Published
Thu, Jul 6, 2017, 17:12
- The French composer passed away in Paris yesterday.
Pierre Henry, a French composer who was one of musique concrète's pioneering figures, is dead at the age of 89.
Henry, who died in Paris yesterday, began his career in experimental music more than six decades ago. After studying piano and percussion at the Paris Conservatoire, he was employed at the Office De Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, the electronic studio founded by Pierre Schaeffer (another leader in the development of musique concrète), from 1949 to 1958.
Henry and Schaeffer collaborated on what is regarded as one of the genre's most important early works: Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul (Symphony For One Man Alone), a 1950 composition that employed sounds from the human body.
The next few years would see Henry write the first musique concrète piece commissioned for a commercial film—Jean Grémillon's short Astrologie—and, as a solo composer and in cooperation with Schaeffer, the first such pieces made for a stage production. Ultimately, he'd craft more than 30 scores for stage and for film.
Henry's wide-ranging pursuits included experimenting with combining electronic and rock sounds. He collaborated with the groups Spooky Tooth and Violent Femmes, and one of his most well-known works, a 1967 song written alongside Michel Colombier called "Psyché Rock," is said to have been the inspiration, decades later, for the theme to the animated science fiction sitcom Futurama. Listen to that tune below.