Parenting & Family Quote by Maurice Jarre

Eight harps is the kind of choice that sounds like either a punchline or a confession, and Maurice Jarre frames it as both. Jarre isn’t bragging about orchestral muscle here; he’s winking at the thin line between inspired color and self-indulgent spectacle. The parenthetical "at least" matters: he knows the decision reads as eccentric even by film-scoring standards, yet he also implies that "weird" can be a strategy, not a mistake.

The context is Ryan's Daughter (1970), David Lean’s windswept Irish epic, a film often remembered as much for its atmosphere as its narrative. Jarre’s job in Lean’s cinema is frequently to manufacture weather: to make landscape feel moral, erotic, punishing. Harps carry immediate cultural freight - Celtic romance, folklore, a kind of antique purity - but eight of them turns that symbol into an engineered environment. It’s less "authentic Ireland" than an Ireland rendered in surround sound, a sonic mist that can overwhelm the frame the way Lean’s visuals sometimes do.

The subtext is Jarre admitting the artifice at the heart of film music. He’s telling you he built an emotion machine, and he’s slightly amused by the audacity of the wiring. The line also hints at the composer’s constant negotiation with directors, studios, and audience expectations: when you need the feel of myth, you don’t reach for one harp. You build a choir of them and hope "weird" reads as sublime.