A short interview from ten years ago. There is a link to the compilation Crime and Dissonance which Mike Patton released on his independent label and which focuses exclusively on Morricone’s early and avant garde material.
Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning Composer of Film Scores, Dies at 91
His vast output included atmospheric music for spaghetti westerns in his native Italy and scores for some 500 movies by a Who’s Who of directors.
Ennio Morricone directed a concert in Rome in January.Credit...Roberto Monaldo/LaPresse, via Associated Press
By Robert D. McFadden
Published July 6, 2020Updated July 7, 2020
Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer whose atmospheric scores for spaghetti westerns and some 500 films by a Who’s Who of international directors made him one of the world’s most versatile and influential creators of music for the modern cinema, died on Monday in Rome. He was 91.
His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, who said that Mr. Morricone was admitted there last week after falling and fracturing a femur. Mr. Assumma also distributed a statement that Mr. Morricone had written himself, titled, “I, Ennio Morricone, am dead.”
To many cineastes, Maestro Morricone (pronounced (mo-ree-CONE-eh) was a unique talent, composing melodic accompaniments to comedies, thrillers and historical dramas by Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malick, Roland Joffé, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino and other filmmakers.
He scored many popular films of the past 40 years: Édouard Molinaro’s “La Cage aux Folles” (1978), Mr. Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), Mr. De Palma’s “The Untouchables” (1987), Roman Polanski’s “Frantic” (1988), Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” (1988), Wolfgang Petersen’s “In the Line of Fire” (1993), and Mr. Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” (2015).
Mr. Morricone won his first competitive Academy Award for his score for “The Hateful Eight,” an American western mystery thriller for which he also won a Golden Globe. In a career showered with honors, he had previously won an Oscar for lifetime achievement (2007) and was nominated for five other Academy Awards; in addition, he won two Golden Globes, four Grammys and dozens of international awards.
Image
Mr. Morricone receiving an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007.Credit...Monica Almeida/The New York Times
But the work that made him world famous, and that was best known to moviegoers, was his blend of music and sound effects for Sergio Leone’s so-called spaghetti westerns of the 1960s: a ticking pocket watch, a sign creaking in the wind, buzzing flies, a twanging Jew’s harp, haunting whistles, cracking whips, gunshots and a bizarre, wailing “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah,” played on a sweet potato-shaped wind instrument called an ocarina.
Imitated, scorned, spoofed, what came to be known as “The Dollars Trilogy” — “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), all released in the United States in 1967 — starred Clint Eastwood as “The Man With No Name” and were enormous hits, with a combined budget of $2 million and gross worldwide receipts of $280 million.
The trilogy’s Italian dialogue was dubbed for the English-speaking market, and the action was brooding and slow, with clichéd close-ups of gunfighters’ eyes. But Mr. Morricone, breaking the unwritten rule never to upstage actors with music, infused it all with wry sonic weirdness and melodramatic strains that many fans embraced with cultlike devotion and that critics called viscerally true to Mr. Leone’s vision of the Old West.
“In the films that established his reputation in the 1960s, the series of spaghetti westerns he scored for Mr. Leone, Mr. Morricone’s music is anything but a backdrop,” The New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in 2007. “It’s sometimes a conspirator, sometimes a lampoon, with tunes that are as vividly in the foreground as any of the actors’ faces.”
Mr. Morricone also scored Mr. Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and his Jewish gangster drama, “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), both widely considered masterpieces. But he became most closely identified with “The Dollars Trilogy,” and in time grew weary of answering for their lowbrow sensibilities.
Asked by The Guardian in 2006 why “A Fistful of Dollars” had made such an impact, he said: “I don’t know. It’s the worst film Leone made and the worst score I did.”
“The Ecstasy of Gold,” from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” was one of Mr. Morricone’s biggest hits. It was recorded by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on a 2004 album of Mr. Morricone’s compositions and used in concert by two rock bands: as closing music for the Ramones and the introductory theme for Metallica.
Image
A scene from the Sergio Leone film “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Its theme was one of Mr. Morricone’s biggest hits.Credit...MGM
Mr. Morricone looked professorial in bow ties and spectacles, with wisps of flyaway white hair. He sometimes holed up in his palazzo in Rome and wrote music for weeks on end, composing not at a piano but at a desk. He heard the music in his mind, he said, and wrote it in pencil on score paper for all orchestra parts.
He sometimes scored 20 or more films a year, often working only from a script before screening the rushes. Directors marveled at his range — tarantellas, psychedelic screeches, swelling love themes, tense passages of high drama, stately evocations of the 18th century or eerie dissonances of the 20th — and at the ingenuity of his silences: He was wary of too much music, of overloading an audience with emotions.
