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

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. 

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

Morricone: Maestro of Music and Image

by DAVID YEARSLEY COUNTERPUNCH JULY 10,2020

Morricone in the Festhalle Frankfurt in 2015. Photo: Sven-Sebastian Sajak, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born in 1929, the masterful composer Ennio Morricone, who died this week at the age of 91, made his entrance into the world just after the advent of synchronized cinematic sound. The Jazz Singer had come out just two years earlier. Over a life that spanned the history of the movie soundtrack, Morricone shaped the combined arts of music and image as few others have or will.

His melodies tended to the simple, even fragmentary: groups of three or four notes stolen from nature or the imagination (assuming there’s a difference) or even lifted from someone else; then a hesitation or pause before moving forward again. His harmonies were rarely adventurous, however rich and compelling. Yet Morricone was a revolutionary, transforming, even inventing ways of making music for moving pictures that exerted a huge influence on his contemporaries, his admirers, and, most enduringly, his audience. He was born and died in Rome, but his music for films stretched across the globe molding the way we see and understand landscapes, people, and history, from the South American rain forest to the grasslands and deserts of the North American West.

As a boy Morricone wanted to become a doctor: he admired his pediatrician, who also looked after Mussolini’s children. It was the age of movies and of fascism. Morricone’s father was a professional trumpet player, who gave a horn to his son and told him music not medicine would be his livelihood. The boy obeyed, and also studied composition from an early age, and his father’s contacts in the Roman music scene landed him arranging gigs in film and television.

Even in the midst of his toweringly prolific career as a composer of soundtracks and concert music, Morricone continued to play the trumpet as a member of the composers’ collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza from 1964 to 1980. The ensemble’s impressive and varied output reflected Morricone’s own more innovative impulses and his talent for drawing on disparate musical sources. Listen to his trumpet work on The Group’s 1970 LP the feed-back, a recording that brings together experimentalism with free jazz and funk, and hear how he strove to avoid producing conventional sounds from his instrument. Yet his timbre echoes Miles Davis, whom he admired, and in these spontaneous ideas meant to contribute to the whole rather than burnish individual glory, one can hear the thrilling High Plains pyrotechnics he ignited in the trumpet soloist for his Western scores, Michele Lacerenza.

The improvisation ensemble’s work grew indirectly out of the required pilgrimage Morricone and some of his colleagues made to the summer courses at Darmstadt, mecca of the European musical avant-garde, in 1958. But he turned away from modernism’s isolating, mathematical strictures in order to produce works that were, in his words, “to be listened to, rather … than remain an incommunicative theoretical system.”

The accessibility and vividness of his film scores often had a searing quality informed by his profound knowledge of music history and technique. Morricone was an erudite musician, basing his work on a foundation of study and hard-won technical skill, commitments he advised younger musicians to adopt. Among the many who heeded that advice was his admirer, Alessandro de Rosa, who collaborated with the composer in a wonderful book published in Italian in 2016 and translated in 2018 as Ennio Morricone: In his Own Words—an honest, thought-provoking, often unexpected, and ceaselessly informative book about the composer, his modes of creation, his aesthetic ideas, and the cast of fascinating and influential musicians and filmmakers he worked with over his six decades of dogged labor.

Rather than subject his musical material to abstruse procedures (though he was capable of these, too), Morricone often turned to the past, reanimating it through intuition and imagination. Daunting, disorienting chromaticism was a hallmark of his modernist contemporaries, but Morricone had a gift—and the attendant skill—for bringing it into the service of cinematic and political action. The credit sequence of his score for Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) in which the French forces raid the freedom fighters’ hide-out is driven by the gunfire tattoo of the snare drum. The heavier caliber of the piano adds to this barrage with a bass line that ascends through three half-steps then leaps down and presents the mirror image of that same figure.

Morricone took the motive from an antique Ricercar—a genre devised, as the word suggests, “to search” after new combinations of thematic material—by the seventeenth-century organist of St. Peter’s in Rome, Girolamo Frescobaldi.

Frescobaldi’s treatment of his theme was as recondite as anything the post-war intellectuals could devise. (Ten years before scoring The Battle of Algiers, Morricone had published a volume of piano pieces called Invenzione, Canone e Ricercari that paid homage to the ancient masters of polyphony.) But in his redeployment of Frescobaldi’s chromatic line, Morricone militarizes the researches of his Roman forebear from three centuries earlier like a commander barking orders at his musical troops. As the French counter-terrorist action unfolds on screen Morricone charges the brass to take over the same ascending chromatic figure but at a slower, warier pace, as if another unit were penetrating the Arab quarter. More winds then join the operation as it spreads through the Casbah. Through this ingenious contrapuntal collage the venerable motive is transformed into something unforgiving, remorseless, decisive. The music of attack becomes an attack on French colonial rule in North Africa, even an attack on oppression across the globe.

The theme for one of the leaders of the Resistance, Ali, is given to an African flute, straining at first against the shackles of European tonality.

