Pierre Henry, Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir, complete, with English track titles
Michael Berridge Michael Berridge
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 Published On Jan 16, 2014

The English heading is "Variations for a Door and a Sigh". Here are all 25 of them, transcribed from my 1969 Philips "prospective 21* siecle" LP. At first hearing, this might all seem like a silly bit of humour, but actually it was a very serious undertaking for Henry's electronic music studio in 1963. A door, a human sigh or breath, and a kind of musical "saw" are used as the sole sound ingredients for creating descriptions of a variety of human behavior as listed below, such as yawning, anger, snoring, waking up from sleep, stretching, gestures, tiredness, to name a few. Each fragment of sound was subjected to a laborious procedure of tape editing and manipulation - centimeter by centimeter. This is one of the masterpieces of the "musique concrete" genre. Repeated hearing of these pieces will quickly convince the serious audiophile of it's unique artistic merit.Henry's use of the stereo effect is very pronounced, so a good hi fi system at high volume, or headphones, are a prerequisite.
Here are the START times and English titles of each variation:- (the title for each piece is shown in the video at it's start).
1) 0 '00" Sleep
2) 2' 37" Swaying (balancing)
3) 3 '50" Chant 1
4) 4' 17" Waking up (from sleep)
5) 5 '43" Chant 2
6) 7' 09" Stretching
7) 8 '08" Gestures
8) 9 '47" Bedtime (lullaby)
9) 11' 21" Fever (or Ague) 1
10) 13' 46" Yawning
11) 15' 09" Chant 3
12) 16' 48" Anger
13) 18' 35" Swaying 2
14) 21' 16" Breathing (Respirations)
15) 23' 15" Fever 2
16) 25 '44" Gymnastics
17) 27 '56" Chant 4
18) 28' 32" Yelling, bawling
19) 30 '05" Vagueness
20) 31' 42" Chant 5
21) 33 '05" Trance
22) 35' 14" Death Rattle
23) 37 '42" Snoring
24) 40' 12" Chant 6
25) 41' 09" Death (Dying)

I believe that a CD might be procurable, and for the collector this is most desirable because of the absence of the vinyl disc surface noise, and easier track accessibility - and another of Henry's works from the same period would also be included.

Pierre Henry enjoyed his 85th birthday in December 2013, so here is my humble tribute to this great master of true sound engineering.

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