Legrand master

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."
And was he surprised when it turned out to be a popular hit for Noel Harrison? "No," he says, emphatically. "You never know what can happen to a song. It's out of my control."
What comes first, the music or the lyrics? "For me, it's nearly always the melody. In the English language I write with the Bergmans, who are great lyric writers. For the film Yentl there were some exceptions to that approach. Sometimes the lyrics were written first and I came later with the music. For me that's rare."
When I ask him who are his favourite classical and jazz performers, he chuckles. "Do you have maybe a week for me to tell you? I listen to all the great performers. You know them, so I don't need to tell you who they are." He's equally reluctant to pick favourites from his vast catalogue of compositions. "I love all my children, so I don't have any preferences. I've liked everything I've written so far, because they belong to me and they were fine for the purpose for which they were composed."
As for his reputation as a prolific composer of film music, he ascribes that to one thing. "It's the passion for the music and for the film and for everything. I love every kind of music: classical, jazz, songs, symphonies, and I participate in every possible style. I work as a performer, a conductor, an arranger and a composer. No one of them is more important than another. All of these activities belong to the same person, they are all part of me, what I am."
Legrand, having been born in Paris in 1932, had started out as a pianist. "When I was young I needed to make a living. The first piano I had was a lousy old instrument. I did my studies at the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique in Paris. I was very young when I decided I wanted music to be my life. It was not because I thought I would make a career of it, but because I wanted to do it, because I had to do it. Even if I had not been able to make a living from it I would still have had to do it. It could have been a disaster. I didn't care. Risky or not, I never thought of doing anything else with my life. Never. Music is my life. I eat music."