Music: With a Song in My Heart

Heart which beats which beats heart which beats which beats . . . no one before Philippe-Gérard was able to capture this sun which comes and goes inside the human clock . . .

The wildly imagistic liner notes by Poet Louis Aragon celebrate one of the oddest pop hits ever recorded—a French disk titled Heartbeat, featuring Composer Marie Philippe-Gérard and his “cardiac rhythms.” One side is devoted to cha cha cha, the other to a Gallic rock ‘n’ roll. In each case, the rhythm section includes a thumping human heart.

Composer Philippe-Gérard, who wrote the score for the hit movie Rififi, long ago decided that “the truest and most exciting tempo of all might be the human heart.” He borrowed a stethoscope, listened to some 50 hearts before he heard just the cardiac sound he wanted: it was thumping in the chest of a 21-year-old Parisian sales girl and model named Nicole Guillenette. What Philippe-Gérard liked about Nicole, he says, is that her heart turned over at a remarkably steady 58 beats to the minute (ideal, in his judgment, for rock ‘n’ roll). Moreover, it could be tuned up to an equally steady 115 (ideal for cha cha cha) after Nicole had taken some exercise, e.g., raced up several flights of stairs. Philippe-Gérard devised a special microphone that filtered out the noise of the bloodstream and the creaking of the rib cage. After that, it was a simple matter of wrapping Nicole’s heartthrobs in strands of music.

The results could make a cardiac case out of a cuttlefish. In Rock du Coeur, the heart thuds (behind an electric guitar, a clavichord and drums) like a bass fiddle muffled in cotton wool. In Cha-Cha du Coeur, the heart sounds louder, its labors interrupted now and then by whispered “cha cha chas.” The effect on the listener, noted France-Soir, was to create “a kind of obsession, almost anxiety.” But Paris cats were buying the record briskly last week, and other record makers are sure to approach Model Guillenette with stethoscopes in hand; nobody, she said, has yet put her “young and dynamic” heart under contract.