Christ Inao Oulaï can hear the music
by NEEL SHELAT
The original soundtrack to the 2023 film Oppenheimer swept its awards season. Every victory was claimed to a snippet of the score’s most popular track, a 111-second, frenzied composition called Can You Hear The Music. The track immediately became iconic, one of the rare pieces of instrumental music to break cinematic containment and soundtrack a summer. It was the first piece composer Ludwig Göransson worked on for the film, and sets the tempo for J. Robert Oppenheimer’s descent into - and emergence from - a kind of lucid, obsessive madness. As Robert deals with homesickness and ventures into the impossibly difficult field of theoretical physics, he runs into the legendary, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr. “Algebra's like sheet music,” Bohr tells him, as they grapple with the gap between theory and reality. “The important thing isn't can you read music; it's can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?”
Can You Hear The Music’s standout element is a gradual and constant acceleration in tempo. Led by violins, it begins at around 75 beats per minute and ends about thrice as fast, undergoing a sequence of 21 tempo changes. Göransson considered the arrangement likely unplayable for session musicians. They could have recorded the piece by splitting it into parts, but the Swedish maestro knew the most authentic result would require a single, uninterrupted session. In the end, they devised a custom click track to keep the orchestra in sync and, after three days of attempts, finally got it right.
“When you are learning to master something”, Göransson said, when explaining his vision for the piece, “you start it in one tempo. Each time you play it, the better you get, you turn the tempo up, right? So you start slow, turn it up, go faster, and faster, and faster. And then by the end of it, after you've been practising for a long time, you've achieved a level where you can play it flawlessly in any tempo […] At a certain point in time in the music, you stop thinking about rhythm, and you stop thinking about tempo. You kind of just kind of get swept away in the feeling.”
When asked to choose his all-time XI, Christ Inao Oulaï’s midfield included Sergio Busquets, Pedri and Vitinha. The selection was telling. Inao is a 20-year-old Ivorian, a midfielder himself, who this summer arrived into mainstream attention by appearing in all four of Côte d’Ivoire’s World Cup games. He caught SCOUTED’s post-tournament attention by emerging with a flawless record for escaping pressure in an exciting and entertaining side. Spearheaded by the joyful attacking of Yan Diomandé, Nicolas Pépé and Amad Diallo, the Elephants won over many neutrals and only narrowly fell short against Norway and Germany’s late winners. Inao’s quality was particularly obvious against Germany: he made more touches, passes and won more duels than any of his teammates that day.
Like so many players raised in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Inao grew up with the ball at his feet. He was born the youngest boy of 11 siblings, and played barefoot for much of his childhood. This practice began on the dirt and sand pitches around his neighbourhood and persisted after he joined the esteemed JMG Academy at 12 years old. The academy’s unique training methods heavily emphasise the connection between the player and the football; famously, Jean-Marc Guillou - the French coach for whom the academy is named - pushes his players to ‘earn’ the right to wear boots. “His philosophy is that first and foremost the ball must be a player’s friend,” Mamadou Wad, the academy’s administrator, told SCOUTED in 2024. “It must become as natural to his players as using their left and right legs when they move.” The results speak for themselves: JMG’s alumni include the likes of Yaya Touré and Didier Zokora.
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