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LP
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OME 1012LP
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Reduced price, last copies. Henri Pousseur was a Belgian composer, teacher, and music theorist active from the 1950s on, influenced by Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio. Pousseur may be lesser known than those contemporaries but his composition and technique is regarded by many as equaling, if not surpassing much of the work of those more famous names. Realized in the same Cologne radio studio as much of Stockhausen's most famous work, this collection brings together some of Pousseur's greatest work, early tape and electronic masterpieces that deserve the recognition afforded many of his more famous contemporaries.
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CD
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SR 415CD
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Henri Pousseur was 25 when he composed his first piece of electronic music in 1954, in the Cologne radio studios where Karlheinz Stockhausen (with whom Pousseur had a close relationship) had created most of his famous pieces. Early Experimental Electronic Music 1954-61, the seventh and penultimate installment in Sub Rosa's Early Electronic Series, features Pousseur's earliest works -- his first steps. Pousseur studied at the Academies of Music in Liège, Belgium, and in Brussels, from 1947 to 1953. He was closely associated with Pierre Froidebise and André Souris. He encountered Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio and thereafter devoted himself to avant-garde research. Pousseur taught in Cologne, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland, and the United States at SUNY Buffalo, as well as in his native Belgium. From 1970 until his retirement in 1988 he taught at the University and Conservatory of Liège, where he also founded the Centre de recherches et de formation musicales de Wallonie. Sub Rosa has released Pousseur's work before, but it has never released any of the pieces included here. CD in six-panel digipak with 12-page booklet; includes CD-only track "Séismogrammes II" (1958).
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2LP
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SR 415LP
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Double LP version in gatefold sleeve. Includes 20-minute vinyl-only track "Ex Dei In Machinam Memoria" (1972). Henri Pousseur was 25 when he composed his first piece of electronic music in 1954, in the Cologne radio studios where Karlheinz Stockhausen (with whom Pousseur had a close relationship) had created most of his famous pieces. Early Experimental Electronic Music 1954-72, the seventh and penultimate installment in Sub Rosa's Early Electronic Series, features Pousseur's earliest works -- his first steps. Pousseur studied at the Academies of Music in Liège, Belgium, and in Brussels, from 1947 to 1953. He was closely associated with Pierre Froidebise and André Souris. He encountered Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio and thereafter devoted himself to avant-garde research. Pousseur taught in Cologne, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland, and the United States at SUNY Buffalo, as well as in his native Belgium. From 1970 until his retirement in 1988 he taught at the University and Conservatory of Liège, where he also founded the Centre de recherches et de formation musicales de Wallonie. Sub Rosa has released Pousseur's work before, but it has never released any of the pieces included here.
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3CD BOX
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NMN 051CD
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2004 release. In 2000, Henri Pousseur was asked by Philippe Samyn, a Brussels-based architect who liked to work in collaboration with other artforms, to lend his support to the plan for the construction of a business complex by one of the most important building enterprises in the country. There were four low buildings arranged like different parts of a medieval castle-village, grouped around a kind of large open central court. Leaning on the suggested image, Pousseur immediately suggested that the first spinal-column be composed of an electronic carillon, sounding in variations every hour, thus marking the hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Henri Poussuer imagined then a connection between Nivelles-time (a city 40 km south of Brussels, where this large project would be situated) and the time of the entire planet and the more or less metaphoric sonic and musical realities attached to it. He made on the one hand