Audio
CINEMA, THEATER, CHILDREN, OTHERS, these are the 4 big families of my compositions.
It is important to make a distinction between them, for the means they use, their purposes, the publics they are addressed to, everything is different.
Most of the time, I have too small a budget to pay real musicians. Living music is expensive...
I don’t really need it –I can play and mix music myself–, it just deprives me of the joy it is to give other musical sensibilities the opportunity to express themselves. Music is also a collective work.
To compose for the cinema,
To become Ennio Morricone, Georges Delerue, John Williams : this is not a very reasonable dream for a young composer.
The place granted by the image to the music is large as the Far-West plains!
I had to test my tools on shorts films, before working on feature films. The cinema is also an industry, with its budgets, its reverse schedules, its commercial departments ; rather far from the daily life of a composer, who is in essence solitary.
Those who have had, or will have the chance to take part in the making of a “cinema movie” will probably be struck as I was by the amazing gathering of people, of skills, of love for Art, and of capacity for work one discovers on the set. The experience is definitely worth the huge amount of time one must devote to it !
Listen to Cinema
To compose for theater play,
I love it ! It sometimes borders on magic, while everything is but an illusion. All the artistic professions meet there, at the same time, at the same place. The exchanges, always new, are constant are rewarding.
Since I also take care of the sound effects, beside he original musics, I like to mix : to add sound effects to the music, and music to the sound effects.
In theater plays, music is what is unsaid, unseen, what takes place outside the frame ; it must find its proper place, and serve the actors as much as the audience.
Listen to Theater
To compose for children,
it’s a big responsibility... Children don’t have any prejudice or any inhibition. Their minds are still free of the little labels of “culture” and “good taste”.
I don’t think that music for children should be simplistic under the pretext that, having no culture, they couldn’t understand an elaborate musical language. On the contrary, I believe children are hungry for all kind of new musical experiences, the only condition being that their ears mustn’t be hurt by a music either too loud or with extreme frequencies.
And I apply myself (I’m not the only one!) to offering them a musical language, particularly in harmony, that is not, let’s say the words, silly and idiotic !
Listen to Children
And the rest...
...what is neither for cinema, nor for theater, nor for children, is “Others”.
A big holdall basket : the world is wide, the world is hungry for music, the music is hungry for the world, music likes being anywhere it can invite itself...
In this holdall, there are some very serious things and some very frivolous ones as well ; from music for a company film to music for a magazine, there’s as much happiness and work for the composer.
What’s important is to always put in it one’s taste, one’s joy, one’s sense of music and of the human being.
Large program...
Listen to Others
It’s often hard for me to present my musics to people, because they are strongly bound to the projects that use them. I very seldom compose ex nihilo, it’s a choice I claim (but a choice I also sometimes regret...).
At the beginning of my career, I thought that a composer should be able to do everything, able to go easily from one style or from one period to another one, from an orchestra formation to an electric combo. Anyway, I found pleasure in this journey, the same way I find pleasure in listening to music from various times and various cultures.
Lots of pianists
play better
than me,
but none plays
like me
(Arthur Rubinstein)
But I now think that the one who keeps trying to do everything may end up getting lost!
Above all, I like creating melodies. I often compose when I sing, and I believe that melodie is the framework of music, its squeleton ; the musical equivalent of the “line” in drawing.
Then, harmony comes and gives an other sense to the melody, enriches the line by giving it structure and space.
Finally, the orchestration, it’s the color, the clay, the sound material.
It’s in this order that I usually compose.
At last, and because I know my flaws as well as my strengths, I often quote a sentence from Arthur Rubinstein, that stroke me, with its mix of pride and humbleness :
Lots of pianists play better than me, but none plays like me.