In Journal de mes sons [Diary of my Sounds], published in 2004 with Actes Sud, Pierre Henry wrote: "Composers work with sounds for everything; the equivalents of musical notes. I don't have any notes. I've never liked notes. I need qualities, relationships, forms, actions, people, materials, unities, movements... Notes aren't enough. They don't exist. They get lost. They're stupid. You can't work with notes. Notes are good for composers." It was a voyage. With his surprising scales, his impressive points of view, his disorienting veerings-off-course. Pierre Henry was clearly not a composer like the others. The breadth and eclecticism of his life's work, which ended when he passed away on 6 July 2017, at the age of 89, would throw off more than one cartographer or musicologist. From the Symphonie pour un homme seul (which he would compose with Pierre Schaeffer in 1950) to Multiplicité (commissioned by the Paris Philharmonic which was to be launched in October 2017), via the hit Psyché Rock, written in 1967 with Michel Colombier for Maurice Béjart's Messe pour le temps présent the father of electro-acoustic music will be remembered as a creator who never stopped pushing himself. A collector and sculptor of extraordinary sounds.
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