Legrand master
Ahead of his forthcoming appearance at the NCH, revered film composer Michel Legrand joins Jackie Hayden for a tete-a-tete about his approach to writing for the big screen.
Jackie Hayden, 19 Aug 2010
Michel Legrand is best known for psychedelic pop song ‘The Windmills of Your Mind', a hit for Noel Harrison in 1969 and covered by Dusty Springfield for her classic Dusty In Memphis album. He's also had his music recorded by Smokey Robinson, Johnny Mathis, Shirley Bassey, Tony Bennett, Andy Williams and numerous others. However. soundtrack buffs will know him as the composer of the music for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Yentl, The Thomas Crown Affair, Summer of '42 and many other revered movies.
Whereas most popular composers these days write on piano or guitar, Legrand eschews those options for a more traditional approach.
"I never use an instrument when I compose. I prefer to compose my work in silence, sitting at a table. From the very beginning I have done it the same way, written the music down on music paper. Just like a long time ago composers wrote their music down with a feather on parchment," he explains with a mischievous laugh.
When I ask him if he has a particular procedure for composing, or if he simply waits for inspiration, he again chuckles heartily.
"I usually compose with my attention on various aspects of what is required for the piece I've been asked to write. I have to think of the tempo, the tonality, the mood, the sound of the instrument, the range and style of the vocalist and all those factors. It's impossible for me to explain exactly how I do it."
I wonder if his father Raymond, another prolific composer, who wrote numerous scores for French films in the '30s and ‘40s, used the same approach. Michel says non.
"My father was not a technician. He was a self-made man who was very gifted. He did more arranging than composing." So what did the son learn from the father? "I don't think I got anything from him," Legrand Junior responds, "because he had left my mother when I was three years old and he was not there when I was doing my music studies."
He says he always works with a specific project in mind. "That's how, for example, ‘The Windmills of Your Mind' came into being. I was scoring a movie for Norman Jewison called The Thomas Crown Affair and there was one section when the character played by the actor Steve McQueen was piloting a glider. The sequence was about two and a half minutes long, so I said to Norman Jewison ‘I'd love to write a song for this section, a song about how the world is the air, and the turning around and so on'. And he said ‘fine'. So with Alan and Marilyn Bergman we wrote the song. Norman loved it and he put it in the film."
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