5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
At least I have an understanding of the Henry phenomenon, but so many questions left blatantly unanswered, June 12, 2010
This review is from: Pierre Henry - The Art of Sounds (DVD)
The Juxtapositions series of DVDs consists of documentaries of various modern composers. I enjoyed earlier installments about Mahler, Boulez, Kurtag, Carter, Messiaen and other composers that I was already acquainted with, but with this volume on Pierre Henry, I was entering uncharted territory. Pierre Henry was, along with his mentor Pierre Schaeffer, one of the inventors of musique concrete, that early electronic music created not by synthesizing sounds, but by recording them outside the studio and then painstakingly assembling them into musical works. In spite of the flirtation of many mid-century composers with the musique concrete scene, I think that fans of modernist classical music generally have little familiarity with musique concrete, and I hoped this documentary would help bridge that gap for me.
The main feature here is "Pierre Henry: The Art of Sounds" by Eric Darmon and Franck Mallet. We follow Henry as he puts on concerts and attends ballet rehearsals, and his thoughts on his music is a constant voice-over. Henry is a very eccentric figure, completely absorbed in his own explorations. He almost never speaks of any relationship with past composers or his contemporaries (except for Schaeffer).
My first question on hearing about Pierre Henry was, why is someone still pursuing musique concrete when sound synthesis had developed to the point where a composer could generate whatever sounds he wished. As the documentary opens, Henry explains that for him the magic of his work is precisely in freeing found sounds of their context and welding them into something new. Musique concrete for him is not an immature style that people had to make do with before sound synthesis, but a valuable aesthetic in itself.
The documentary is OK as an introduction to Henry, but it could have been a lot better. What I especially don't like about this documentary is that Henry is never challenged to defend his classic pieces when they have clearly waned in popularity. Most of the footage of a public digging this music comes from the 1960s, and his output has slowed. One of the most poignant scenes comes when Henry puts on a concert of his more customary music and only a few people come. "Maybe I'll stop doing the concerts," he says. "There's very few people." The recent Henry pieces that seem to attract a crowd are much closer to popular electronica, with a steady dance beat or remixing of earlier music.
Also, it focuses a bit too exclusively on Henry. Throughout the documentary we find him assisted by a woman named Bernadette, presumably his wife, but we get no information of how they met and how she might have influenced his work. Another collaborator is present through a large portion of the documentary, but he is never named.
The DVD extras are two. First up is the rehearsal and performance of Henry's 1953 work "Veil of Orpheus" in a sparsely attended concert in 2003 at the Cite de la Musique, Paris. Then comes the "Le Candidat", one in a series of collaborations between film-maker Gerald Belkin and Henry. It's a quirky tale of a man running for political office with a number of unusual images.
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