The throaty notes rock incessantly between a pair of interlocking major and minor thirds heard above a tragically heroic orchestral accompaniment. The melody appears trapped in its own prison, but will not give up the fight. During preparations for the film, Morricone heard Pontecorvo, himself a musician, whistling the tune, but waited until the premiere of the film to disabuse the director of the notion that the theme had been transmitted to the composer clairvoyantly.

A distinctive melodist, Morricone proved himself equally adept at rhythm, whose possibilities imbued the images with energy and portent, as in the sequence from The Battle of Algiers where a group of Arab women, disguised as Europeans, place bombs in a café and club.

Morricone intensifies the urgency of this plot with North African percussion patterns that sound like motors: the machinery of history chugging towards tragedy, but continually slamming into the sounds of the city or, more terrifyingly, silence. These gaps in the soundtrack stretch the tension towards its terrible breaking point as the dancers and diners enjoy themselves in the final seconds before they are converted from occupiers to victims. A bass drone spurs a frenzy of wallops on the tenor drum that seems to detonate the bombs.

Kindred attempts—successful, if sometimes fraught—to clear sonic and ethical space for musical traditions that had resisted, or even been erased by European aggression moved Morricone to create one of his greatest, most opulent scores, that for Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1990). Set in eighteenth-century South America, the film elevates music to an affirmative force even in the clash between Old and New Worlds. The scene in which a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons) captivates the Guarani warriors with his oboe (first alone, then with a studio symphony orchestra), can’t help but cast the European civilizer as Orpheus—and therefore the natives as wild beasts. With its tapestry of embellishments that Morricone gives to this Father Gabriel to play, his music evokes the baroque style of the film’s period.

Thanks to its rapturous melody and life-affirming orchestral backdrop, “Gabriel’s Oboe” became a huge hit, recorded by Yo Yo Ma and other international heavyweights.

Morricone was no ethnomusicologist, but he tried nonetheless to reclaim in The Mission something of what he imagined to be the lost music of the indigenous peoples by wedding simple choral acclamations with wistful Andean flute lines above yearning orchestral surges buffeted by the thump of jungle drums.

The result is romantic and utopian, exoticizing and intoxicating— a skeptic would rather say excessive, even schmaltzy. But this elixir can be so exhilarating because the ideal will be wrecked by the history the film portrays.

In counterpoint to the enchanting tones of the priest and the joyous music of the indigenous peoples, Morricone depicts the worldly imperatives of the Catholic church with quasi-renaissance vocal polyphony that could be (and probably by now, has been) heard in the Sistine Chapel. As the credits of The Mission roll Morricone brings all three elements together in a tour-de-force of polyphonic layering in a piece called “As Earth as it is in Heaven”—a final effusion of ambrosial, healing world music.

This reconciliation is celestial rather than terrestrial. The murdered will not be raised from the dead by the conquerors’ musket and sabre. Music, however radiantly ecumenical, cannot heal these wounds, forgive these crimes.

But this virtuosic, irresistible skill at contrapuntal combination in evoking places that Morricone had seen on film but never visited found its most famous expression in the films directed by his Roman schoolmate, Sergio Leone. In the first of the director’s Westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Morricone repurposed an arrangement he had made of Woody Guthrie’s Pastures of Plenty for a recording of that song by Peter Tevis, a California singer then popular in Italy.

Morricone’s setting called on the whistle and whip to summon visions of the open range. The tolling of the bell and the chanting of the chorus (its English tinged by Italian accents) seems to suggest that a lone singer is riding with his own posse, or perhaps being urged on by the voices of destiny. This was hard-bitten, intrepid music, leagues distant from Guthrie’s plaint of struggling dirt farmers and herders.

Guthrie had based his song on the nineteenth-century ballad “Pretty Polly,” so Morricone was well within his rights to equip that same accompaniment with a new melody. He gave the newly-inserted invention to his celebrated whistler, Alessandro Alessandroni, the wind-riffled tune shot through with bolts from the electric guitar of Bruno Battisti D’Amario.

However popular and crucial to the composer’s subsequent success this music became, both Leone and Morricone thought A Fistful of Dollars their weakest, ugliest work.

The blatantly anachronistic electronics and studio effects could reach unprecedented levels of viciousness, as when D’Amario’s guitar slashes across a devastated homestead until the camera finds its way to the perpetrator—blue-eyed Henry Fonda, taking an unexpected turn as the black-hatted bad guy in the greatest of the Leone/Morricone Westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

A similar, if richer, texture to Morricone’s Pasture of Plenty /A Fistful of Dollars encompasses the three-way duel at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The rocking guitar figure is now taken by the piano; rather than a clear male voice, an English horn intones a solemn, sweeping melody. The chime tolls. The bass now moves with the force of fate. The musical tableau expands inexorably, magnificently towards the horizon. Lacerenza’s trumpet soars. The incomparable soprano Edda Dell’Orso—one of the singers in Alessandroni’s choir, Cantori Moderni., that is also heard in these Westerns offers up a benediction for the death soon to descend.

These pastures of plenty are full of the dead and the loot, the spoils of war and the winning of the west.

