UPDATED
Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning composer, has
died at the age of 91.
GREATEST FILM SCORE COMPOSER EVER
The Italian musician, who scored more than 400 films, died on Monday (6 July) at the Campus Bio-Medico in Rome, a week after suffering a fall in which he broke his femur.
He scored seven for his fellow countryman Sergio Leone after they had met as kids in elementary school.
Born in 1928, Morricone began his career as a trumpet player before turning to film composition in 1961, going on to create music for more than 70 award-winning movies.
In 1966, Morricone composed the iconic soundtrack to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a score so influential it earned him a spot in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2009.
Biography:
Ennio Morricone, (born 10 November 1928) was an Italian composer, orchestrator, conductor, and former trumpet player, writing in a wide range of musical styles. Since 1961, Morricone has composed over 400 scores for cinema and television, as well as over 100 classical works. His score to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) is considered one of the most influential soundtracks in history and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. His filmography includes over 70 award-winning films, including all Sergio Leone films (since A Fistful of Dollars), all Giuseppe Tornatore films (since Cinema Paradiso), The Battle of Algiers, Dario Argentos Animal Trilogy, 1900, Exorcist II, Days of Heaven, several major films in French cinema, in particular the comedy trilogy La Cage aux Folles I, II, III and Le Professionnel, as well as The Thing, The Mission, The Untouchables, Mission to Mars, Bugsy, Disclosure, In the Line of Fire, Bulworth, Ripley's Game and The Hateful Eight.
After playing the trumpet in jazz bands in the 1940s, he became a studio arranger for RCA Victor and in 1955 started ghost writing for film and theatre. Throughout his career, he has composed music for artists such as Paul Anka, Mina, Milva, Zucchero and Andrea Bocelli. From 1960 to 1975, Morricone gained international fame for composing music for Westerns and—with an estimated 10 million copies sold—Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the best-selling scores worldwide. From 1966 to 1980, he was a main member of Il Gruppo, one of the first experimental composers collectives, and in 1969 he co-founded Forum Music Village, a prestigious recording studio. From the 1970s, Morricone excelled in Hollywood, composing for prolific American directors such as Don Siegel, Mike Nichols, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone, Warren Beatty, John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino. In 1977, he composed the official theme for the 1978 FIFA World Cup. He continued to compose music for European productions, such as Marco Polo, La piovra, Nostromo, Fateless, Karol and En mai, fais ce qu'il te plait. Morricone's music has been reused in television series, including The Simpsons and The Sopranos, and in many films, including Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. He also scored seven Westerns for Sergio Corbucci, Duccio Tessari's Ringo duology and Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown and Face to Face. Morricone worked extensively for other film genres with directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Mauro Bolognini, Giuliano Montaldo, Roland Joffé, Roman Polanski and Henri Verneuil. His acclaimed soundtrack for The Mission (1986)[7] was certified gold in the United States. The album Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone stayed 105 weeks on the Billboard Top Classical Albums.
Morricone's best-known compositions include "The Ecstasy of Gold", "Se Telefonando", "Man with a Harmonica", "Here's to You", the UK No. 2 single "Chi Mai", "Gabriel's Oboe" and "E Più Ti Penso". In 1971, he received a "Targa d'Oro" for worldwide sales of 22 million, and by 2016 Morricone had sold over 70 million records worldwide. In 2007, he received the Academy Honorary Award "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music." He has been nominated for a further six Oscars. In 2016, Morricone received his first competitive Academy Award for his score to Quentin Tarantinos film The Hateful Eight, at the time becoming the oldest person ever to win a competitive Oscar. His other achievements include three Grammy Awards, three Golden Globes, six BAFTAs, ten David di Donatello, eleven Nastro d'Argento, two European Film Awards, the Golden Lion Honorary Award and the Polar Music Prize in 2010.
Morricone has influenced many artists from film scoring to other styles and genres, including Hans Zimmer, Danger Mouse, Dire Straits, Muse, Metallica, and Radiohead.
R.I.P.
Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning ‘Hateful Eight’
Composer, Dies at 91
By Carmel Dagan
Courtesy of Muthmedia GmbH
Oscar winner Ennio Morricone, composer of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “The Mission” and among the most prolific and admired composers in film history, has died. He was 91.
Morricone died early Monday in a Rome clinic, where he was taken shortly after suffering a fall that caused a hip fracture, his lawyer Giorgio Asumma told Italian news agency ANSA.
Shortly after Morricone’s death was confirmed, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte tweeted: “We will always remember, with infinite gratitude, the artistic genius of the Maestro #EnnioMorricone. It made us dream, feel excited, reflect, writing memorable notes that will remain indelible in the history of music and cinema.”
The Italian maestro’s estimated 500 scores for films and television, composed over more than 50 years, are believed to constitute a record in Western cinema for sheer quantity of music.
At least a dozen of them became film-score classics, from the so-called spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s, including “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” to the widely acclaimed “The Mission” and “Cinema Paradiso” of the 1980s.
