Pierre Henry

Parisian composer Pierre Henry was one of the earliest innovators of musique concrète, beginning to work in the compositional world of electronically manipulated sound in the early ’50s. Born in Paris in 1927, Henry was a prodigious talent who entered conservatory at age 10. There, he studied with the most esteemed and tastemaking composition teacher of his time: Nadia Boulanger. He quickly moved toward experimenting with tape: in early works like 1950’s Symphonie pour un homme seul and 1953’s The Veil of Orpheus, he used a tape recorder to warp recorded sounds, often extending the sound of voices or instruments beyond what they would produce in real life. After working in this vein for a decade and a half, Henry dabbled in rock music in the late ’60s with the composition of his most culturally ubiquitous work: the heavily remixed and film-and-TV-licensed “Psyché Rock” from 1967’s ballet Messe pour le temps présent, which features a combination of orchestral, electronic and rock instruments. Soon afterward, Henry would collaborate with the Carlisle band Spooky Tooth on the 1969 album Ceremony. In the following decades, Henry mostly composed lengthy concert and radio works, some of which were inspired by literature and historical figures and included a dramatic element. Henry passed away in 2017 in his hometown of Paris at 89.