CDOTD 4/26/2023

 Pierre Henry: Polyphonies (Decca) disc 12

Purchased at Half Price Books

If you dig back into this blog to last year, you'll see that I started writing about this collection disc-by-disc, but I let it go. Since I'm trying maintain the discipline of writing here again regular, time to start posting some thoughts about this again.

This twelve disc brick came at a ridiculously low price at Half Price Books in the North Hills. Luck favors the vigilant; it's why you look, right? I don't have empirical evidence, but I suspect Pierre Henry's name is eclipsed by his associate's, Pierre Schaeffer. That has largely to do with Schaeffer being there first, and for creating the term musique concrète. 

But what does that mean? The term has come to mean music created entirely sounds recorded from a microphone, edited/manipulated/assembled using recording techniques. Nothing is synthesized, instrumental and environmental sounds being equally valid.

However, I've read that Schaeffer's term referred to the corporeal natural of the recorded medium itself. Rather than the music existing as abstracted markings on a piece of paper to be interpreted by musicians, the music is physically part of the tape or disc medium used to both create and playback the music.

I might have written that previously, and maybe the distinction isn't that important. 

If I'm considering these discs, why skip from #3 to the end and work backwards? Curiously, the collection is in reverse chronological order, most to least recent. 

This disc begins with the Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (as you might guess, Symphony for a Single Man or similar). It's co-credited with Schaeffer, as are a few other early works for Henry. The piece is in twelve "movements,", sometimes drawing on classical titles: "Valse", "Scherzo", "Intermezzo", "Cadence" for example. It's fast moving and lively, doesn't look back on itself much but does repeat some sound sources, specifically human voice(s) and prepared piano. 

A point I make to students about works such as this is, we can't hear it the way someone might have heard it when it was first presented. It dates to 1950. It sounds strange now, and it must have sounded downright alien at the time. 

I can't help but notice the technical elements of the Symphonie, and the other works on this disc which date from the same year. The frequency response for the medium hasn't been perfected yet, and it's noticeably missing lower and (especially) higher frequencies. It all has a dulled sound to it. There are times when record surface noise it also noticeable. I'm certain, based on the techniques used to create the pieces, it wasn't cut disc-to-disc; it was realized on tape. But at some point, I'm guessing it had to be transferred to disc, and that's where the final glaze of noise was added. 

My understand is that the first set of musique concrète works, Schaeffer's Cinq Études de Bruits of 1948, was created by cutting disc-to-disc. It's primitive, and I can hear development in both the technology and musical ideas when compared to these works of a short time later.

The two other works on the disc, Musique Sans Titre and Concerto des Ambiguïtés, show more patience. The former in particular brings in more sampled materials, musical recordings that are manipulated in a variety of ways. It sometimes comes closer to a sort of plunderphonics precedent. The Concerto has an even less rapid turnover of ideas, focussing more on a particular texture and/or idea for each movement.

The music is interesting, bizarre, and probably more than a little obsessive. There's a lot of sweat that went into making these works, effort that is largely eliminated now. If anything, things have become so easy that I think it's necessary in some ways for current technology-based composers to make challenges for themselves.