Comptine D’Un Autre Été L’Aprés Midi – Yann Tiersen (piano sheet music)

Comptine d’un autre été : L’Après-midi

is a famous composition of classical music-film music for solo piano, by singer-songwriter Yann Tiersen. Music from the film Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, by Jean-Pierre Jeunet in 2001, it is part of the album Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (soundtrack), César for best original music 2002, successfully sold at over a million copies worldwide.

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Him is Yann Tiersen,

what he likes in life is to compose and play music with his piano, violin, guitar, and accordion. Amélie Poulain will change her life. He composes and plays this work for her in the form of a nostalgic, melancholic and joyful nursery rhyme-song, in memory of an afternoon of a past summer…

With more than 32 million admissions, the major international success of the film and its soundtrack make Yann Tiersen and this composition famous throughout the world.

Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

is a Franco-German film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet released in 2001. It is a romantic comedy written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant with Audrey Tautou in the title role.

The film is an original and sometimes idealized representation of contemporary life in Paris in the Montmartre district. It is one of the biggest worldwide commercial successes for a French film. The film received numerous awards, as well as multiple nominations including thirteen at the Césars and five at the Oscars.

In 2002, he won four Césars, including Best Film and Best Director.

film music

is the music used for a film, wanted by the director and/or the producer. This can be pre-existing music (compilations, covers, as in 2001, A Space Odyssey, Trainspotting, or Pulp Fiction), or music composed especially for the film (as in James Bond, Star Wars , The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter): we then speak of “original soundtrack” (BO), in English “original soundtrack” (OST). In this case, in France, the composer of the soundtrack is considered as one of the authors of the film, in the same way as the scriptwriter(s), and the director.
The powers of music

Its expressive function is located on several levels, associated or not, dramatic, lyrical, aesthetic or symbolic, in a more or less distanced relationship with what is happening on the screen, whether to characterize or illustrate the scene musically, to give it a emotional power over the spectator, even making him play the role of a character or a symbolic event by the use of a leitmotif.

The first scores written specifically for the cinema generally play the same role as the pieces of the classical repertoire that they replace: they only support the cinematographic discourse, often with emphasis and redundancy. This reduction of music to a doubling function will lead the composer Igor Stravinsky to compare it to “wallpaper”.

Little by little, the music breaks the cocoon of simple sound accompaniment. It goes beyond its illustrative role to bring an additional dimension charged with meaning. Beyond its aesthetic contribution, it becomes useful and contributes to the story.

John Williams’ score is a revealing example; it transforms the viewer’s expectation into real anxiety in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The musical theme becomes an apprehension-inducing leitmotif on its own, repeatedly throughout the film.

In 1969, rock made its appearance in film music. The soundtrack connects the hits. The commercialization of film music is becoming popular. Sales of soundtracks explode by offering a compilation of known songs.

The music becomes inseparable from the image and many directors give it a place of choice. The musical themes of certain films have become popular hits: the music of Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin (1936), the famous theme played on the zither in The Third Man by Carol Reed (composed by Anton Karas), or the sirtaki in Zorba le Grec by Michael Cacoyannis (1964) composed by Míkis Theodorakis, without forgetting the famous credits of Once upon a time in the West (Ennio Morricone) or the Imperial March in Star Wars (signed by John Williams) by Georges Lucas .

Many filmmakers, and not the least, considered that music was a language in its own right in their films and that it contributed to the narration and dramaturgy of fiction, as Mario d’Angelo points out. Yannick Rolandeau thus lends to Jean-Luc Godard this affirmation: “in audiovisual, audio comes first”. The music comes in support of the narration, even becomes a protagonist in its own right, as Alexandre Tilsky considers by referring to Steven Spielberg’s remarks on the music written by John Williams for Indiana Jones.

For Mario d’Angelo, this vision is not very far from that of Claude Pinoteau, co-screenwriter and director of La Boum (1980), who says he wanted, for certain scenes, to use music rather than the dialogue of actors. in what he calls “scenes of silent eloquence” where only images and music speak.

Lasting collaborations are established between director and composer who share the same universe, the same sensibility: Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, Steven Spielberg and John Williams, David Cronenberg and Howard Shore, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, Robert Zemeckis and Alan Silvestri, James Cameron and James Horner or in France Georges Delerue and François Truffaut, Luc Besson and Éric Serra, Claude Sautet and Philippe Sarde, Jean Girault and Raymond Lefèvre, Yves Robert and Vladimir Cosmo.