ENNIO MORRICONE CHANNEL ON YOU TUBE
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUAwOBo-ZZ8S8cIH0SGoXpg
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The Best Classic Film Music Albums of 2019
Wong Kar-wai’s Block 2 to Sell Giuseppe Tornatore’s ‘Ennio: The Maestro’
He was nominated six times for Oscars — for “Days of Heaven,” “The Mission,” “The Untouchables,” “Bugsy,” “Malena” and “The Hateful Eight,” winning for the last of these — and in 2006 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences presented him with an honorary Oscar for “his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” He was only the second composer in Oscar history to receive an honorary award for his body of work.
He contributed the original score to Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” in 2015 after having made some earlier comments about being unhappy with the way his music, originally composed for other movies, had been used in earlier Tarantino films.
Their collaboration on “Hateful Eight,” first announced by Variety in June 2015, took place rapidly, with Morricone working from Tarantino’s screenplay, rather than scoring specific scenes, similarly to his technique on “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Although he preferred to work in Rome — and famously refused to speak any language other than Italian — he worked with a wide range of filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Sergio Leone (“Once Upon a Time in America”), Gillo Pontecorvo (“The Battle of Algiers”), Bernardo Bertolucci (“1900”), Terence Malick (“Days of Heaven”), William Friedkin (“Rampage”), Roman Polanski (“Frantic”), Brian De Palma (“The Untouchables”), Barry Levinson (“Disclosure”), Mike Nichols (“Wolf”) and Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”).
He was classically trained and insisted upon personally orchestrating every note of his scores, unlike many of his contemporaries. The sound he achieved was often unique and innovative, as in the Western scores that featured whistling, bells, electric guitars, wordless soprano vocals and full choirs.
Morricone was so busy in the 1960s and 1970s that he often didn’t conduct his own music. From 1965-73, he wrote nearly 150 scores, more than many composers create in a lifetime. Many were for films never released in the U.S., which led to a small but passionate cult of record buyers who didn’t see the films but doted on the music.
While he is often remembered for his often wildly romantic themes (notably for such 1970s European films as “Metti, una sera a cena” and “Maddalena”), he also excelled at crime dramas (“Revolver”) and enjoyed indulging his passion for dissonance and improvisatory music, especially in the Italian “giallo” thriller films of the 1970s (such as Dario Argento’s “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage”).
Morricone had enjoyed a top-10 hit with the theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” but it was “The Mission” that brought him worldwide acclaim in 1986. His alternately primitive and sophisticated, choral and orchestral music for Roland Joffe’s epic set in 18th century South America won BAFTA and Golden Globe awards but lost the Oscar to “Round Midnight,” a jazz score that wasn’t entirely original.
The loss — which outraged Oscar observers and disappointed Morricone in his best-ever shot at Oscar glory — resulted in modification to Academy rules and, eventually, the honorary Oscar as a 20-years-late consolation prize.
But in general, Morricone devoted more time In later years to classical composition, writing more than 50 works for chamber groups, symphony orchestra, solo voice and choral ensembles. Appearing in concert at the United Nations in early 2007, he conducted his “Voci Dal Silencio,” a cantata in memory of those killed in 9/11 and other terrorist attacks.
He launched a film-scoring career with “Il Federale” in 1961. The Leone films of the 1960s — notably the Clint Eastwood “Man With No Name” trilogy that started with “Fistful of Dollars” in 1964 — ensured his future in movies, although in later years he would regularly remind interviewers that he had worked in every genre, not just Westerns. Director Quentin Tarantino used obscure Morricone tracks in several of his films, including “Kill Bill,” “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” and Morricone composed an original song for “Django Unchained,” “Ancora Qui.”
Morricone was born in Rome. He took up the trumpet at an early age and studied music at Italy’s famed Santa Cecilia conservatory under composer Goffredo Petrassi. Although he initially preferred writing for the concert hall, he began to arrange and conduct for pop singers in the late 1950s as a means of earning a living. His pop song “Se Telefonando” was one of Italy’s big hits of 1966.
Artists in every genre of music-making have paid tribute to the maestro, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a bestselling 2004 classical album and the all-star 2007 tribute “We All Love Ennio Morricone” that featured Celine Dion, Bruce Springsteen and Metallica.
His albums have sold, it is estimated, more than 50 million units worldwide.
In addition to his honorary Oscar, he received seven of Italy’s David di Donatello awards, another Golden Globe for “The Legend of 1900,” a Grammy and another BAFTA for “The Untouchables,” ASCAP’s Golden Soundtrack Award and the career achievement award of the Film Music Society.
In recent years he had conducted concerts of his own music around the world, including a notable American debut at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 2007. Although he was scheduled to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009, the event was cancelled and he never returned to L.A.
Morricone is survived by wife Maria Travia and their four children.
A FAVE OF MINE
Oscar-winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone
dies at 91
Ennio Morricone at the 2016 Oscars, where he won the award for best original score for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.” (Jordan Strauss / Invision/ Associated Press)
Art world, politicians salute talent of Morricone
Issued on: 07/07/2020 -
Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning composer, has
died at the age of 91.
GREATEST FILM SCORE COMPOSER EVER
The Italian musician, who scored more than 400 films, died on Monday (6 July) at the Campus Bio-Medico in Rome, a week after suffering a fall in which he broke his femur.
