HENRY, PIERRE — Haut-Voltage / Coexistence

"The 22 min. "Haut-Voltage" is a product of Henry's collaboration with French coreographer Maurice Béjart, recorded in 1956 for one of Bejart's stage productions, and featuring the vocals of Henry himself. By 1958 Henry had left Pierre Schaeffer's RTF and had begun working in his own private studio. "Coexistence", recorded in 1959, comes from this new period, when Henry had begun to realize that in order for "musique concrète" to evolve, it would have to begin to use electronics. "Coexistence" is one of Henry's first attempts at bringing the two together. Electronic music pioneer Pierre Henry (b. 1927) is a classically trained French pianist and percussionist, but gained notoriety as one of the driving forces behind the French avante-garde movement "musique concrète", started by Pierre Schaeffer, a radio engineer, in 1950. Henry believed that any sound could be music, and was one of the first to experiment with tape looping, splicing and sampling. Drawing inspiration from Italian Futurists, like Luigi Russolo, he believed that any sound could be music, and that the industrial sounds of our modern world were in some ways the "music" of our modern times. "Musique concrète" attempted to make music by using "real" sounds, like trains, dogs barking, footsteps, etc., in place of actual instruments and then electronically manipulating them in ways that had never been seen before, effectively redefining the very idea of music itself, and forcing listeners to ask themselves the question, "what is music?". Many did, and the many answers to this question went on to inspire scores of artists and musicians, and the ripple effect is still being felt today."
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