Evoking the work of the composer Henri Pousseur feels quite like travelling across a century of contemporary musical adventure with ears and eyes wide open, discovering unlikely links between pernickety writing and audible architecture, instrumental quintessence and electroacoustic experience.

His first musical studies lead Henri Pousseur in the wake of the serial movement, developed by Arnold Schoenberg’s Viennese school, along with Pierre Boulez, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, but he soon moved away from what he now calls the « limited series ».

Being an enthusiast of the freedom of creation, his inspiration makes go against the dogmas. The essential for Henri Pousseur is to get beyond the divisions, all kind of divisions, and particularly those who separate the ancient from the modern and the “learned” from the popular.

It is essential for him to reconnect to his roots and to resume dialog with his past through a constantly reinvented relation with history, culture, geography and sociology. Otherwise, how could we explain his deep-seated attachment to his native Wallonie – from his influence on the whole creation of Musiques Nouvelles, by his friend Pierre Bartholomée, amongst others, in 1961, to the founding of the Center for musical research of Walonie in 1970, where his reflection into a more lively way of teaching contemporary music styles is put into practice.

For him, it was also fundamental to start a real research work on the emerging musical opportunities. That’s why he created in 1960 the first studio for electronic music in Brussels called the Apelac, where many compositions were created like Rimes, for three orchestral groups and tape. With Musiques Nouvelles, he benefits of a first proper interpretation of his work Répons in 1962. With Votre Faust, a creation in the operatic genre, which combines magnetic tapes and quadraphonic projection, he brings into reality the long-term work he elaborated with one of his most faithful friends and collaborators, the writer Michel Butor, who paid homage to him in the post-face of the indispensable work written by Henri Pousseur, with his explicit title, Musiques Croisées.

In all, Henri Pousseur wrote more than 180 electroacoustic or combined works like Diechterliebesreigentraum, Couleurs Croisées, Le Procès du Jeune Chien or La Rose des Voix, preceded by a reading of a text written by Michel Butor, or also Seize Paysages planétaires, the ethno-electroacoustic experience, which lead the composer to the digital images of his multimedial music project Voix et Vues Planétaire, and its final theme, Vietnamibie, will be interpreted by Henri Pousseur during the Qwartz Music Awards*.

As he likes to say about his own work: if all this was nothing but an inconsistent dream, I’d rather have daydreamt it, this particular dream instead of any other.” Let’s dream then!

Laurent Catala

*Note of the Président:

Because of a health problem, Henri Pousseur was not able to join us as planed for the Qwartz Awards ceremony to receive the Qwartz Pierre Schaeffer. Here is the text he sent us.