At the end, the coyote cry of the famed opening theme returns to lacerate the landscape. That musical utterance is so much more violent than the sounds of the animal itself. The soundtrack tells us that human deceit and revenge are unique in nature.

That Morricone’s score soared over the credits after the battle was done proved that, however closely tied to the images like the noose around “the ugly” Tuco’s head, music wins the final duel between sound and image.

Morricone received an honorary Oscar in 2007, handed to him by Clint Eastwood, whose first starring role had come in A Fistful of Dollars. In his speech, Morricone said that the prize represented not a point of arrival but of departure. He kept on riding. Nominated for a sixth time for his grand score (the penultimate soundtrack of the more than 500 he delivered) for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016, Morricone become the oldest winner of a competitive Academy Award. He was as old as Oscar himself: Morricone and Academy Awards had both been born in the fateful year of 1929.

That evening in Los Angeles, Morricone spoke in Italian, with Eastwood translating. In Morricone: In His Own Words, the composer expressed regret that he never learned English or another foreign language. For all its ennobling mixture of diversity and specificity, technique and imagination, Morricone’s soundtracks speak a global language, immediately and powerfully understood and loved. Morricone shrugged off Tarantino’s fawning comparison of him to Mozart and Beethoven. The Maestro was modest about how history would judge his work, but his music doesn’t just survive him, it glorifies him and his visionary hearing of the world.

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by:DAVID YEARSLEY

DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at  dgyearsley@gmail.com

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MORRICONE

Ennio Morricone A Fistful of Composer

Who else but famed Movie score/soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone would have a gorgeous Flash home page with great sound. Check it out. Yes it is in Italian. But the sound compostion that is playing in the background will more than make up for the time you spend navigating. It is by far the most stupendous sound I have heard come out of the tiny crappy speakers that are installed in my 19 inch Monitor. Amazing. Do check it out.

Oh and did I mention I am a Morricone fan. The man is a Genius. He is not only a composer of a mammoth collection of movie soundtracks but of Symphonic compositions as well.Morricone in London!:

And I am not the only one who thinks so.


Ennio not only outlasts the lumiére of such scored-film fare but still overshadows both his contemporaries and his bambinos.

His work is beyond just scoring films, without his sound the films are nothing. Whether the haunting echo of the harmoncia in Once Upon A Time In The West, or the strange melodies of terror he evokes for the films of Dario Agenta.

Unlike Gyuri, who becomes increasingly pallid, the film becomes more gray and dark, washing away all color. Its stark scenes of massed prisoners and looming guard towers acquire a bizarre, twisted beauty, which is accented by the haunting music of veteran composer Ennio Morricone.A haunting look at inhumanity and survival

Along with this new movie sound track he has a new collaboration with Ex-Smiths lead singer and now Bryan Ferry knock off Morrissey;

Morrissey Moves on From Miserable, Discovers Libido in New CD

With Tony Visconti producing, Morrissey has essentially made a thoughtful and probing album for adult-contemporary radio.
Musically, Morrissey falters

Considering the spottiness of Morrissey's last few releases, you wouldn't be out of line nursing low expectations for the singer's eighth solo release. Produced by former Bowie/T. Rex collaborator Tony Visconti, recorded in Rome and featuring string arrangements from spaghetti western composer Ennio Morricone, the disc sees the former Smiths frontman not only reinvigorating his sound but coming back to life Ringleader of the Tormentors

It’s on the Ennio Morricone-arranged gospel concerto ‘Dear God, Please Help Me’ though where the intimacy really kicks in, as His Master declares his intent from the off (“There are explosive kegs between my legs”) like some sexually deprived artisan – which many have been led to believe he was for at least two decades – before erupting in magnanimous joy at his success in coveting a relationship at last (“…Now I’m spreading your legs with mine between!”).Morrissey: Ringleader Of The Tormentors

And the Ennio Morricone influence in modern pop rock continues with the release of Muse's new album

Muse To Shock Fans On New Album

Howard has described the album as a "very drastic" mix of musical styles, ranging from "mellow jazz" to "Prince-influenced, groove-based rock weirdness". New song "The Knights Of Cydonia" took inspiration from Italian film composer of such classics "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly" and "The Untouchables", Ennio Morricone,

Muse Hope Fans Aren't Too Shocked By 'Genre-Morphing' New LP

And his influence is felt in the works of the musically adventureous Brit Punjabi Nitin Sawhney

His first album, Spirit Dance (1994), grew from listening to the Bristol trip-hop collective Massive Attack, and realising that "you can incorporate diverse music on one album and make it work". He retains his enthusiasm for Indian classical musicians, including Hariprasad Chaurasia, Ravi Shankar, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Zakir Hussain. Through the films of Satyajit Ray he discovered and was influenced by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, famed for Bengali songs as well as poetry. He also admired Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who revolutionised the spaghetti western with his scores for Sergio Leone's films.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Ennio, Morricone, Composer, Spagetti, Westerns, Soundtracks, Movies, Morrissey, Smiths, Muse, Ferry