In the 1990s, film music interacted with the story and we could thus see the characters of Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) begin to sing even though the film was not a musical comedy.

In 1995, seeking to reconnect with greater simplicity and sincerity, the Dogme95 vow of chastity forbade the use of any music whose interpretation would not be represented in the image; it must not be added to the edit, it must be part of the scene. In the jargon of semiologists, an added music is qualified as “hors-diegèse”. If the characters can hear it, then it is ‘diegetic.’

Bollywood and its productions represent a particular case close to the musical, because in addition to the usual soundtrack, there are systematically scenes of sung and danced groups which interrupt the plot of the story, bringing freshness and liveliness, or melancholy and sadness… These passages are even more special because they are sung in playback by professionals, while the actors pretend to sing on the screen.

Relationship of music to film

For Igor Stravinsky, the music was “wallpaper” for the film11,16; by this he meant that the music should support the image and the story, but not take precedence. In musical films, on the contrary, the music is often a preponderant factor since it is what guides the rhythm of the film: the diction (singing) of the actors, their movements, the movements of the camera…

Directors and producers are aware of its importance, including the emotion it can evoke in the viewer, from the tears associated with violins, to the excitement of choppy music with overdriven sound, to the worry , the anguish or discomfort of dissonant music.

In some cases, the director is guided by music, a song, a piece he has in mind, and which may or may not be part of the film’s music. The French director Claude Lelouch is accustomed to this method; he works, before shooting, with a composer, shoots and edits with, as a witness, the pre-recorded music, then, can ask the composer to adapt his music to the duration of the final editing. Other directors shoot and edit their film with music they like and listen to this so-called “temporary” music with a walkman in order to give rhythm to the images.

Can we measure the place of music in a film?

The place of the music is linked to the overall conception that the director (and sometimes the producer) will have of the audiovisual work as well as to the quality of the joint director/composer activity (the composer being chosen for the original music that he will compose but can also often be the adviser for the choice of other music for the film and which are then incorporated into the soundtrack).

In this perspective, for Mario d’Angelo, it is certain that the budget devoted to music in a film production has an impact on the music, but the economic factor does not explain everything. Marc-Olivier Dupin already underlined that: “The Anglo-Saxons have a more balanced requirement in the different fields of creation contributing to the making of the film. They pay particular attention to the music and the soundtrack in all its components. ‘. This care obviously does not have the sole explanation of the budget allocated to the music.

Other reasons also explain the place and the impact of music in a cinematographic work because sound art is only one component, among others but which can be used according to the different possible results expected by the director.

Thus, for example, in the film Nue Propriété by Joachim Lafosse (Isabelle Huppert in the title role), over a total duration of one hour and twenty-eight minutes, the sequences with music (arrangements of Gustav Mahler’s 2nd Symphony by Uri Caine) total only two minutes twenty-three seconds. But the director, for the sake of realism and to favor the heavy atmosphere of his drama, reserves only one track for the music, at the conclusion of the film (there is then no more dialogue) just before the final credits, which becomes silent again (as is also the opening credits).

If the analysis of the role that music plays in a film can only be qualitative, Mario d’Angelo nevertheless believes that this analysis can be accompanied by tangible elements; they will only allow to better support the more global analysis of the audiovisual content in particular of a fiction. In the study that was conducted by a team of academics from the OMF and CEISME, Mario d’Angelo points out the different possible variants in relation to the place of music by defining, in addition to a criterion of duration, a criterion mixing level: “loud or only music” (like the final sequence of Nue Propriété) “music equal to the voice” and “recessed music”.

The verification was carried out on forty audiovisual content, including six feature films. These were retained in the sample to reflect the great diversity of films in terms of the two tangible criteria of length and level of music mixing.

Unlike Nue Propriété, the film Casino Royale, a James Bond film directed by Martin Campbell (2006) with original music by David Arnold, is distinguished first by the length of the music compared to the total length of the film (80%) but here too the music represents a set of musical works incorporated into the soundtrack, including a song performed by Chris Cornell and composed for the occasion by David Arnold. However, it is not part as such of the soundtrack of the film but of the album of the singer. In addition, the action sequences have the particularity of mixing the music with the sound effects.

The measure of the music does not in any way prejudge its quality. However, it is necessary to manage the intellectual property rights related to the musical works (or their extracts) used in the audiovisual content (original music, pre-existing music, i.e. recorded in another context or for purposes other than the film in which it is incorporated).

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