Mr. Morricone composed for television films and series, (some of his music was reused on “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons”), wrote about 100 concert pieces, and orchestrated music for popular singers, including Joan Baez, Paul Anka and Anna Maria Quaini, the Italian star known as Mina.
Mr. Morricone never learned to speak English, never left Rome to compose, and for years refused to fly anywhere, though he eventually flew all over the world to conduct orchestras, sometimes performing his own compositions. While he wrote extensively for Hollywood, he did not appear in concert in the United States until 2007, when, at 78, he made a monthlong tour, punctuated by festivals of his films.
Image
Mr. Morricone directing an ensemble in Milan in 2018.Credit...Luca Bruno/Associated Press
He gave concerts in New York at Radio City Music Hall and the United Nations, and he concluded the tour in Los Angeles, where he received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. The presenter, Clint Eastwood, roughly translated his acceptance speech from the Italian as the composer expressed “deep gratitude to all the directors who had faith in me.”
Ennio Morricone was born in Rome on Nov. 10, 1928, one of five children of Mario and Libera (Ridolfi) Morricone. His father, a trumpet player, taught him to read music and play various instruments. Ennio wrote his first compositions at 6. In 1940, he entered the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, where he studied trumpet, composition and direction.
His World War II experiences — hunger and the dangers of Rome as an “open city” under German and American armies — were reflected in some of his later work. After the war, he wrote music for radio; for Italy’s broadcasting service, RAI; and for singers under contract to RCA.
Mr. Morricone’s survivors include his wife, Maria Travia, whom he married in 1956 and cited when accepting his 2016 Oscar; four children, Marco, Alessandra, Andrea (a composer and conductor) and Giovanni; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Morricone’s first film credit was for Luciano Salce’s comedy “The Fascist” (1961). He soon began his collaboration with Mr. Leone, a former schoolmate. But he also scored political films: Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” (1966), Mr. Pasolini’s “The Hawks and the Sparrows” (1966), Giuliano Montaldo’s “Sacco and Vanzetti” (1971) and Mr. Bertolucci’s “1900” (1976).
image
Mr. Morricone, left, received a “Golden Lion” career award for lifetime achievement at the 1995 Venice Film Festival.Credit...Luigi Costantini/Associated Press
Five Morricone scores nominated for Oscars displayed his virtuosity. In Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978), he captured a love triangle in the Texas Panhandle, circa 1916. For “The Mission” (1986), about an 18th-century Jesuit priest (Jeremy Irons) in the Brazilian rain forest, he wove the panpipe music of Indigenous people with that of a missionary party’s European instruments, playing out the cultural conflicts.
In “The Untouchables,” his music pounded out the struggle between Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in Prohibition-era Chicago. In Mr. Levinson’s “Bugsy” (1991), about the mobster Bugsy Siegel (Warren Beatty), it was a medley for a star-struck sociopath in Hollywood. And in Mr. Tornatore’s “Malèna” (2000), he orchestrated the ordeals of a wartime Sicilian town as seen through the eyes of a boy obsessed with a beautiful lady.
Talking to Mr. Pareles, Mr. Morricone placed his acclaimed oeuvre in a modest perspective. “The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one hand and not true on the other hand,” he said. “Maybe my time is better organized than many other people’s. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed.”
Ennio Morricone Was More Than Just a Great Film Composer
He was one of the great composers, period.
By John Zorn
July 8, 2020
Ennio Morricone was more than one of the world’s great soundtrack composers — he was one of the world’s great composers, period. For me, his work stands with Bach, Mozart, Debussy, Ellington and Stravinsky in achieving that rare fusion of heart and mind. Dare we compare the five notes of his famous “coyote call” in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” with the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Morricone’s music is just as timeless.
Morricone, who died on Monday at 91, has been an influence and an inspiration since I first encountered his work as a teenager in 1967. “The Ecstasy of Gold” from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” hit me with the same power as modernist masterpieces like “The Rite of Spring,” Ives’s Fourth Symphony and Varèse’s “Arcana”; it shares their complex rhythmic invention, unique sound world and lush romantic sweep.
Embracing the soaring lyricism of his Italian heritage, Morricone’s gift for song was extraordinary. He was one of those musicians who could make an unforgettable melody with just a small fistful of notes. His meticulous craftsmanship and ear for orchestration, harmony, melody and rhythm resulted in music that was perfectly balanced; as with all master composers, every note was there for a reason. Change one note, one rhythm, one rest, and there is diminishment.
Having roots in both popular music and the avant-garde, Morricone was an innovator, and he overcame each new challenge with a fresh approach, retaining a curiosity and childlike sense of wonder. He was always open to trying new sounds, new instruments, new combinations — rarely drawing from the same well twice.
