The composer who pioneered electronic music

Pierre Henry is considered the grandfather of techno music. In the 1950s, the French composer began using ambient sounds rather than musical notes— dripping water, car horns, train engines—and manipulating them into coherent musical works. Together with fellow composer Pierre Schaeffer, he created the first classics of an experimental genre the pair called musique concrète. Henry later incorporated electronics into his work, paving the way for today’s techno stars. “Musique concrète [is] not a study of timbre,” he said. “It must be presented by means of nontraditional characteristics.” Born in Paris, Henry “entered the Paris Conservatoire when he was 9,” said The Guardian (U.K.). He studied under the esteemed composer Olivier Messiaen and alongside Pierre Boulez, who later became a major conductor. Henry “found his metier” at age 22, when he joined Schaeffer’s studio at French Radio andTelevision. The pair were “poles apart in temperament”—Henry was a risk-taker, Schaeffer more “precise”—but they “made a good team.” Their first major work, Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (1950–51), involved “playing tapes at different speeds, backwards, or as loops.” In the mid-1950s, Henry began working with the avant-garde choreographer Maurice Béjart, “with whom he collaborated on more than a dozen ballets,” said The New York Times. He set up “the first private electronic studio in France,” where he went on to produce a large and varied oeuvre. One of his most celebrated pieces was La Dixième Symphonie de Beethoven (1979), in which he “knitted together isolated chords, arpeggios, and rhythmic components from Beethoven’s nine symphonies into a single grand tribute.”