Sacem honour film music legend Lalo Schifrin, with lifetime achievement award

— France, Press releases, Reward
Los Angeles - 26 April 2017: Legendary film and TV musician, Lalo Schifrin, has been awarded a SACEM medal in recognition of his contributions to music in the film and TV industry, during a special ceremony in Los Angeles, hosted by the Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers (SACEM), one of the world’s leading collective management organisations.
 
Lalo Schifrin© Sébastien Paquet
 

Schifrin rose to prominence in the 1950s through his first love jazz, before establishing his reputation as a composer of music for TV and cinema. Over the course of his esteemed career, he has composed music for some of the most well-known cult films such as 'Operation Dragon' starring Bruce Lee, 'Dirty Harry' with Clint Eastwood, and 'Bullitt' with its famous car chase scene.

Schifrin started training in classical music at an early age. Initially opting for studies in law and sociology, his love of music subsequently drew him back and he won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied for three years. He met a famous French teacher of top composers, Nadia Boulanger, Georges Enesco, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Elliott Carter were among her classmates. Olivier Messiaen deeply influenced his way of writing music. We can find his heritage in Lalo Schifrin works like the theme of “The plot” in “Mission: Impossible”.

This experience in Paris proved to be instrumental in his career; providing an opportunity for the young composer to develop and express his love for jazz by playing piano in Parisian nightclubs. In 1955, Schifrin played piano with Argentinian bandoneon giant Ástor Piazzolla, a Sacem member, and represented his country at the International Jazz Festival in Paris.

With this experience behind him he returned to Argentina, establishing Argentina’s first jazz band, bringing his passion for the genre to a new audience. The band achieved great success, appearing regularly on television, developing Lalo Schifrin’s first link with the small screen.

As a pianist, composer, music arranger and conductor, Lalo Schifrin has worn many different hats over the course of his career, always with great panache, but it is his compositions for cinema and television that have signalled his greatest success.
 


Nicolas Galibert, Jean-Noël Tronc and Lalo Schifrin © Sébastien Paquet

With the arrival of modern television and modern TV series in the 1960s, Lalo Schifrin turned his talents to writing music for TV, composing what became cult pieces for series such as ‘Mission: Impossible’, for which he won Grammy awards for 'Best Instrumental Composition' and 'Best Original Soundtrack'.

Lalo Schifrin’s remarkable ability to switch between different genres of music, has established him as an inestimable talent in the world of entertainment. His passion for jazz has endured throughout his career, reinventing film music over his 60 years in the business and over 110 compositions by drawing inspiration from the genre’s unique sounds.

Jean-Claude Petit, composer and President of the SACEM Board of Directors, declared: "I saw and heard Lalo playing with Dizzy Gillespie’s band in the 60s. As a pianist he was already writing some terrific arrangements for this legendary band, and his career soon took the turn towards being a film music composer. Lalo is one of the greatest musicians of our time. With an Argentinian and American background, he is also one of the greatest amongst my fellow musicians composing in French. It is a great honour for us to bestow this SACEM award on him.”
 


Lalo Schifrin © Sébastien Paquet

About Sacem

About SACEM

The Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music (SACEM) aims to represent and defend its members’ interests in view of promoting musical creation in all its forms (from contemporary music to jazz, rap, hip-hop, French chanson, film music, music for video, etc.) along with other repertoires (humor, poetry, dubbing-subtitling, etc.).

Its key mission is to collect royalties and distribute them to authors, composers and publishers whose works are disseminated or reproduced.

A private organization, SACEM is a non-profit entity managed by creators and publishers of music elected to its Board of Directors. It has 164,840 members, including 20,012 creators from outside France (3,830 new members in 2017) and represents over 121 million works from the global repertoire.

In 2017, SACEM distributed royalties to 300,000 authors, composers and publishers worldwide for than 2.4 million works, including mandates and partnerships.