French composer Pierre Henry, a pioneer of electronic music, has died last night at the age of 89. Henry, born in Paris, began experimenting with sounds and the integration of noise into music at the age of 15. He studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen.
Between 1949 and 1958, Henry worked at the Club d’Essai studio of the French radio, which had been founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1943, and started composing what he called musique concrète. Later, he founded with Jean Baronnet the first private electronic studio in France, the Apsone-Cabasse Studio.
He produced a great number of film music, ballets and other pieces, among them his Symphonie pour un homme seul (in collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer), his Messe pour le temps présent (1967) as well as one of his last works, Continuo, commissioned by the Paris Philharmonic Hall in 2016.
