Death of Lalo Schifrin, composer of more than just soundtracks

Some films change the history of cinema, and so does some music. A prolific composer of jazz, bossa, funk, pop, and psychedelic rock, Lalo Schifrin captured soundscapes of unprecedented vastness on the optical strips of 35mm film. To achieve this level of production and richness, he had a secret, which he explained to Libération in 2016: "I don't have a problem with inspiration. I start composing, and the music comes by itself. I know that. Music is a solution. Liszt, Chopin, Vivaldi, Berio, even Guillaume de Machaut, what we hear from them is a solution." Lalo Schifrin died on Thursday, June 26, having just celebrated his 93rd birthday.

Born in 1932 in Buenos Aires to a Jewish family, Lalo was encouraged to pursue music from a very early age by his father, first violin at the Teatro Colón, the Argentine national opera, while his uncle was first cello. He took piano lessons with a friend of his father, the stern Enrique Barenboim, Daniel 's father – and it is touching to imagine the young Lalo, 10 years old, entering the Barenboims' apartment when the infant Daniel babbles in the living room, these two juniors becoming a few decades later world leaders of classical and contemporary music. Lalo's training was completed by the theorist Juan Claudio Paz, who introduced him to composers such as