He was a man of integrity who did not suffer fools gladly. Stories of his responses to inane directorial suggestions are legend, including one of my favorites: “In the history of music, nothing like that has ever happened — nor will it ever happen.” He lived a relatively simple life in a beautiful apartment in Rome, waking as early as 4:30 in the morning, taking walks and composing at his desk for hours on end. He traveled little.
What needs to be understood is that Morricone was a magician of sound. He had an uncanny ability to combine instruments in original ways. Ocarina, slapstick, whistling, electric guitar noises, grunts, electronics and howls in the night: Anything was welcome if it had dramatic effect. By the 1960s, the electric guitar had become central to his palette and he was able to blend it into a variety of unusual contexts with dramatic flair. In “Svegliati e Uccidi,” he has the guitarist imitate the “rat-a-tat-tat” of a machine gun through the amplifier’s spring reverb, and his instruction to the musician to “sound like a spear” resulted in one of the most intense guitar tones ever recorded, in “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
His mastery of a wide range of genres and instruments made him a musician ahead of his time. He could explore extended techniques on a trumpet mouthpiece in a free-improvisational context in the morning; write a seductive big-band arrangement for a pop singer in the afternoon; and score a searing orchestral film soundtrack at night. This kind of openness remains the way of the future — and was a formative model for me.
Morricone is best known for his film work, but we must never forget his large catalog of “absolute” music — his classical compositions. There the music comes straight from his heart. And yet what he accomplished in the challenging and restrictive world of film music is nothing short of miraculous. There, his immense imagination, sharp ear for drama, profound lyricism, puckish sense of humor and huge heart find voice through a magnificent and masterly musicianship. Artistic freedom was his credo, and his impeccable taste and innate sense of energy, space and time was palpable. His work elevated every film he scored.
One of my dearest memories is visiting him at a recording session in New York, around 1986. He was, as always, a gentleman: elegant, gracious and more than kind to a young fan who stood humbled in front of his hero. We spoke through a translator for much of our conversation, but he took me aside for a few moments and shared some composerly advice on working in movies. I will always remember his words to me that day: “Forget the film. Think of the soundtrack record.”
Many composers wonder, and may even worry, if their work will live on after they are gone — if their contribution will be remembered and their music treasured. Morricone need have had no such fears. His work has been embraced; he achieved that rare balance of being profoundly influential to both the inner world of musicians and to society as a whole. His sonic adventures stand on their own merits both in the context of the films he scored and on their own terms as pure music. This was his magic.
He was more than a musical figure. He was a cultural icon. He was the maestro — and I loved him dearly.
John Zorn is a composer and instrumentalist. Among his many recordings is “The Big Gundown” (1986), an album reworking music by Ennio Morricone.
Here you go, Daylight; the other article linked in DMG Newsletter:
The Not-Entirely-Secret Avant-Garde Life of Ennio Morricone
By Glenn Kenny @glenn__kenny Jul 6, 2020 at 1:00pm
If you’re any kind of film buff, you’ve heard of —and are today probably mourning the passing of— the composer and musician Ennio Morricone. He was so prolific for so long — he has more than 500 films on his IMDb page — it’s almost hard to believe he was only 91 years old.
Arguably the composer of the most memorable pieces of theme music in movie history — sure, David Raksin has Laura, and Max Steiner has Gone With The Wind, but Morricone has Cinema Paradiso, The Mission, The Battle Of Algiers, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Once Upon A Time In The West, just off the top of one’s head — the Italian maestro was also a huge champion of experimental and improvisational music. When he toured the United States in 2007, conducting an orchestra, the attendees had shelled out their shekels to hear the precisely those aforementioned themes. Many of them had no idea that there was a whole other world of Morricone to explore.
And honestly, a lot of them might not have enjoyed what they heard had they deigned to explore it! His avant-garde music is very far removed from the lush romanticism of his Paradiso score, for instance. But one way that Morricone innovated was in pushing different modes close together, and listening to what happened.
Morricone was a child prodigy who grew into a multi-instrumentalist conversant with a lot of genres. (The percussive accents of some of his most memorable film scores, like the variations on the martial snare drum in Battle of Algiers, no doubt derived from his training as a drummer.) He broke into film music work as an arranger, and began scoring light comedies in the early ’60s.
The early ’60s saw two turning points in his musical development. One was the beginning of his famed collaboration with director Sergio Leone, in the first of the three Clint Eastwood-starring “spaghetti Westerns” that became and remain cinematic sensations. The other was the formation of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. If Morricone with an orchestra was made for Radio City, Morricone with Nuova Consonanza was made for Roulette, or Issue Project Room.
