Pierre Henry is not dead

Franck Podguszer-Braun
Documentary

Screening preceded by an introduction to the work of Pierre Henry by Armando Balice, Philippe Gordiani and André Serre-Milan.

A pioneer of electronic music, Pierre Henry (1927-2017) laid, alongside Pierre Schaeffer from the 1950s onwards, the foundations of what characterizes the music of our time. At the time, everything had to be invented: creating his sounds, the tools to manipulate them, and the ways to broadcast them. He influenced the pop music of the 1960s and 1970s, from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, and even the DJs of the 1990s. He is the author of an absolute hit: the electronic jerks composed with Michel Colombier for the Messe pour le temps présent created by Maurice Béjart in 1967. But he is above all the creator of a prolific body of work, spanning from the late 1940s to the 2010s, where pure and extraordinary sound experiments coexist with settings of text to music to form a new kind of mock-opera. Thanks to often unpublished documents, this documentary invites us to listen to Pierre Henry tell us about his journey and, above all, to listen to his music, one of the most innovative of the 20th century.

Direction, writing — Franck Podguszer-Braun

Production Acqua Alta, Son/Ré - 2024
Pierre Henry © Thierry Martinot Lebrecht / pattern © Gwladys Bernard