Word: musicalization
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...heard, the movie, and thought Jarre could be helpful in finding an aural complement to Lean's sand-swept tribute to T.E. Lawrence. As Stephen M. Silverman tells it in his excellent Lean biography, Spiegel had originally wanted Lawrence to have three composers: Jarre would do the dramatic music, while Aram Khachaturian scored the Arab scenes and Benjamin Britten the English. When those two estimable gents proved unavailable, Spiegel corralled Richard Rodgers into writing an Arabian motif and a "love theme" - for an all-male movie. Sanity eventually prevailed: the not-so-well-known Frenchman composed the whole score...
...However Arabic or Russian the orchestrations, Jarre's music fit the plangent mood of French postwar pop: the mordant, worldly-wise chansons of Gilbert Bécaud, Marguerite Monnot, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour. The simple melodies follow a clear ascending or descending line, and sound either inevitable or predictable, depending on the extent of the listener's fondness for the form. Jarre didn't write pop songs, exactly; "Lara's Theme" was his one Top 40 hit. But the sound was marketable in movies, and after Lawrence, Jarre's tinny, tinkly, discordant music was in high demand by directors searching...
...lent it to William Wyler's The Collector, Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum, George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Paul Mazursky's Enemies; A Love Story and Jerry Zucker's Ghost. He could churn out military music in a minor key, like a sarcastic Sousa; that's what you hear under the espionage chicanery in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz, ornamenting the anti-Nazi smuggling in John Frankenheimer's The Train and underlining the grand folly of two British soldiers' Afghanistan caper in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King. At times Jarre mocked...
...told one sympathetic critic, Jon Burlingame of Variety, that he took on so many assignments because he had a bunch of ex-wives (three) and owed them all alimony. The first of these marriages begat a son, Jean-Michel, who made his own name as a composer of electronic music and producer of gargantuan sound-and-light shows, one of which drew 3.5 million people to celebrate the 850th anniversary of the city of Moscow in 1997. (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory...
...Papa Maurice enjoyed a 50-year career, including three Oscars (for Lawrence, Zhivago and Lean's last film, A Passage to India), because he knew that film music is not the star of a movie; it is the secret supporting player that brings out the tension, the yearning, the drama. And because, back in 1962, when he was a little-known composer auditioning for a famous director and his imperious producer, David Lean said to Spiegel, "Sam, this chap here should do the work." Movie lovers and music lovers should be happy that Jarre...