Pierre Henry was born in 1927 in Paris. A student at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique from 1937 to 1947, he was taught by Felix Passerone, Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen who, in 1944, guided him towards what would become his musical world - electronic music. In 1950, he composed, along with Pierre Schaeffer, La Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul (Symphony for a Single Man), the keynote piece of his work, and to which Maurice Béjart danced. Together they presented about fifteen ballets, including Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir (Variations for a Door and a Sigh) in 1966 and Messe Pour le Temps Présent (Mass for the Present) in 1967 which premiered in the Pope's Palace Courtyard of Honour, and were the first dance performances at the Avignon Festival. Since 1950, he has worked regularly with choreographers, film makers and plastic artists in an unending exploration of a ground-breaking musical world, inventing and adapting new technologies while remaining totally in control of the most classical musical practices. Pierre Henry is an absolute innovator in the domain of sound aesthetics, a pioneer of a new freedom in sound and has led the way for many other musicians who followed.

Objectif Terre (Objective Earth), which Pierre Henry presents this year at the Avignon Festival, is a “concert-manifesto” in three parts which covers the history of our world, from its dream origins to the specter of its disappearance.
The first part, Une Histoire Naturelle ou les Roues de la Terre (A Natural History or the Wheels of the Earth), is “the book of the beginning and of the end”, the story of the Earth's genesis, when it opened, and from which sprang “bubbling life”, to this are added sounds of modernity, essential in this “pre-apocalypse-period”. For Pierre Henry, this is a “philosophical cantata”, “a physiological act of live sound”. Six Coupes de colère (Six Cups of Anger) follow the biblical tale of John's Apocalypse and of the methodical destruction of the West by cups full of God's wrath. In the final part, called Prisme, the composer appeals to us with a “general, icy, strident alarm, which should have been heard a while ago, over the preservation of this Earth under a bell-jar.”
Pierre Henry gives a virtuoso performance using an ensemble of 96 loud-speakers, as if they were an orchestra, placed all around the audience.