Formed by Franco Evangelisti in 1964, “New Consonance” was an “experimental composers collective” in which the members, all of whom were well-versed in notated music, left that behind and improvised to the outer limits of sonic possibilities. In a 1967 German documentary about the group, Evangelisti says of their audience, “Some even think that we can’t play the instruments, as we don’t play them in a conventional way. It’s a funny situation, because this creates different attitudes among the listeners, which is much better than having a single-minded audience.”
The footage of the group itself in this film, here a septet, aptly demonstrates their approach and its results. Bleats and blats, block chords and tinklings, and manic sort-of glissandos ensue with nary a musical “theme” in evidence. Morricone, here the trumpet player, sometimes plays only through his mouthpiece. Years later, the New York composer and improvisor John Zorn, who would concoct the epic, excellent 1986 tribute album to Morricone called The Big Gundown, would make entire LPs using only his sax mouthpieces and reeds, and game calls.
In their studio work, Nuovo Consonanza pioneered what’s called “electro-acoustic” music, which blends acoustic instrumentation and electronic manipulation, often incorporating ostensibly non-musical sounds, sometimes involving using an instrument in an unusual way, sometimes involving banging and scraping non-musical items, and also including the form of documentary audio called “field recordings.”
How did this inform Morricone’s film music, if at all? Well listen to the theme for Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (which became a Top 40 hit in a cover by Hugo Montenegro in 1968). Such things are commonplace nowadays, but back then it was not exactly customary to put the sounds of cracking whips and gunshots into music. Nor to pair such apparently disparate instruments as a church bell and a twangy, surf-inflected electric guitar. The use of the chorus to declaim semi-nonsense syllables — all this sort of thing was derived from the experimental modes with which Morricone was playing as a member of Nuovo Consonanza.
This activity also helped him with his prolific output. The genres of movie Morricone scored were almost as varied as the musical forms he pursued. In 1977 he scored Hitch Hike, one of the most memorably sleazy road thrillers ever, and in 1978 Days Of Heaven, one of the most lyrical tragedies of American cinema. In between he shoehorned in a Kirk-Douglas-starring Omen rip-off and maybe a half-dozen other pictures. For the 1971 Spanish-Italian horror picture (that’s “giallo” for you mavens) Cold Eyes Of Fear, Morricone, in collaboration with his frequent right-hand man Bruno Nicolai, enlisted Nuovo Consonanza to extemporaneously create the score while watching picture playback, much as Miles Davis did when concocting the modal jazz soundtrack for Louis Malle’s 1958 thriller Elevator to the Gallows.
In an interview with Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen for Premiere in 1989 (some of which seems a little…well, facetious), Fagen doesn’t bring up Nuovo Consonanza at all. But he does ask a verbose question about Sergio Leone’s own genre-bending, and how Morricones’s scores for Leone’s films function “both ‘inside’ the film as a narrative voice and ‘outside’ the film as the commentary of a winking jester,” finally saying “put it all together and doesn’t it spell ‘post-modern’?” and further urging “Isn’t that what’s attracting Downtown Manhattan?” The question is answered with a Morricone shrug. The joke was sort of on Fagen, though, because downtown Manhattan, by which Fagen mostly meant Zorn, was as familiar with Morricone’s Nuovo Consonanza work as they were with his movie work. (Which yes, of course they dug, and yes, in part of course because of the reasons Fagen enumerates. But still.)
In the same interview Morricone gave up one trade secret of his conventional scoring: “When I begin a theme in a certain key, say, D minor, I never depart from this original key. If it begins in D minor, it ends in D minor. This harmonic simplicity is available to everyone.”
Much of Morricone’s not-available-to-everyone material is on compilations curated by knowing fans with discographies of their own. The collection Crime and Dissonance, an excellent starter for the more open-eared, was put together by Mike Patton, one-time Faith No More singer turned experimental musician. But even such comps mostly steer clear of the Morricone-affiliated sounds that don’t have a tonal center. The German label die Schactel issued a 4-CD, 1 DVD set of Nuovo Consonanza’s live work in 2017. It, and original pressings of the combo’s early LPs, fetch big bucks on collectors’s sites like Discogs. But whatever you can afford will afford you musical fascination, which was ultimately what Morricone was all about.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Dr. Benway
damn
damn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YJgsP8r7Mk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7bIhV-Zckk
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Dr. Benway
of course i cant find a
of course i cant find a single article about his death that even mentions il gruppo or any of his music outside of film scores at all :(
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Sound and Vision
RIP Ennio
RIP Ennio
He more than makes up for composing for the tool who is Paul Anka so I won't hold that against him.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Ken D.
Don't think I heard anything
Don't think I heard anything but his film scores, but they were good ones. RIP.