He scored seven for his fellow countryman Sergio Leone after they had met as kids in elementary school.
Born in 1928, Morricone began his career as a trumpet player before turning to film composition in 1961, going on to create music for more than 70 award-winning movies.
In 1966, Morricone composed the iconic soundtrack to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a score so influential it earned him a spot in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2009.
Biography:
Ennio Morricone, (born 10 November 1928) was an Italian composer, orchestrator, conductor, and former trumpet player, writing in a wide range of musical styles. Since 1961, Morricone has composed over 400 scores for cinema and television, as well as over 100 classical works. His score to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) is considered one of the most influential soundtracks in history and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. His filmography includes over 70 award-winning films, including all Sergio Leone films (since A Fistful of Dollars), all Giuseppe Tornatore films (since Cinema Paradiso), The Battle of Algiers, Dario Argentos Animal Trilogy, 1900, Exorcist II, Days of Heaven, several major films in French cinema, in particular the comedy trilogy La Cage aux Folles I, II, III and Le Professionnel, as well as The Thing, The Mission, The Untouchables, Mission to Mars, Bugsy, Disclosure, In the Line of Fire, Bulworth, Ripley's Game and The Hateful Eight.
After playing the trumpet in jazz bands in the 1940s, he became a studio arranger for RCA Victor and in 1955 started ghost writing for film and theatre. Throughout his career, he has composed music for artists such as Paul Anka, Mina, Milva, Zucchero and Andrea Bocelli. From 1960 to 1975, Morricone gained international fame for composing music for Westerns and—with an estimated 10 million copies sold—Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the best-selling scores worldwide. From 1966 to 1980, he was a main member of Il Gruppo, one of the first experimental composers collectives, and in 1969 he co-founded Forum Music Village, a prestigious recording studio. From the 1970s, Morricone excelled in Hollywood, composing for prolific American directors such as Don Siegel, Mike Nichols, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone, Warren Beatty, John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino. In 1977, he composed the official theme for the 1978 FIFA World Cup. He continued to compose music for European productions, such as Marco Polo, La piovra, Nostromo, Fateless, Karol and En mai, fais ce qu'il te plait. Morricone's music has been reused in television series, including The Simpsons and The Sopranos, and in many films, including Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. He also scored seven Westerns for Sergio Corbucci, Duccio Tessari's Ringo duology and Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown and Face to Face. Morricone worked extensively for other film genres with directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Mauro Bolognini, Giuliano Montaldo, Roland Joffé, Roman Polanski and Henri Verneuil. His acclaimed soundtrack for The Mission (1986)[7] was certified gold in the United States. The album Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone stayed 105 weeks on the Billboard Top Classical Albums.
Morricone's best-known compositions include "The Ecstasy of Gold", "Se Telefonando", "Man with a Harmonica", "Here's to You", the UK No. 2 single "Chi Mai", "Gabriel's Oboe" and "E Più Ti Penso". In 1971, he received a "Targa d'Oro" for worldwide sales of 22 million, and by 2016 Morricone had sold over 70 million records worldwide. In 2007, he received the Academy Honorary Award "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music." He has been nominated for a further six Oscars. In 2016, Morricone received his first competitive Academy Award for his score to Quentin Tarantinos film The Hateful Eight, at the time becoming the oldest person ever to win a competitive Oscar. His other achievements include three Grammy Awards, three Golden Globes, six BAFTAs, ten David di Donatello, eleven Nastro d'Argento, two European Film Awards, the Golden Lion Honorary Award and the Polar Music Prize in 2010.
Morricone has influenced many artists from film scoring to other styles and genres, including Hans Zimmer, Danger Mouse, Dire Straits, Muse, Metallica, and Radiohead.
R.I.P.
Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning ‘Hateful Eight’
Composer, Dies at 91
By Carmel Dagan
Courtesy of Muthmedia GmbH
Oscar winner Ennio Morricone, composer of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “The Mission” and among the most prolific and admired composers in film history, has died. He was 91.
Morricone died early Monday in a Rome clinic, where he was taken shortly after suffering a fall that caused a hip fracture, his lawyer Giorgio Asumma told Italian news agency ANSA.
Shortly after Morricone’s death was confirmed, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte tweeted: “We will always remember, with infinite gratitude, the artistic genius of the Maestro #EnnioMorricone. It made us dream, feel excited, reflect, writing memorable notes that will remain indelible in the history of music and cinema.”
The Italian maestro’s estimated 500 scores for films and television, composed over more than 50 years, are believed to constitute a record in Western cinema for sheer quantity of music.
At least a dozen of them became film-score classics, from the so-called spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s, including “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” to the widely acclaimed “The Mission” and “Cinema Paradiso” of the 1980s.
ENNIO MORRICONE CHANNEL ON YOU TUBE
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUAwOBo-ZZ8S8cIH0SGoXpg
Related Stories
The Best Classic Film Music Albums of 2019
Wong Kar-wai’s Block 2 to Sell Giuseppe Tornatore’s ‘Ennio: The Maestro’
He was nominated six times for Oscars — for “Days of Heaven,” “The Mission,” “The Untouchables,” “Bugsy,” “Malena” and “The Hateful Eight,” winning for the last of these — and in 2006 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences presented him with an honorary Oscar for “his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” He was only the second composer in Oscar history to receive an honorary award for his body of work.