the 16 hours of a theoretically complete day of work (from the cleaning service up to the last research in the office) correspond to the 24 hours of a complete terrestrial revolution. He then divided the globe into eight large north/south "slices," themselves divided into three perpendicular "rings": north, center, south, with the understanding that only inhabited lands were taken into consideration. To each of the 8 "great hours" of the total duration, Pousseur associated three regions, one of each ring (north/central/south) set out as far apart as possible on the terrestrial globe. Over a background of a fairly continuous variety of noises which are perpetually evolving: sea, fire, city, swamp, industry, forest, etc., there are ethno-musical samples from one region or from several regions involved, more or less worked over by all sorts of numerical methods which vary their capacity to be recognized as quasi-traditional music. This work once finished (realized in the studio of the composer's son Denis), Pousseur made a synthesis on three discs by superimposing the landscapes (a bit in the manner of the previous Etudes paraboliques) in 16 Paysages Planetaires. The titles of the landscapes express by their contraction the simultaneous or alternate presence of several regions; for example, "Alaskamazonie" is self-explanatory. Something like "Gamelan Celtibere" is a sort of play on something between the West Coast of Europe with the Indonesian archipelago and even the northern part of Australia. Continuing like this you could find it amusing to reconstruct the circumplanetary movement of the work. Michel Butor wrote the luminous prose-verse alternating poetic structure which accompanies these landscapes. His text is included in the 60-page documentation booklet, also featuring two long essays by Henri Pousseur: "Paysages Planetaires" and "Atmospheric and Cultural Sources for Each of the Landscapes." Finally, with this work, Henri Pousseur makes an homage to all the singers and instrumentalists, sound engineers, ethnic musicologists and editors who have either produced, or gathered and transmitted, all the marvelous musical invention which inspired and nourished the work and which, with the sounds of the world, of nature, of society and of industry, are supposed to represent a kind of formal summing-up of life's multiplicity. All the images, obtained through extensive digital treatments, were conceived and manipulated by Henri Poussuer. Housed in a heavy cardboard slipcase with 3CDs and a 60-page booklet.
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CD
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SR 318CD
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This recording will be Sub Rosa's first posthumous recording of Henri Pousseur. It is the sixth release (out of eight) in their catalog devoted to this composer's experimental and electronic works. It also marks the end of the trilogy of the Parabolic works (following the 1972 unreleased recordings and the 2001 collective performance). This time around, we have a piece built through another major Pousseur work: Leçon d'Enfer (composed in 1990-1991 around Arthur Rimbaud). This previously-unreleased version was realized by Henri Pousseur in Cologne in 1992. This release was important to Henri Pousseur, as it concludes, in a sense, the Paraboles trilogy, after 1972's 8 Etudes Paraboliques (released as a 4CD box set comprised of all the études to be used as the basis for all current and future mixes) and 4 Parabolic Mixes (2001), on which four composers -- Robert Hampson, Philip Jeck, Markus Popp, and Pousseur himself -- tackled those source tapes. This suite of works was gradually pushing composition further into the territory of destruction and abstraction. This final installment, a mix made from the 1972 Études, as it should be, integrates a major external element (something already planned in the initial design), another work by Pousseur, "Leçons d'Enfer," a complex piece of musical theater dedicated to the memory of Arthur Rimbaud and composed in 1991 for the centennial of the poet's death. This work, over 100 minutes long, was written for two actors, three singers, seven musicians (clarinet, alto saxophone, tuba, harp, piano, and two percussions), tapes (including traditional Ethiopian music and field recordings from that area), and electroacoustic devices. With this version, Henri Pousseur shows how the deep impression left by a work in constant mutation can take different guises. The Rimbaud pictured in this flux is neither the promising teenager, nor the striking genius, nor even the desperate man struggling in vain in an empty landscape; it is an appeased hybrid breathing the ebullient air of the final times.