Saw a couple of low budget Kung Fu movie that blatantly "borrowed" his soundtracks lock, stock. and barrel.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: _
https://thequietus.com
A short interview from ten years ago. There is a link to the compilation Crime and Dissonance which Mike Patton released on his independent label and which focuses exclusively on Morricone’s early and avant garde material.
https://thequietus.com/articles/04050-ennio-morricone-interview-a-fistfu...
He is the first person I can clearly recall influencing the way I think about and listen to music.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: MeditateontheQ
Our classical station is
Our classical station is streaming a tribute to Ennio both days this weekend... more info here:
https://www.allclassical.org/spotlights/remembering-ennio-morricone/
Here's the text and link to the NY Times Obit -- not sure if the link will work for everyone...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/movies/ennio-morricone-dead.html?auth...
Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning Composer of Film Scores, Dies at 91
His vast output included atmospheric music for spaghetti westerns in his native Italy and scores for some 500 movies by a Who’s Who of directors.
Ennio Morricone directed a concert in Rome in January.Credit...Roberto Monaldo/LaPresse, via Associated Press
By Robert D. McFadden
Published July 6, 2020Updated July 7, 2020
Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer whose atmospheric scores for spaghetti westerns and some 500 films by a Who’s Who of international directors made him one of the world’s most versatile and influential creators of music for the modern cinema, died on Monday in Rome. He was 91.
His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, who said that Mr. Morricone was admitted there last week after falling and fracturing a femur. Mr. Assumma also distributed a statement that Mr. Morricone had written himself, titled, “I, Ennio Morricone, am dead.”
To many cineastes, Maestro Morricone (pronounced (mo-ree-CONE-eh) was a unique talent, composing melodic accompaniments to comedies, thrillers and historical dramas by Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malick, Roland Joffé, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino and other filmmakers.
He scored many popular films of the past 40 years: Édouard Molinaro’s “La Cage aux Folles” (1978), Mr. Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), Mr. De Palma’s “The Untouchables” (1987), Roman Polanski’s “Frantic” (1988), Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” (1988), Wolfgang Petersen’s “In the Line of Fire” (1993), and Mr. Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” (2015).
Mr. Morricone won his first competitive Academy Award for his score for “The Hateful Eight,” an American western mystery thriller for which he also won a Golden Globe. In a career showered with honors, he had previously won an Oscar for lifetime achievement (2007) and was nominated for five other Academy Awards; in addition, he won two Golden Globes, four Grammys and dozens of international awards.
Image
Mr. Morricone receiving an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007.Credit...Monica Almeida/The New York Times
But the work that made him world famous, and that was best known to moviegoers, was his blend of music and sound effects for Sergio Leone’s so-called spaghetti westerns of the 1960s: a ticking pocket watch, a sign creaking in the wind, buzzing flies, a twanging Jew’s harp, haunting whistles, cracking whips, gunshots and a bizarre, wailing “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah,” played on a sweet potato-shaped wind instrument called an ocarina.
Imitated, scorned, spoofed, what came to be known as “The Dollars Trilogy” — “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), all released in the United States in 1967 — starred Clint Eastwood as “The Man With No Name” and were enormous hits, with a combined budget of $2 million and gross worldwide receipts of $280 million.
The trilogy’s Italian dialogue was dubbed for the English-speaking market, and the action was brooding and slow, with clichéd close-ups of gunfighters’ eyes. But Mr. Morricone, breaking the unwritten rule never to upstage actors with music, infused it all with wry sonic weirdness and melodramatic strains that many fans embraced with cultlike devotion and that critics called viscerally true to Mr. Leone’s vision of the Old West.
“In the films that established his reputation in the 1960s, the series of spaghetti westerns he scored for Mr. Leone, Mr. Morricone’s music is anything but a backdrop,” The New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in 2007. “It’s sometimes a conspirator, sometimes a lampoon, with tunes that are as vividly in the foreground as any of the actors’ faces.”
Mr. Morricone also scored Mr. Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and his Jewish gangster drama, “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), both widely considered masterpieces. But he became most closely identified with “The Dollars Trilogy,” and in time grew weary of answering for their lowbrow sensibilities.
Asked by The Guardian in 2006 why “A Fistful of Dollars” had made such an impact, he said: “I don’t know. It’s the worst film Leone made and the worst score I did.”
“The Ecstasy of Gold,” from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” was one of Mr. Morricone’s biggest hits. It was recorded by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on a 2004 album of Mr. Morricone’s compositions and used in concert by two rock bands: as closing music for the Ramones and the introductory theme for Metallica.
