MAURICE-ALEXIS JARRE, THE SOUNDTRACK OF OUR LIVES

Today, The Grandma has been listening to some music. She has chosen Maurice Jarré's soundtracks, the French composer and conductor who was born on a day like today in 1924.

Maurice-Alexis Jarré (13 September 1924-28 March 2009) was a French composer and conductor.

Although he composed several concert works, Jarré is best known for his film scores, particularly for his collaborations with film director David Lean. Jarré composed the scores to all of Lean's films from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to A Passage to India (1984).

He was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning three in the Best Original Score category for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984), all of which were directed by Lean.

Notable scores for other directors included Eyes Without a Face (1959), The Longest Day (1962), The Train (1964), The Collector (1965), Grand Prix (1966), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Mohammad, Messenger of God (1976), Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Lion of the Desert (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Witness (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Dead Poets Society (1989), and Ghost (1990). He worked with such directors as John Frankenheimer, Peter Weir, Georges Franju, John Huston, Adrian Lyne, Luchino Visconti, Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, and Volker Schlöndorff.

Jarré also won four Golden Globes, three BAFTA Awards, a Grammy Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Three of his compositions spent a total of 42 weeks on the UK singles chart; the biggest hit was Somewhere My Love (to his tune Lara's Theme, with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster) performed by the Mike Sammes Singers, which reached Number 14 in 1966 and spent 38 weeks on the chart.

He was the father of musician Jean-Michel Jarré and the adopted father of screenwriter Kevin Jarré.

Jarré was born in Lyon, the son of Gabrielle Renée (née Boullu) and André Jarre, a radio technical director. He first enrolled in the engineering school at the Sorbonne, but decided to pursue music courses instead. He left the Sorbonne against his father's will and enrolled at the Conservatoire de Paris to study composition and harmony and chose percussion as his major instrument. He became director of the Théâtre National Populaire and recorded his first film score in France in 1951.

Jarré wrote mainly for orchestras, but began to favour synthesized music in the 1980s. Jarre pointed out that his electronic score for Witness was actually more laborious, time-consuming and expensive to produce than an orchestral score. 

Jarré's electronic scores from the 1980s also include Fatal Attraction, The Year of Living Dangerously, Firefox and No Way Out. A number of his scores from that era also feature electronic/acoustic blends, such as Gorillas in the Mist, Dead Poets Society, The Mosquito Coast and Jacob's Ladder.

Maurice Jarré died on 28 March 2009 in Los Angeles.

More information: The Guardian

My parents did not have any interest in music.

Maurice Jarré