He contributed the original score to Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” in 2015 after having made some earlier comments about being unhappy with the way his music, originally composed for other movies, had been used in earlier Tarantino films.
Their collaboration on “Hateful Eight,” first announced by Variety in June 2015, took place rapidly, with Morricone working from Tarantino’s screenplay, rather than scoring specific scenes, similarly to his technique on “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Although he preferred to work in Rome — and famously refused to speak any language other than Italian — he worked with a wide range of filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Sergio Leone (“Once Upon a Time in America”), Gillo Pontecorvo (“The Battle of Algiers”), Bernardo Bertolucci (“1900”), Terence Malick (“Days of Heaven”), William Friedkin (“Rampage”), Roman Polanski (“Frantic”), Brian De Palma (“The Untouchables”), Barry Levinson (“Disclosure”), Mike Nichols (“Wolf”) and Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”).
He was classically trained and insisted upon personally orchestrating every note of his scores, unlike many of his contemporaries. The sound he achieved was often unique and innovative, as in the Western scores that featured whistling, bells, electric guitars, wordless soprano vocals and full choirs.
Morricone was so busy in the 1960s and 1970s that he often didn’t conduct his own music. From 1965-73, he wrote nearly 150 scores, more than many composers create in a lifetime. Many were for films never released in the U.S., which led to a small but passionate cult of record buyers who didn’t see the films but doted on the music.
While he is often remembered for his often wildly romantic themes (notably for such 1970s European films as “Metti, una sera a cena” and “Maddalena”), he also excelled at crime dramas (“Revolver”) and enjoyed indulging his passion for dissonance and improvisatory music, especially in the Italian “giallo” thriller films of the 1970s (such as Dario Argento’s “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage”).
Morricone had enjoyed a top-10 hit with the theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” but it was “The Mission” that brought him worldwide acclaim in 1986. His alternately primitive and sophisticated, choral and orchestral music for Roland Joffe’s epic set in 18th century South America won BAFTA and Golden Globe awards but lost the Oscar to “Round Midnight,” a jazz score that wasn’t entirely original.
The loss — which outraged Oscar observers and disappointed Morricone in his best-ever shot at Oscar glory — resulted in modification to Academy rules and, eventually, the honorary Oscar as a 20-years-late consolation prize.
But in general, Morricone devoted more time In later years to classical composition, writing more than 50 works for chamber groups, symphony orchestra, solo voice and choral ensembles. Appearing in concert at the United Nations in early 2007, he conducted his “Voci Dal Silencio,” a cantata in memory of those killed in 9/11 and other terrorist attacks.
He launched a film-scoring career with “Il Federale” in 1961. The Leone films of the 1960s — notably the Clint Eastwood “Man With No Name” trilogy that started with “Fistful of Dollars” in 1964 — ensured his future in movies, although in later years he would regularly remind interviewers that he had worked in every genre, not just Westerns. Director Quentin Tarantino used obscure Morricone tracks in several of his films, including “Kill Bill,” “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” and Morricone composed an original song for “Django Unchained,” “Ancora Qui.”
Morricone was born in Rome. He took up the trumpet at an early age and studied music at Italy’s famed Santa Cecilia conservatory under composer Goffredo Petrassi. Although he initially preferred writing for the concert hall, he began to arrange and conduct for pop singers in the late 1950s as a means of earning a living. His pop song “Se Telefonando” was one of Italy’s big hits of 1966.
Artists in every genre of music-making have paid tribute to the maestro, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a bestselling 2004 classical album and the all-star 2007 tribute “We All Love Ennio Morricone” that featured Celine Dion, Bruce Springsteen and Metallica.
His albums have sold, it is estimated, more than 50 million units worldwide.
In addition to his honorary Oscar, he received seven of Italy’s David di Donatello awards, another Golden Globe for “The Legend of 1900,” a Grammy and another BAFTA for “The Untouchables,” ASCAP’s Golden Soundtrack Award and the career achievement award of the Film Music Society.
In recent years he had conducted concerts of his own music around the world, including a notable American debut at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 2007. Although he was scheduled to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009, the event was cancelled and he never returned to L.A.
Morricone is survived by wife Maria Travia and their four children.
A FAVE OF MINE
Oscar-winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone
dies at 91
Ennio Morricone at the 2016 Oscars, where he won the award for best original score for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.” (Jordan Strauss / Invision/ Associated Press)
By DAVID COLKER
JULY 6, 2020
12:46 AM
Oscar-winning film composer Ennio Morricone, who came to prominence with the Italian western “A Fistful of Dollars” and went on to write some of the most celebrated movie scores of all time, has died. He was 91.
Morricone’s longtime lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, told the Associated Press that the composer died early Monday in a Rome hospital of complications following a fall, in which he broke a leg.