Image
A scene from the Sergio Leone film “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Its theme was one of Mr. Morricone’s biggest hits.Credit...MGM
Mr. Morricone looked professorial in bow ties and spectacles, with wisps of flyaway white hair. He sometimes holed up in his palazzo in Rome and wrote music for weeks on end, composing not at a piano but at a desk. He heard the music in his mind, he said, and wrote it in pencil on score paper for all orchestra parts.
He sometimes scored 20 or more films a year, often working only from a script before screening the rushes. Directors marveled at his range — tarantellas, psychedelic screeches, swelling love themes, tense passages of high drama, stately evocations of the 18th century or eerie dissonances of the 20th — and at the ingenuity of his silences: He was wary of too much music, of overloading an audience with emotions.
Mr. Morricone composed for television films and series, (some of his music was reused on “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons”), wrote about 100 concert pieces, and orchestrated music for popular singers, including Joan Baez, Paul Anka and Anna Maria Quaini, the Italian star known as Mina.
Mr. Morricone never learned to speak English, never left Rome to compose, and for years refused to fly anywhere, though he eventually flew all over the world to conduct orchestras, sometimes performing his own compositions. While he wrote extensively for Hollywood, he did not appear in concert in the United States until 2007, when, at 78, he made a monthlong tour, punctuated by festivals of his films.
Image
Mr. Morricone directing an ensemble in Milan in 2018.Credit...Luca Bruno/Associated Press
He gave concerts in New York at Radio City Music Hall and the United Nations, and he concluded the tour in Los Angeles, where he received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. The presenter, Clint Eastwood, roughly translated his acceptance speech from the Italian as the composer expressed “deep gratitude to all the directors who had faith in me.”
Ennio Morricone was born in Rome on Nov. 10, 1928, one of five children of Mario and Libera (Ridolfi) Morricone. His father, a trumpet player, taught him to read music and play various instruments. Ennio wrote his first compositions at 6. In 1940, he entered the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, where he studied trumpet, composition and direction.
His World War II experiences — hunger and the dangers of Rome as an “open city” under German and American armies — were reflected in some of his later work. After the war, he wrote music for radio; for Italy’s broadcasting service, RAI; and for singers under contract to RCA.
Mr. Morricone’s survivors include his wife, Maria Travia, whom he married in 1956 and cited when accepting his 2016 Oscar; four children, Marco, Alessandra, Andrea (a composer and conductor) and Giovanni; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Morricone’s first film credit was for Luciano Salce’s comedy “The Fascist” (1961). He soon began his collaboration with Mr. Leone, a former schoolmate. But he also scored political films: Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” (1966), Mr. Pasolini’s “The Hawks and the Sparrows” (1966), Giuliano Montaldo’s “Sacco and Vanzetti” (1971) and Mr. Bertolucci’s “1900” (1976).
image
Mr. Morricone, left, received a “Golden Lion” career award for lifetime achievement at the 1995 Venice Film Festival.Credit...Luigi Costantini/Associated Press
Five Morricone scores nominated for Oscars displayed his virtuosity. In Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978), he captured a love triangle in the Texas Panhandle, circa 1916. For “The Mission” (1986), about an 18th-century Jesuit priest (Jeremy Irons) in the Brazilian rain forest, he wove the panpipe music of Indigenous people with that of a missionary party’s European instruments, playing out the cultural conflicts.
In “The Untouchables,” his music pounded out the struggle between Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in Prohibition-era Chicago. In Mr. Levinson’s “Bugsy” (1991), about the mobster Bugsy Siegel (Warren Beatty), it was a medley for a star-struck sociopath in Hollywood. And in Mr. Tornatore’s “Malèna” (2000), he orchestrated the ordeals of a wartime Sicilian town as seen through the eyes of a boy obsessed with a beautiful lady.
Talking to Mr. Pareles, Mr. Morricone placed his acclaimed oeuvre in a modest perspective. “The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one hand and not true on the other hand,” he said. “Maybe my time is better organized than many other people’s. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed.”
###
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: _
AN APPRAISAL
AN APPRAISAL
Ennio Morricone Was More Than Just a Great Film Composer
He was one of the great composers, period.
By John Zorn
July 8, 2020
Ennio Morricone was more than one of the world’s great soundtrack composers — he was one of the world’s great composers, period. For me, his work stands with Bach, Mozart, Debussy, Ellington and Stravinsky in achieving that rare fusion of heart and mind. Dare we compare the five notes of his famous “coyote call” in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” with the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Morricone’s music is just as timeless.
Morricone, who died on Monday at 91, has been an influence and an inspiration since I first encountered his work as a teenager in 1967. “The Ecstasy of Gold” from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” hit me with the same power as modernist masterpieces like “The Rite of Spring,” Ives’s Fourth Symphony and Varèse’s “Arcana”; it shares their complex rhythmic invention, unique sound world and lush romantic sweep.
