Henri Pousseur - Ballade Berlinoise

Henri Pousseur (1929-2009) was a celebrated composer whose early work is in the serial style of the Darmstadt school and included several works for electronics.  Although he is probably best remembered today for his electronic work, he composed for more conventional forces throughout his career.  With novelist Michel Butor as a librettist, he composed two operas, each of which had several associated satellite works.  One of the satellite works for the second of these operas, Die Erprobung des Petrus Hebraïcus (1974), is Ballade Berlinoise for piano solo (1977).  Dedicated 'to the memory of Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg and ... J. S. Bach', Ballade Berlinoise follows a short theme through brief pastiches of the dedicatees.

The images in this video are generated using the VQGAN+CLIP model for generating images from texts, in this case from essays by Charles Bowden and Edward Abbey, two authors who lived and wrote in the American desert southwest.

Created with Hamburg Steinway D Studio Recording preset.

Ballade Berlinoise by Henri Pousseur