A native of the Italian capital, Morricone composed music for more than 500 films and television shows in a career that spanned more than 50 years. At first he was closely associated with “A Fistful of Dollars” director Sergio Leone, for whom he scored six films, including “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in America.” Established in his own right, Morricone turned out classic scores for films such as “Days of Heaven,” “Bugsy,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “The Untouchables,” “La Cage aux Folles” and “Battle of Algiers.”
A favorite of critics, directors and other composers, Morricone’s score to the 1986 film “The Mission” was voted best film score of all time in a 2012 Variety poll. On his sixth nomination, he finally won a competitive Oscar, in 2016, for his score for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had awarded Morricone an honorary Oscar in 2007.
He also occasionally did live performances in which he conducted orchestra and choruses in both his film music and concert pieces he composed.
It was a 1960s recording made in Rome of the Woody Guthrie song “Pastures of Plenty” that launched Morricone’s international career. The seemingly incongruous mixture of sounds in the orchestration — surging violins, the crack of a whip, church bells, an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, chimes and a chanting male chorus — so entranced Leone that he ditched his original choice of composer and hired Morricone to score what became 1964’s “A Fistful of Dollars.”
Morricone’s music, like the man who wrote it, was never shy.
“The best film music is music that you can hear,” he said in a 1995 BBC documentary about his life and work. “Music you can’t hear, no matter how good, is bad film music.”
Although Morricone scored several Hollywood movies, he usually did so from his home city of Rome and seldom traveled to Los Angeles. He never learned more than a handful of phrases in English and even refused an offer from a studio to buy him a house in L.A. His absence didn’t diminish his popularity among high-profile U.S. musicians — the 2007 tribute album “We All Love Ennio Morricone” featured performers as varied as opera soprano Renee Fleming, rocker Bruce Springsteen, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the heavy metal band Metallica.
“He has taken so many risks, and his music is not polished whatsoever,” said Metallica lead singer James Hetfield in a 1977 New York Times interview. The band regularly used a theme from the western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” in its concerts. “It’s very rude and blatant,” Hetfield said of Morricone’s music. “ All of a sudden a Mexican horn will come blasting through and just take over the melody. It’s just so raw, really raw, and it feels real, unpolished.”
Addressing the more melodic side of Morricone, film music composer and former rock musician Danny Elfman said in a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview, “Anyone who’s ever written any kind of romantic score has been influenced by him.”
If there is a common thread to Morricone’s work, it’s the mixing of that raw and romantic, expressed with a blend of unlikely instruments to create excitement, suspense, joy and pathos — sometimes all in the same film.
That was never more true than in “The Mission” (1986), set in 18th-century South America, in which a tune played on the oboe has a key role in the plot. In the movie, the oboe player is a Jesuit priest who is accepted, in part because of the music he makes, by a native tribe deep in the jungle. The score, which ranges from ominously dissident to celebratory tonal, features pan pipes and drums of various types to represent tribal sounds, plus an orchestra, chorus and child singers. As the action culminates near the end of the film, all these sounds can be heard fitting together like a puzzle that suddenly gets solved.
“These three elements: the oboe, the native music and Western music taught by the Jesuits had to be combined into a whole,” Morricone said in an English translation on the BBC program. “The union of these elements is very important. In them I see myself, spiritually and technically.”
Morricone was born Nov. 10, 1928, in a working-class neighborhood in Rome. His father, Mario, was a musician who played trumpet in night clubs and taught his son to play the instrument at an early age. Ennio did his first composing at age 6. “I wrote silly bits of music,” he said in a 1989 interview with British author Christopher Frayling. “They were hunting themes. I destroyed them.”
He enrolled at age 14 in the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, where he studied classical music, including works by contemporary composers. But at night he often subbed for his unwell father, playing trumpet in clubs. Graduating from the conservatory in 1954, he went on to compose several serious pieces. He married Maria Travia in 1956 and the following year they had a son.
“Little by little I realized that I couldn’t live on the very meager income from composing contemporary music,” Morricone told Frayling. He turned to arranging pop tunes and in just a few years became quite successful, working on songs for television variety shows and for famed stars such as Mario Lanza. The first film score for which he received a credit was for director Luciano Salce’s 1961 “Il Federale” (“The Fascist”).
Morricone soon found himself in demand as a film composer. Able to work fast, he picked up several more credits over the next couple years, including for two westerns. Those led to his being considered for the Leone film and when the two men met, Morrisone had a surprise for the director. He told him they had met before, more than 30 years ago in third grade and Morricone had the picture to prove it. The class photo, from an school in Rome, showed the two boys sitting just one student apart from each other, although back then they were not close friends.
The recording of “Pastures of Plenty” sealed the deal for Morricone to write the music for “Fistful of Dollars,” and his unorthodox, upfront score for the film starring Clint Eastwood was credited with helping it become a worldwide success.
“I think the music of Ennio becomes almost visible, becomes almost a visual element in the film,” the late director Bernardo Bertolucci said in the BBC documentary.
Morricone and Leone teamed again for two more films in what came to be known as the “Dollars” trilogy of westerns starring Eastwood: “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), which is likely the composer’s best known work.
