d'Ovide II for a concert with Erik Truffaz and improvised live, on 27 november 2004 at the Maison de la culture in Grenoble. To be discovered or rediscovered in the category ‘Music for special occasions’ is the Compilation amoureuse dédiée à Maurice Béjart (Loving compilation dedicated to Maurice Béjart) that Pierre Henry produced on CD following the choreographer's death (22 November 2007). Three years later, he released Analogy - which draws on the sounds of Douze Heures de la nuit, commissioned by the Wet Sounds festival and performed underwater by Étienne Bultingaire at London's York Hall Pool, on 6 March 2011.
As for 'Improvised music', Pierre Henry has of course been heard several times in a duo with the trumpeter Erik Truffaz in Poussière de soleils and Métamorphoses d'Ovide, as well as in a mixed version of Utopia in 2014.
Franck Mallet
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