Gilles Tinayre
Composer, President of UCMF
“To federate is to unite...
A plain statement that leads to another plain statement: It is not possible to act alone when you engage in professional action. Given the constant improvement of technology in the Information Age, the mass media operate in a territory where visibility, outside of the gossip column, is only accessible to collective action. Nowadays, any isolated affirmation is immediatly buried under the constant and anonymous flow of information.
Yet, we are here to to dynamize our profession. To shed the light on a certain way of writing , a European touch, a style that is common to us, a plurality of language which drains from a common cultural matrix that has interweaved our our aspirations and dreams for centuries. Music knows no frontiers; Throughout the European community, Wagner is venerated as much as Purcell, Bach as much as Rossini, Manuel de Falla as much as Lulli, without attributing any added value to their particular nationalities.
Film music encompasses all styles, all cultures, and all territories: It has a great ability to cross frontiers. It is not uncommon to have the score of a German film written by an English composer, a TV series by a Polish musician, a Swedish film by a Spanish composer. So as for the logistics required for the recording of the original music. Studios and orchestras from Prague, Sofia, London or Paris are involved in the making of our soudtracks for a network of international productions outsourced for the occasion. This internationalization of the means of creation and production of film music is in itself a reflection of a community of destinies.
UCMF was created four years ago because there was no organization to respond to the specificities of film music and because a need to regroup the communication on and around film music was essential. It now counts more than a hundred and ten members, among them Bruno Coulais, Antoine Duhamel, Francis Lai, Jean-Claude Petit, Gabriel Yared. Very early on, it became clear that, more than defending the profession nationally, our interest laid in improving the perception of film music itself, as an art and as a specific industry with its own ethic, financing channels and opportunities of development, in each country of the European community where it exists.
So we are now engaged in FFACE. I see here the same importance in terms of development, the same urgency to improve the visibility of the European film music composer in Brussels, to make sure that our work meets more systematically the path of pan-European co-productions. I can feel our strength, knowing that we share the same problems, the same worries from country to country, and that we already know how to coordinate our actions to better boost our talents.