In a 2007 tribute to Morricone, Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed called it “audacious” music. “The whistle, the whoop, the ‘60s rock guitar, the ocarina, the quick-tongued trumpets, the simple harmonies, the catchy melody are a combination never before associated with the American West or anyplace or anything else,” Swed said.
The working relationship between the director and composer was so close that Leone sometimes had Morricone compose and record the music before the film was shot. Leone would play the music on the set to help set the mood for actors, and at times he would shoot the film to go with the music instead of the usual other way around.
In all, they did six films together, ending with “Once Upon A Time in America” (1984), which had one of Morricone’s most melodic scores. Leone died in 1989.
Among other directors that Morricone worked with multiple times were Bertolucci, Federico Fellini, Brian De Palma and Roland Joffe.
After finishing the 1976 Bertolucci epic “1900,” Morricone cut back a bit on film and TV composing to spend more time writing orchestra works. He stoped working on U.S. films entirely, but for a different reason. “I was being paid no more than the worst American composers,” he said in the BBC documentary. “So I decided to stop working for the Americans.”
English producer David Puttnam broke that logjam by paying him what he wanted for the Warner Bros.-financed “The Mission.” “He doesn’t sell himself cheaply,” Puttnam said in the BBC documentary, “but he does give you everything.”
The one thing that Morricone did not get out of “The Mission” was an Oscar, though he was nominated. At the awards ceremony in 1987, the winner, instead, was Herbie Hancock for “’Round Midnight.”
Morricone did not hide his disappointment. “Despite all the prizes and awards throughout Europe, the thing not fulfilled is the Oscar,” he said in a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview. “I feel there is a hole in me. I just don’t understand it.”
That hole was partially filled in 2007, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an honorary Oscar for “his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” Although the composer was visibly moved when he received the award from Clint Eastwood, he could not help but remind the Academy that it had passed him over for a competitive award.
In 2016, at age 87, he finally took home a competitive Oscar, for the score of “The Hateful Eight.” In his acceptance speech, he thanked the other nominated composers as a group but gave a special shout-out to John Williams, the “Star Wars” composer, perennial academy favorite and fellow octogenarian who had been working nearly as long as he had.
In his later years, Morricone conducted highly popular performances of his works with large orchestras and choruses massed especially for the occasions.
Still, he kept on composing for film and television, with total credits surpassing 520. But taking a stance that was uncharacteristically modest, Morricone said his output was slight compared to at least one classical composer.
“If you think about it, Bach, for example, used to compose one cantata a week. He had to compose the music in time for it to be performed in church on Sunday,” Morricone said in a 2010 interview with the Quietus online arts site. “So if you just consider Bach, you will see that I’m practically unemployed.”
David Colker
David Colker previously wrote and edited obituaries – a beat perhaps foreshadowed by being on the Timothy Leary death watch in 1996 when he took the assignment so seriously he was at Leary’s bedside when he died. He left The Times in 2015.
JULY 6, 2020
12:46 AM
Oscar-winning film composer Ennio Morricone, who came to prominence with the Italian western “A Fistful of Dollars” and went on to write some of the most celebrated movie scores of all time, has died. He was 91.
Morricone’s longtime lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, told the Associated Press that the composer died early Monday in a Rome hospital of complications following a fall, in which he broke a leg.
A native of the Italian capital, Morricone composed music for more than 500 films and television shows in a career that spanned more than 50 years. At first he was closely associated with “A Fistful of Dollars” director Sergio Leone, for whom he scored six films, including “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in America.” Established in his own right, Morricone turned out classic scores for films such as “Days of Heaven,” “Bugsy,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “The Untouchables,” “La Cage aux Folles” and “Battle of Algiers.”
A favorite of critics, directors and other composers, Morricone’s score to the 1986 film “The Mission” was voted best film score of all time in a 2012 Variety poll. On his sixth nomination, he finally won a competitive Oscar, in 2016, for his score for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had awarded Morricone an honorary Oscar in 2007.
He also occasionally did live performances in which he conducted orchestra and choruses in both his film music and concert pieces he composed.
It was a 1960s recording made in Rome of the Woody Guthrie song “Pastures of Plenty” that launched Morricone’s international career. The seemingly incongruous mixture of sounds in the orchestration — surging violins, the crack of a whip, church bells, an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, chimes and a chanting male chorus — so entranced Leone that he ditched his original choice of composer and hired Morricone to score what became 1964’s “A Fistful of Dollars.”
Morricone’s music, like the man who wrote it, was never shy.
“The best film music is music that you can hear,” he said in a 1995 BBC documentary about his life and work. “Music you can’t hear, no matter how good, is bad film music.”
Although Morricone scored several Hollywood movies, he usually did so from his home city of Rome and seldom traveled to Los Angeles. He never learned more than a handful of phrases in English and even refused an offer from a studio to buy him a house in L.A. His absence didn’t diminish his popularity among high-profile U.S. musicians — the 2007 tribute album “We All Love Ennio Morricone” featured performers as varied as opera soprano Renee Fleming, rocker Bruce Springsteen, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the heavy metal band Metallica.
