From the César for best music for L’Amant in 1993, to the Oscar for best dramatic score for The English Patient in 1997, to the European Film Award for best composer for La Vie des autres in 2006, to the European Award in 2010 for his European contribution to world cinema, French Lebanese composer Gabriel Yared has picked all the stars.
“I probably suffered from solitude when I was four and going to boarding school, but solitude also molded my character and stimulated my vocation. The childhood events I remember are always linked to music: Bands in restaurants, my first accordion lessons, and my father whistling for me to play and harmonize tunes. As for the piano teacher, he certainly had his reasons for not liking me, as I always fell short of following his teachings to the letter. I was very independent, but I intuitively knew what to do or not to do in order to reach my goal.”
Key moments of his career are explored in the following interview:
You consider yourself more of a self-taught person, why did you choose Brazil to perfect your musical knowledge?
I did not follow any traditional musical training. I trained myself in a very eclectic way, reading scores but also listening to jazz, black American music, classical music and bands like The Beatles. I would listen and at the same time write down on music paper what I heard in order to understand it better. I played the piano in bars, founded a rock band, and spent time deciphering and playing the works of J. S. Bach on the organ of the Saint-Joseph cathedral.
I met Augusto Marzagão, the director of the Rio de Janeiro Song Festival, who invited me to represent Lebanon. I won the third prize in the contest, and as I was passionate about Brazilian music, my stay, initially planned for two weeks, lasted more than two years. I was planning to settle permanently in Brazil, but I finally stayed in Paris!
Tell us more about your partnership with filmmakers for whom you composed music.
The director is the master builder and my only contact. In order to collaborate artistically there should be a certain understanding and harmony between us. Dialogue with film directors is a source of inspiration and desire to give a film the best of my music.
Films go through several stages, including writing, preparation, shooting and editing. I like to take part in the project right from the beginning in order to make sure that my music has an impact on the shooting, the actors, the camera movements and the editing.
You are a great reader of music, to what extent is your approach to music like that of writers?
Being a great reader and decoder of music is not enough to become a composer. Music is based on rules of writing and disciplines. Without them, composers can’t build, develop, and enrich their musical ideas, in the same way that writers who have never learned the alphabet and grammar could not write a book. ”
You say that you are not a cinephile, and do not need to see the images of a film to compose its theme…
It is not true that I do not like images! If I’m not a cinephile, it’s because I’ve devoted all my time catching up on my musical knowledge. For almost forty years, partly because of my lack of film culture and partly because of my ignorance of film music, my personal experience has led me to an ‘approach’ – not a ‘method’ – different from the one adopted by most film music composers. When I read a script, or when I listen to a story told by the director, images appear and dance in my head; it’s the evocative power of words. And these images feed me and inspire me to begin my work of composition.
In your recent compositions, we feel a return to the sources, to the roots, a quest for Lebanese and Arabic music and the desire to revisit them. Are you working on new projects in that direction?
I never had a sense of belonging to the country, or a sense of “roots” per se. Moreover, at the time, I did not like Arabic music at all. When I left, at the age of 19, I didn’t have the intention to ever go back to Lebanon. It was only much later that I began to awaken my roots, always through music! Before leaving, my grandmother gave me a book, the ‘Conference of Arabic music in Cairo – 1932’, which I always kept aside until Maroun Baghdadi asked me to compose the music for his film ‘Les Petites Guerres’. Since then, I have not stopped learning about Arabic classical music. I drew valuable lessons from it when I composed the music for Costa Gavras’ film Hanna K, Youssef Chahine’s Farewell to Bonaparte, Michel Ocelot’s Azur and Asmar, and more recently, Jimmy Keyrouz’s Broken Keys.
But the one who brought me back to my deep roots is Yasmina Joumblatt (great granddaughter of Arabic singer Asmahan). We created original songs for which Yasmina had written the lyrics in Arabic, and which inspired me to write some of my most beautiful music. We are currently working on a project that reflects our ‘crossbreeding’ and we hope to tell you more about it very soon…”