''Symphonie pour un homme seul'' (''Symphony for One Man Alone'') is a musical composition by
Pierre Schaeffer and
Pierre Henry
Henry at his home (January 2008)
Pierre Georges Albert François Henry (; 9 December 1927 – 5 July 2017) was a French composer and pioneer of musique concrète.
Biography
Henry was born in Paris, France, and began experimenting at the age of ...
, composed in 1949–1950. It is an important early example of
musique concrète
Musique concrète (; ): " problem for any translator of an academic work in French is that the language is relatively abstract and theoretical compared to English; one might even say that the mode of thinking itself tends to be more schematic, ...
.
The ''Symphonie'' was premiered at a concert on 18 March 1950. Comprising twenty-two movements of music produced using
turntables and mixers, it was difficult to perform due to technical problems. The number of movements was reduced to 11 for a broadcast in 1951, and then to 12 for the revised 1966 version by Henry. The revised version was used for the ''Pierre Schaeffer – L'oeuvre musicale'' recordings. Its movements are as follows:
# ''Prosopopée I''
# ''Partita''
# ''Valse''
# ''Erotica''
# ''Scherzo''
# ''Collectif''
# ''Prosopopée II''
# ''Eroïca''
# ''Apostrophe''
# ''Intermezzo''
# ''Cadence''
# ''Strette''
Schaeffer started developing the idea of a "symphony of noises" (''Symphonie de bruits'') soon after he established his studio (''
Studio d'Essai The ''Studio d'Essai'', later ''Club d'Essai'', was founded in 1942 by Pierre Schaeffer, played a role in the activities of the French resistance during World War II, and later became a center of musical activity.
In 1942 the French composer and th ...
'') at RTF (now
ORTF). He sketched ideas for sound materials in his journal. He later described the completed work as "an opera for blind people, a performance without argument, a poem made of noises, bursts of text, spoken or musical." In the 1952 work ''À la recherche d'une musique concrète'' he commented thus on the nature of the ''Symphonie'':
The lone man should find his symphony within himself, not only in conceiving the music in abstract, but in being his own instrument. A lone man possesses considerably more than the twelve notes of the pitched voice. He cries, he whistles, he walks, he thumps his fist, he laughs, he groans. His heart beats, his breathing accelerates, he utters words, launches calls and other calls reply to him. Nothing echoes more a solitary cry than the clamour of crowds.
Legacy
Excerpts of the piece were debuted in the United States on 14 June 1952 as a prelude to a
Boston production of
Kurt Weil
Kurt Weil (2 January 1932 – 12 December 2012) was a Swiss jazz vibraphonist.
Weil was born in Zürich. He learned piano and trombone as a youth, but was playing vibraphone professionally by 1952, as a member of Rio de Gregori's ensemble. He ...
and
Bert Brecht's ''
Threepenny Opera
''The Threepenny Opera'' ( ) is a "play with music" by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay's 18th-century English ballad opera, ''The Beggar's Opera'', and four ballads by François Villon, with music b ...
''. Reporting on the performance, ''
DownBeat
' (styled in all caps) is an American music magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond", the last word indicating its expansion beyond the jazz realm which it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1934 in Chi ...
'' wrote that the piece "was played on a sound track compounded of an amazing variety of 'concrete' sounds from trains to the magnified beat of a cricket's heart and truncated cadences of the human voice. Audience reaction was at best bewildered, most agreeing it was certainly concrete, but wondering where the music was."
Notes
References
*
Chadabe, Joel. 1997. ''Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music''. Prentice Hall.
*
* Emmerson, Simon. 2007. ''Living Electronic Music''. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
* Schaeffer, Pierre. 1952. ''A la recherche d'une musique concrète''. Paris, Éditions du Seuil.
* Schaeffer, Pierre. 1973. ''La musique concrète''. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul
1950 compositions
Compositions by Pierre Schaeffer
Musique concrète