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Album review
Yann Tiersen
Back on the Soundtrack
Paris
12/09/2003 -
RFI Musique: Your last album, L’Absente, came out a full two and a half years ago now. Does your having worked on the soundtrack for Good Bye, Lenin! mean fans will have to wait even longer for the next Yann Tiersen album? Yann Tiersen: Well, the thing is I started work on the soundtrack at the end of my last tour, right at the point where I felt like getting down to work on a new album. So yes, this has set things back a bit, but working on the soundtrack has been really important to me. I’ll get around to doing a new album pretty soon, though. I just need a bit of time to digest things, you know, working on the Good Bye, Lenin music has been pretty intense!
So the soundtrack doesn’t represent a complete break from your solo work then?
Well, I can’t really say until I get down to work on the next album but it doesn’t feel like a big break. Basically, I felt like getting rid of a few personal tics at this point and I thought I’d do that either by turning to electric instruments and guitars and stuff or developing something very acoustic within a classical form. What I ended up doing was working with an orchestra and that fitted perfectly with the feel of the film.
Do you think your work with the Synaxe ensemble in recent years motivated your desire to do something orchestral?
No, not particularly. The way I see it, an orchestra’s a pretty natural thing. Its homogeneity makes it an instrument in its own right really. I’ve always had a horizontal take on orchestras, rather than a vertical one. I don’t think in terms of general harmony – I prefer for each part of the whole to have its own life so you get moments where you’ve got all sorts of different things crashing into each other. What I wanted to do was work on the strings and have these really separate parts going on and write specifically for wind instruments, too. That’s something I’ve never done before… And I insisted on the whole thing being recorded live - which is exactly what we ended up doing three or four days after the last tour date, in Berlin.
Well, the way I work is I record a series of master tapes as I go along which are then transcribed into orchestral scores. What really takes a huge amount of time is writing out all the different parts for the different instruments. So I got a bit of help with that. It’s a pretty straightforward job really, but it’s just so time-consuming - it can take longer than writing the music in the first place. Things went pretty quickly after that, though. There’s no problem with interpretation or anything. We ended up recording the whole thing in two days, in fact.
That’s more or less the normal working rhythm for classical musicians...Well, I don’t know about classical! We shook them up a bit! Generally speaking, I really like working like that, getting into a rhythm where the recording lasts exactly as long as a given track, no more, no less. But I really got into the studio work, too. With Le Phare, for instance, I worked at home by myself, recording all the parts of the different instruments. When I work like that I don’t make any kind of master tape, I decide to keep or throw things away as I go along. That way you get an especially fresh feel to things and a freshness that’s different from live recording even where the interpretation borders on what you get in concert. I’m thinking of maybe alternating the two methods on my next album, in fact.
Interestingly enough, the track order on the album isn’t the same as in the film…
No, that’s right. What happened was we recorded the music in January and then the album came straight out in Germany in February. But the problem was the album was longer than the soundtrack. I had no idea about the track order at the time - I was still too close to the recording sessions at that point. But one thing was obvious and that was that the album was too long.
When it came to releasing the album in France we arranged the tracks in a different order and ended up cutting a few out. Then we re-released the new version of the album in Germany, too.
Do you think a film soundtrack can ever be completely disassociated from the box-office success - or failure - of the film?
Well, the soundtrack and the film are obviously dependent on one another, although I can’t say I ever give much thought to what place music has in a film. I can be a bit schizophrenic actually. There’s my relationship to the film I’ve been involved in, but when I’m watching it I don’t pay any attention to the music at all. And then there’s my relationship to the music, but that’s totally divorced from the watching of the film. It’s funny, but I just can’t hear the music when I watch a film like Last Tango in Paris. I love the music and I love the film, but I’m completely incapable of appreciating the two together!
Interview: Bertrand Dicale
Translation: Julie Street
Yann Tiersen, Good Bye Lenin! (Labels-Virgin).
04/10/2010 -
27/05/2005 -
07/12/2004 -
23/04/2001 -