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DVD
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OME 006DVD
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Sub Rosa re-releases the 2005 documentary of Belgian theoretician and experimental/avant-garde composer, Henri Pousseur. Over 15 years ago, the Basel-based Fondation Paul Sacher, which preserves archives related to 20th century music, sent its best expert, musicologist Dr. Albi Rosenthal, to Henri Pousseur's home. Upon finding out the scope of documents Pousseur had kept, the musical antiquarian's eyes widened. Now, Pousseur's past, present and future archives can be found at the Foundation: magnetic tapes, scores, correspondence, etc., along with his most complex research work, his most obscure sound materials, and his most random memos. This documentary film is part of that archival body, in the form of a "road movie," if you will. Henri leads a convoy en route to Basel. For hours on end, the footage conjures up far-away and ancient places, but we know nothing of the moment, the location, or the context of their emergence. The enclosed and moving space of the car is the only thing you can hold on to or believe in. On the way back, after sitting in the car for hours, the setting sun illuminates Pousseur's face. He remembers his first glimpse of Mount Fuji and carefully shows the viewer where he was sitting on the Tokyo-Kyoto train, years ago: "Right there, like that. My wife was there and I was there." Through the window, he shows us where Mount Fuji stood. And suddenly, we can see it too, silhouetted on the horizon. Thanks to what happens off-camera, the filmed reminiscence turns into Presence. As we capture the tale of this vision, we can see what Pousseur sees. And yet, beyond that, and that light: nothing. This is a powerful documentary, which manages to change sensations simply by recording a living, direct, and unpredictable narration. It is also Henri's last voyage. Directed by Dominique Lohlé and Guy Marc Hinant. 52 minutes; double-sided DVD in both NTSC & PAL formats, region-free; in French with English subtitles.
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CD
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SR 289CD
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This is the fifth Henri Pousseur CD in Sub Rosa's Early Electronics series, exploring the work of this Belgian theoretician and experimental/avant garde composer. Along with previous releases in this series, Electronic Experimental and Microtonal (1953-1999) is comprised of 5 rare pieces that span over 45 years of microtonal and electronic work. Performed by Rohan de Saram (Quatuor Arditti), Evert van Tright (who played mainly Stockhausen), Brigitte Foccroulle, Danielle Dubosch, Isabelle Schmit (three great Belgian pianists) Sumila Goto, Mikoto Jakahata, Shuzan Morita (from the Japanese Yonin No Kai Trio) and for the first and only time, Henri Pousseur himself. These recordings are a continuation of Sub Rosa's earlier releases, namely: Musique Mixte, Liège à Paris, 8 Études Paraboliques and 4 Parabolic Mixes. Henri Pousseur studied at the Academies of Music in Liège and in Brussels from 1947 to 1953, and was closely associated with Pierre Froidebise and André Souris. He encountered Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, and thereafter devoted himself to avant-garde research. As Posseur describes of his music: "When I first met Pierre Boulez in 1951, we both agreed that the materials of the young serial music had to be renewed, both on a purely acoustic basis (electronic music) and in the relationships between its components." Generally regarded as a member of the Darmstadt School in the 1950s, Pousseur's music employs serialism, mobile forms, and aleatory, often mediating between or among seemingly irreconcilable styles, such as those of Schubert and Webern, or Pousseur's own serial style. From 1970 until his retirement in 1988, he taught at the University and Conservatory of Liège where he also founded the Centre de Recherches et de Formation Musicales de Wallonie.
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CD
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SR 231CD
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This is the fourth Henri Pousseur CD in Sub Rosa's Early Electronics series, exploring the work of this Belgian theoretician and experimental/avant garde composer. Along with previous releases in this series, Musique Mixte will cover all his electronic music and his most radical works between 1953 and 1988 -- 35 years of research and experiments. These recordings are a continuation of Sub Rosa's earlier releases, namely: Liège à Paris (a piece composed thanks to Luciano Berio and premiered at the grand opening of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, in 1977), the 8 Études Paraboliques box set (over 220 minutes of music realised in Cologne, 1972, at the WDR's studios -- the last étude featuring Stockhausen's participation) and 4 Parabolic Mixes, (four takes on the work by Henri Pousseur himself, Robert Hampson, Philip Jeck and Markus Popp). The two pieces featured on Musique Mixte (voice, pianos, various electroacoustic devices) are magnum opuses in Pousseur's body of work, though they are seldom heard -- "Jeu de Miroirs de Votre Faust" has been unavailable for a long time, while "Crosses of Crossed Colors" is released here for the first time ever. "Already for 'Couleurs croisées,' my initial idea was to add an amplified voice to the orchestra, a voice that could stand up to it and would clarify and explain the meaning of the piece, in the form of a black Baptist minister-style preach. So, besides the voice ('black,' if possible), we have: five pianos, whose assembled parts re-use almost all the harmonic-rhythmic contents of the orchestral piece." --Henri Pousseur
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