“He has taken so many risks, and his music is not polished whatsoever,” said Metallica lead singer James Hetfield in a 1977 New York Times interview. The band regularly used a theme from the western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” in its concerts. “It’s very rude and blatant,” Hetfield said of Morricone’s music. “ All of a sudden a Mexican horn will come blasting through and just take over the melody. It’s just so raw, really raw, and it feels real, unpolished.”
Addressing the more melodic side of Morricone, film music composer and former rock musician Danny Elfman said in a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview, “Anyone who’s ever written any kind of romantic score has been influenced by him.”
If there is a common thread to Morricone’s work, it’s the mixing of that raw and romantic, expressed with a blend of unlikely instruments to create excitement, suspense, joy and pathos — sometimes all in the same film.
That was never more true than in “The Mission” (1986), set in 18th-century South America, in which a tune played on the oboe has a key role in the plot. In the movie, the oboe player is a Jesuit priest who is accepted, in part because of the music he makes, by a native tribe deep in the jungle. The score, which ranges from ominously dissident to celebratory tonal, features pan pipes and drums of various types to represent tribal sounds, plus an orchestra, chorus and child singers. As the action culminates near the end of the film, all these sounds can be heard fitting together like a puzzle that suddenly gets solved.
“These three elements: the oboe, the native music and Western music taught by the Jesuits had to be combined into a whole,” Morricone said in an English translation on the BBC program. “The union of these elements is very important. In them I see myself, spiritually and technically.”
Morricone was born Nov. 10, 1928, in a working-class neighborhood in Rome. His father, Mario, was a musician who played trumpet in night clubs and taught his son to play the instrument at an early age. Ennio did his first composing at age 6. “I wrote silly bits of music,” he said in a 1989 interview with British author Christopher Frayling. “They were hunting themes. I destroyed them.”
He enrolled at age 14 in the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, where he studied classical music, including works by contemporary composers. But at night he often subbed for his unwell father, playing trumpet in clubs. Graduating from the conservatory in 1954, he went on to compose several serious pieces. He married Maria Travia in 1956 and the following year they had a son.
“Little by little I realized that I couldn’t live on the very meager income from composing contemporary music,” Morricone told Frayling. He turned to arranging pop tunes and in just a few years became quite successful, working on songs for television variety shows and for famed stars such as Mario Lanza. The first film score for which he received a credit was for director Luciano Salce’s 1961 “Il Federale” (“The Fascist”).
Morricone soon found himself in demand as a film composer. Able to work fast, he picked up several more credits over the next couple years, including for two westerns. Those led to his being considered for the Leone film and when the two men met, Morrisone had a surprise for the director. He told him they had met before, more than 30 years ago in third grade and Morricone had the picture to prove it. The class photo, from an school in Rome, showed the two boys sitting just one student apart from each other, although back then they were not close friends.
The recording of “Pastures of Plenty” sealed the deal for Morricone to write the music for “Fistful of Dollars,” and his unorthodox, upfront score for the film starring Clint Eastwood was credited with helping it become a worldwide success.
“I think the music of Ennio becomes almost visible, becomes almost a visual element in the film,” the late director Bernardo Bertolucci said in the BBC documentary.
Morricone and Leone teamed again for two more films in what came to be known as the “Dollars” trilogy of westerns starring Eastwood: “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), which is likely the composer’s best known work.
In a 2007 tribute to Morricone, Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed called it “audacious” music. “The whistle, the whoop, the ‘60s rock guitar, the ocarina, the quick-tongued trumpets, the simple harmonies, the catchy melody are a combination never before associated with the American West or anyplace or anything else,” Swed said.
The working relationship between the director and composer was so close that Leone sometimes had Morricone compose and record the music before the film was shot. Leone would play the music on the set to help set the mood for actors, and at times he would shoot the film to go with the music instead of the usual other way around.
In all, they did six films together, ending with “Once Upon A Time in America” (1984), which had one of Morricone’s most melodic scores. Leone died in 1989.
Among other directors that Morricone worked with multiple times were Bertolucci, Federico Fellini, Brian De Palma and Roland Joffe.
After finishing the 1976 Bertolucci epic “1900,” Morricone cut back a bit on film and TV composing to spend more time writing orchestra works. He stoped working on U.S. films entirely, but for a different reason. “I was being paid no more than the worst American composers,” he said in the BBC documentary. “So I decided to stop working for the Americans.”
English producer David Puttnam broke that logjam by paying him what he wanted for the Warner Bros.-financed “The Mission.” “He doesn’t sell himself cheaply,” Puttnam said in the BBC documentary, “but he does give you everything.”
The one thing that Morricone did not get out of “The Mission” was an Oscar, though he was nominated. At the awards ceremony in 1987, the winner, instead, was Herbie Hancock for “’Round Midnight.”
Morricone did not hide his disappointment. “Despite all the prizes and awards throughout Europe, the thing not fulfilled is the Oscar,” he said in a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview. “I feel there is a hole in me. I just don’t understand it.”
That hole was partially filled in 2007, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an honorary Oscar for “his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” Although the composer was visibly moved when he received the award from Clint Eastwood, he could not help but remind the Academy that it had passed him over for a competitive award.
