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    Pierre Henry

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    Pierre Henry

    French composer and pioneer of electronic music

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    Born: 9th December 1927 Paris, France
    Died: 5th July 2017 Paris, France
    A leading figure of the electroacoustic music movement and considered the grandfather of techno . He pioneered the transformation of sounds that could be recorded on the newly developed tape recorder (a precursor to sampling). Owner of Studio Son/Ré.

    After completing traditional studies at the Academy of Paris, with Olivier Messiaen (harmony) and Nadia Boulanger (composition), Pierre made in 1949 a decisive meeting with Pierre Schaeffer, with whom he founded the GRMC (Groupe de recherche de musique concrète) dedicated to the experimentation in "concrete music", a genre of electronic music. In collaboration with Schaeffer, he wrote Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950) and the "concrete" opera Orphée (1951) (revised as Orphée 53 (1953)), which has the astonishing sequence Le Voile d'Orphée", where already one finds the technique of audio time stretching, a characteristic of his style and the presence of death: a subject that inspired him.

    After having founded his own studio Studio Apsome, he undertook a long collaboration with the choreographer Maurice Béjart. His compositions from the early 1960s have a certain purity, such as the ballet Le Voyage (1962) inspired by the Tibetan Book of Dead, and the famous Variations pour une porte et un soupir (1963). As the decade progressed his music adopted increasingly spiritual and meditative qualities, such as Messe de Liverpool (1967-68) and Apocalypse de Jean (1968). Even more ambitious works followed: Dixième symphonie (1979) (a gigantic joining of extracts of the nine symphonies of Beethoven) and Noces chymiques (1980), that had him simultaneously in the roles of composer and director.

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