For its second music lesson after that of Gabriel Yared in 2022, Sacem invited Canadian composer Howard Shore to the Cannes Film Festival to meet the public on the Croisette.
Resident composer of director David Cronenberg, a Canadian like himself, Howard Shore will give a music lesson organized by Sacem as part of the 76e Cannes Film Festival on Monday May 22.
Natural union
Howard Shore, David Cronenberg’s teenage friend, naturally became the composer of sixteen feature films by the director since Chromosome 3 in 1979. Some have become classics, such as The Fly, Pretence and History of Violence. Eclectic, with each film, Shore offers original music to the filmmaker’s organic obsessions: from Ornette Coleman’s free saxophone to naked feastto the haunting sextet of crystalline electric guitars of Crash. The composer will even write the music for an opera adapted from Fly to a libretto by David Henry Hwang, directed by the filmmaker.
Howard Shore has developed an unusual mix of symphonic orchestration and state-of-the-art experimentation. The Canadian composer quickly seduced other directors such as Martin Scorsese with After-hours in 1985, a prelude to a collaboration that would become stronger seventeen years later with Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Infiltrators And Hugo Cabret. Then it will be Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia), David Fincher (Seven, The Game, Panic Room) or Tim Burton (Ed Wood, soundtrack for theremin soloist on Afro-Cuban rhythms, very 50s). We must also mention, in 1999, the decisive meeting with Arnaud Desplechin on Esther Kahnwith a chamber music and repetitive score, with hypnotic lyricism.
Not formatted
Resistant to formatting, Shore avoids the pitfalls of an illustrative and descriptive aesthetic. A musician of feelings and emotions, he is the antithesis of the Hollywood composer who emphasizes action. And yet, paradoxically, it turns out to be Hollywood-compatible when the circumstances demand it, the time to Big or Mrs. Doubtfire. At the dawn of the 21st century, a major earthquake awaits Howard Shore: the invitation of New Zealander Peter Jackson to accompany him in the epic of Lord of the Rings, an out-of-proportion triptych, which allows a wide audience to discover the splendours of Shore’s writing, this time turned towards the epic and the magic. The collaboration will be renewed on the triptych The Hobbit.
This new Music Lesson will paint the portrait of a cultured, curious and modest creator: “Cinema is a collective art that involves artists such as the scriptwriter, the director of photography, the composer… You have to be lucid: the work that is born of their collaboration is bigger, broader than each individual.”