In 2016, at age 87, he finally took home a competitive Oscar, for the score of “The Hateful Eight.” In his acceptance speech, he thanked the other nominated composers as a group but gave a special shout-out to John Williams, the “Star Wars” composer, perennial academy favorite and fellow octogenarian who had been working nearly as long as he had.
In his later years, Morricone conducted highly popular performances of his works with large orchestras and choruses massed especially for the occasions.
Still, he kept on composing for film and television, with total credits surpassing 520. But taking a stance that was uncharacteristically modest, Morricone said his output was slight compared to at least one classical composer.
“If you think about it, Bach, for example, used to compose one cantata a week. He had to compose the music in time for it to be performed in church on Sunday,” Morricone said in a 2010 interview with the Quietus online arts site. “So if you just consider Bach, you will see that I’m practically unemployed.”
David Colker
David Colker previously wrote and edited obituaries – a beat perhaps foreshadowed by being on the Timothy Leary death watch in 1996 when he took the assignment so seriously he was at Leary’s bedside when he died. He left The Times in 2015.
Art world, politicians salute talent of Morricone
Issued on: 07/07/2020 -
Ennio Morricone, the iconic composer, died aged 91 TIZIANA FABI AFP
Rome (AFP)
Big names from Hollywood, music and politics lined up on Monday to praise the talent and the legacy of Italian maestro Ennio Morricone, after the iconic composer died aged 91, with Antonio Banderas saluting "a big master of cinema."
- Antonio Banderas -
"With great sadness, we say goodbye to a big master of cinema. His music will keep playing in our memories. Rest in peace #EnnioMorricone."
- Monica Bellucci -
"There are people who have the ability to make the world better because they know how to create beauty".
- Riccardo Muti, Italian conductor -
Morricone was "a master for whom I nurtured friendship and admiration."
- Metallica -
"Your career was legendary, your compositions were timeless. Thank you for setting the mood for so many of our shows since 1983," when the rock band started using "The Ecstasy of Gold" from the score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as its walk-on music.
- Edgar Wright, British screenwriter and producer -
"He could make an average movie into a must see, a good movie into art, and a great movie into legend."
- Hans Zimmer, German composer -
"Ennio was an icon and icons just don't go away, icons are forever."
- John Carpenter -
"A friend and collaborator, his talent was inestimable. I will miss him."
- Goldfrapp -
"Sad to hear about the passing of Ennio Morricone today. He was a huge inspiration for Goldfrapp too, in particular Felt Mountain."
- Yo-Yo Ma -
"I'll never forget the way Ennio Morricone described music as 'energy, space, and time.' It is, perhaps, the most concise and accurate description I've ever heard. We'll truly miss him."
- Britain's Royal Philharmonic Society -
"If proof were needed of orchestral music's enduring power and currency, imagine so many of the all-time great films without Ennio Morricone's colossal scores, giving so many of them their soul."
- Jean-Michel Jarre, French musician -
"Ennio Morricone was a source of constant inspiration, like a member of my family... he was omnipresent in my life."
- Giuseppe Conte, Italian prime minister -
"He made us dream, he moved us and made us think, writing unforgettable notes that will remain forever in the history of music and cinema."
© 2020 AFP
Rome (AFP)
Big names from Hollywood, music and politics lined up on Monday to praise the talent and the legacy of Italian maestro Ennio Morricone, after the iconic composer died aged 91, with Antonio Banderas saluting "a big master of cinema."
- Antonio Banderas -
"With great sadness, we say goodbye to a big master of cinema. His music will keep playing in our memories. Rest in peace #EnnioMorricone."
- Monica Bellucci -
"There are people who have the ability to make the world better because they know how to create beauty".
- Riccardo Muti, Italian conductor -
Morricone was "a master for whom I nurtured friendship and admiration."
- Metallica -
"Your career was legendary, your compositions were timeless. Thank you for setting the mood for so many of our shows since 1983," when the rock band started using "The Ecstasy of Gold" from the score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as its walk-on music.
- Edgar Wright, British screenwriter and producer -
"He could make an average movie into a must see, a good movie into art, and a great movie into legend."
- Hans Zimmer, German composer -
"Ennio was an icon and icons just don't go away, icons are forever."
- John Carpenter -
"A friend and collaborator, his talent was inestimable. I will miss him."
- Goldfrapp -
"Sad to hear about the passing of Ennio Morricone today. He was a huge inspiration for Goldfrapp too, in particular Felt Mountain."
- Yo-Yo Ma -
"I'll never forget the way Ennio Morricone described music as 'energy, space, and time.' It is, perhaps, the most concise and accurate description I've ever heard. We'll truly miss him."
- Britain's Royal Philharmonic Society -
"If proof were needed of orchestral music's enduring power and currency, imagine so many of the all-time great films without Ennio Morricone's colossal scores, giving so many of them their soul."
- Jean-Michel Jarre, French musician -
"Ennio Morricone was a source of constant inspiration, like a member of my family... he was omnipresent in my life."
- Giuseppe Conte, Italian prime minister -
"He made us dream, he moved us and made us think, writing unforgettable notes that will remain forever in the history of music and cinema."
© 2020 AFP
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