»… Play-rew-forward-stop …« audio-video music serie 3.5

The audio-video music series will continue at the Palazzo Cini at San
Vio from October to December, when it will come to a close. The
remaining two short series, entitled after the forward and stop
buttons on video players, are intended to convey a powerful impression
of the plurality of passions, of the “forward” and “stop” in artistic
research, which may be represented by Virgil’s sprawling beech tree (sub tegmine fagi): an uncontrollable manifestation of the hypertrophy of the sense organs trained on beauty.

Venice, Palazzo Cini at San Vio
31 October 2009, 5.00pm

Fifth session: Orpheus’ veils. Homage to PIERRE HENRY

Le
Voile d’Orphée, 1953, rehearsal of
the 2003 concert, 16’
Le
Voile d’Orphée, 1953, 2003
concert, Paris Cité de la Musique, 17’

Le
candidat, a film by Gerard Belkin,
1966, with music by Pierre Henry, 22’
L’art
des sons, a film by Eric Darmon
& Frank Mallet, 2007, film portrait of Pierre Henry, 52’

Co-opted by Pierre
Schaeffer into the French Radio Research Group on Concrete Music right from the
early days of musique concrète, the
composer, percussionist and pianist Pierre Henry has always endowed the genre
of “concrete music” with lyrical ambitions, which the initial movement arguably
did not posses or control. Under the banner of musique concrète, Henry has produced a vast number of compositions
enjoyed by different audiences from various generations. Although his eighteen
projects in collaboration with Maurice Béjart brought him a certain fame, Henry
also shared his creativity with all kinds of artists (painters, sculptors,
filmmakers, etc.), not to mention his “posthumous” collaborators like
Beethoven, Hugo, the evangelist St John, etc. In addition to tackling themes
with extraordinary semantic potential, Henry worked on real sounds with a
taxonomic intensity (cataloguing an exorbitant number of significant sound
events). This peculiar side to his research led him to establish a distinctive
personal “style” based on the richness of the pieces, which have a cosmic
scope, bringing the archaic into the modern quotidian and the legendary into
the familiar. In 2002 Philips released a huge anthology in 19 CDs of his
acoustic works from 1949-1999 entitled Mix.

Henry made
significant contributions to the creations of films with his highly elaborate
sound tracks for directors such as Allegret, Jean Rouch, Henry Decoin, François
Weyergans, Mario Ruspoli, Gerard Belkin, Georges Luca, Constantin Costa-Gavras,
Ken Russell, Guy Job, and Marcel Carné.