Embracing the soaring lyricism of his Italian heritage, Morricone’s gift for song was extraordinary. He was one of those musicians who could make an unforgettable melody with just a small fistful of notes. His meticulous craftsmanship and ear for orchestration, harmony, melody and rhythm resulted in music that was perfectly balanced; as with all master composers, every note was there for a reason. Change one note, one rhythm, one rest, and there is diminishment.
Having roots in both popular music and the avant-garde, Morricone was an innovator, and he overcame each new challenge with a fresh approach, retaining a curiosity and childlike sense of wonder. He was always open to trying new sounds, new instruments, new combinations — rarely drawing from the same well twice.
He was a man of integrity who did not suffer fools gladly. Stories of his responses to inane directorial suggestions are legend, including one of my favorites: “In the history of music, nothing like that has ever happened — nor will it ever happen.” He lived a relatively simple life in a beautiful apartment in Rome, waking as early as 4:30 in the morning, taking walks and composing at his desk for hours on end. He traveled little.
What needs to be understood is that Morricone was a magician of sound. He had an uncanny ability to combine instruments in original ways. Ocarina, slapstick, whistling, electric guitar noises, grunts, electronics and howls in the night: Anything was welcome if it had dramatic effect. By the 1960s, the electric guitar had become central to his palette and he was able to blend it into a variety of unusual contexts with dramatic flair. In “Svegliati e Uccidi,” he has the guitarist imitate the “rat-a-tat-tat” of a machine gun through the amplifier’s spring reverb, and his instruction to the musician to “sound like a spear” resulted in one of the most intense guitar tones ever recorded, in “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
His mastery of a wide range of genres and instruments made him a musician ahead of his time. He could explore extended techniques on a trumpet mouthpiece in a free-improvisational context in the morning; write a seductive big-band arrangement for a pop singer in the afternoon; and score a searing orchestral film soundtrack at night. This kind of openness remains the way of the future — and was a formative model for me.
Morricone is best known for his film work, but we must never forget his large catalog of “absolute” music — his classical compositions. There the music comes straight from his heart. And yet what he accomplished in the challenging and restrictive world of film music is nothing short of miraculous. There, his immense imagination, sharp ear for drama, profound lyricism, puckish sense of humor and huge heart find voice through a magnificent and masterly musicianship. Artistic freedom was his credo, and his impeccable taste and innate sense of energy, space and time was palpable. His work elevated every film he scored.
One of my dearest memories is visiting him at a recording session in New York, around 1986. He was, as always, a gentleman: elegant, gracious and more than kind to a young fan who stood humbled in front of his hero. We spoke through a translator for much of our conversation, but he took me aside for a few moments and shared some composerly advice on working in movies. I will always remember his words to me that day: “Forget the film. Think of the soundtrack record.”
Many composers wonder, and may even worry, if their work will live on after they are gone — if their contribution will be remembered and their music treasured. Morricone need have had no such fears. His work has been embraced; he achieved that rare balance of being profoundly influential to both the inner world of musicians and to society as a whole. His sonic adventures stand on their own merits both in the context of the films he scored and on their own terms as pure music. This was his magic.
He was more than a musical figure. He was a cultural icon. He was the maestro — and I loved him dearly.
John Zorn is a composer and instrumentalist. Among his many recordings is “The Big Gundown” (1986), an album reworking music by Ennio Morricone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/arts/music/ennio-morricone-john-zorn.... (thanks to the Downtown Music Gallery newsletter for sending me there)
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: _
Here you go, Daylight; the
Here you go, Daylight; the other article linked in DMG Newsletter:
The Not-Entirely-Secret Avant-Garde Life of Ennio Morricone
By Glenn Kenny @glenn__kenny Jul 6, 2020 at 1:00pm
If you’re any kind of film buff, you’ve heard of —and are today probably mourning the passing of— the composer and musician Ennio Morricone. He was so prolific for so long — he has more than 500 films on his IMDb page — it’s almost hard to believe he was only 91 years old.
Arguably the composer of the most memorable pieces of theme music in movie history — sure, David Raksin has Laura, and Max Steiner has Gone With The Wind, but Morricone has Cinema Paradiso, The Mission, The Battle Of Algiers, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Once Upon A Time In The West, just off the top of one’s head — the Italian maestro was also a huge champion of experimental and improvisational music. When he toured the United States in 2007, conducting an orchestra, the attendees had shelled out their shekels to hear the precisely those aforementioned themes. Many of them had no idea that there was a whole other world of Morricone to explore.
And honestly, a lot of them might not have enjoyed what they heard had they deigned to explore it! His avant-garde music is very far removed from the lush romanticism of his Paradiso score, for instance. But one way that Morricone innovated was in pushing different modes close together, and listening to what happened.
