A few weeks ago I introduced Ludvico Einaudi from Italy to TMV as an excellent contemporary composer. This week I want to introduce a contemporary French composer to TMV, Yann Tiersen. I am often asked by my piano students why we spend all this time on music by “old dead white guys”. How come we don’t play music by people still living?
This often leads to an interesting discussion on the differences in Life between the 1700’s and 1800’s and now. Back when the “old dead white guys” were living, there was no internet, TV, radio, movies and hardly any books except for the Bible. The only form of entertainment was concerts in big auditoriums if you lived in a city or at a Noble’s house on Sunday afternoon where a local musician often played. If you were a musician, composing paid far more than just performing.
As a result, composers turned out tons of new compositions, many of which were crap but they got paid anyway. For example, Bach had a great job as an organist/composer for a large German Cathedral but it came with an important caveat. The head Priest demanded Bach present a new Prelude and Postlude for every Sunday service. Two new pieces of music every week probably meant Bach stayed up late on many a Saturday night trying to come up with something new for the following day.
Music historians estimate 1.3 million pieces of music have been published at one time or another. Yet of that vast number, only about 400 pieces are still performed regularly and a Conservatory repertoire will still number less than a 1,000 pieces of music. So you can see most of the music written by “old dead white guys” did not stand the test of time. The same is going to be true of contemporary compositions, less than 1% will be played in the future.
The same fate may befall this week’s composer, Yann Tiersen. Born in Northern France in 1970. As a child he studied and became proficient with the piano and violin. However, in his teen years he deliberately broke his violin and turned to playing the guitar and forming a punk rock band. As the phase dwindled away, Yann became fascinated by various instruments and became proficient in playing the accordion, bass guitar, mandolin and basically any instrument he could get his hands on.
This led him to begin writing film scores where he could play all the instruments and record his compositions. The two movie scores which vaulted Tiersen to game were “Amelie” and “Goodbye Lenin” produced in France but became popular also in America. To illustrate Tiersen’s music, I am going to offer three links.
Comptine d`un autre ete – l`apres-midi – This is how I discovered Yann Tiersen. One day as I was browsing YouTube this little cartoon type story set to this song was displayed on the side of the YouTube page. I was absolutely blown away by not only the music but also the story of an old man reviewing his life. After shedding many tears, I have since acquired virtually every piece of sheetmusic Tiersen wrote.