I couldn't think of what to say about Michel Legrand that I or anyone else hadn't already said. Then I say the Washington Post obituary:
"Joy and pain are the inexorable rhythms of life,” Mr. Legrand once told an interviewer about the tensions he said defined the craftsmanship of song. "It’s impossible to play one chord without striking the other. That contradiction is life’s mystique. In music, there is profound exultation of expression. But, for a moment of high-level happiness, there are 10 tons of sweat and sorrow and fatigue and fury.”
Legrand didn't write the lyrics to any of his famous hits. Lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman. What would those songs have been like without Legrand's music? I conversed with a friend recently about immortality about Woody Allen's movie Irrational Man in which a philosophy writer/professor tries to do good and change the world by killing a man who he overhears was doing evil. The blackest comedy lies in the fact that professor Abe became his own philosophical conundrum that by moving forward one can never go back. Or as Emmerson put it: every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.
Abe blinded himself into believing that his Deleuzian monad could do something the many couldn't. Well, that was true. But in doing so the whole is irrevocably changed. He became the Nietzche 'man' that Hitler espoused instead of the true lonely noble tormented Nietzche inside him. Isn't The Terminator ideal impossibly flawed?
Some folk write their own music and lyrics, others don't. Very few great classical composers ever wrote their own libretti or song lyrics. It matters not at the end of the day only the fact that a wondrous musical life has been created and that the parts of the whole are inseparable.
There are millions of 'cute' street kids in India who suffer every day. In the film After the Wedding the fact that Jacob forges a bond with one such Pramod totally transforms his life. Was it fate or simply serendipity? It's easy to condemn Harry Lime atop the ferris wheel in The Third Man looking down upon the ‘ant people’ meandering below and thinking Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?
Yet that is a sentiment on record from some very famous world politicians. No names. For the greater good.
The power of music or conversely silence (that of course is never) is that it is so intrinsic to planet earth's DNA it strikes so many irrevocable chords within us. Perhaps without it the planet is lost forever. The CEO in Margin Call muses on the imminent collapse of his world-famous financial institution at 3am one morning to his board before the 'fire sale' of bad mortgages "the…odious excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism". "It wasn't brains that got me here I assure you of that…[You know] why I earn the big bucks…I'm here for one reason and one reason alone: I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more."
Ressentiment
Someone's silence is another’s noise, another’s joy. The music never stops playing, only that we humans allow to be deafened; why we need the Michel Legrands of this world to remind us of what the future could be when everything around us speaks of desolation.
Michel Legrand (1932-2019)