Morricone was a child prodigy who grew into a multi-instrumentalist conversant with a lot of genres. (The percussive accents of some of his most memorable film scores, like the variations on the martial snare drum in Battle of Algiers, no doubt derived from his training as a drummer.) He broke into film music work as an arranger, and began scoring light comedies in the early ’60s.
The early ’60s saw two turning points in his musical development. One was the beginning of his famed collaboration with director Sergio Leone, in the first of the three Clint Eastwood-starring “spaghetti Westerns” that became and remain cinematic sensations. The other was the formation of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. If Morricone with an orchestra was made for Radio City, Morricone with Nuova Consonanza was made for Roulette, or Issue Project Room.
Formed by Franco Evangelisti in 1964, “New Consonance” was an “experimental composers collective” in which the members, all of whom were well-versed in notated music, left that behind and improvised to the outer limits of sonic possibilities. In a 1967 German documentary about the group, Evangelisti says of their audience, “Some even think that we can’t play the instruments, as we don’t play them in a conventional way. It’s a funny situation, because this creates different attitudes among the listeners, which is much better than having a single-minded audience.”
The footage of the group itself in this film, here a septet, aptly demonstrates their approach and its results. Bleats and blats, block chords and tinklings, and manic sort-of glissandos ensue with nary a musical “theme” in evidence. Morricone, here the trumpet player, sometimes plays only through his mouthpiece. Years later, the New York composer and improvisor John Zorn, who would concoct the epic, excellent 1986 tribute album to Morricone called The Big Gundown, would make entire LPs using only his sax mouthpieces and reeds, and game calls.
In their studio work, Nuovo Consonanza pioneered what’s called “electro-acoustic” music, which blends acoustic instrumentation and electronic manipulation, often incorporating ostensibly non-musical sounds, sometimes involving using an instrument in an unusual way, sometimes involving banging and scraping non-musical items, and also including the form of documentary audio called “field recordings.”
How did this inform Morricone’s film music, if at all? Well listen to the theme for Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (which became a Top 40 hit in a cover by Hugo Montenegro in 1968). Such things are commonplace nowadays, but back then it was not exactly customary to put the sounds of cracking whips and gunshots into music. Nor to pair such apparently disparate instruments as a church bell and a twangy, surf-inflected electric guitar. The use of the chorus to declaim semi-nonsense syllables — all this sort of thing was derived from the experimental modes with which Morricone was playing as a member of Nuovo Consonanza.
This activity also helped him with his prolific output. The genres of movie Morricone scored were almost as varied as the musical forms he pursued. In 1977 he scored Hitch Hike, one of the most memorably sleazy road thrillers ever, and in 1978 Days Of Heaven, one of the most lyrical tragedies of American cinema. In between he shoehorned in a Kirk-Douglas-starring Omen rip-off and maybe a half-dozen other pictures. For the 1971 Spanish-Italian horror picture (that’s “giallo” for you mavens) Cold Eyes Of Fear, Morricone, in collaboration with his frequent right-hand man Bruno Nicolai, enlisted Nuovo Consonanza to extemporaneously create the score while watching picture playback, much as Miles Davis did when concocting the modal jazz soundtrack for Louis Malle’s 1958 thriller Elevator to the Gallows.
In an interview with Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen for Premiere in 1989 (some of which seems a little…well, facetious), Fagen doesn’t bring up Nuovo Consonanza at all. But he does ask a verbose question about Sergio Leone’s own genre-bending, and how Morricones’s scores for Leone’s films function “both ‘inside’ the film as a narrative voice and ‘outside’ the film as the commentary of a winking jester,” finally saying “put it all together and doesn’t it spell ‘post-modern’?” and further urging “Isn’t that what’s attracting Downtown Manhattan?” The question is answered with a Morricone shrug. The joke was sort of on Fagen, though, because downtown Manhattan, by which Fagen mostly meant Zorn, was as familiar with Morricone’s Nuovo Consonanza work as they were with his movie work. (Which yes, of course they dug, and yes, in part of course because of the reasons Fagen enumerates. But still.)
In the same interview Morricone gave up one trade secret of his conventional scoring: “When I begin a theme in a certain key, say, D minor, I never depart from this original key. If it begins in D minor, it ends in D minor. This harmonic simplicity is available to everyone.”
Much of Morricone’s not-available-to-everyone material is on compilations curated by knowing fans with discographies of their own. The collection Crime and Dissonance, an excellent starter for the more open-eared, was put together by Mike Patton, one-time Faith No More singer turned experimental musician. But even such comps mostly steer clear of the Morricone-affiliated sounds that don’t have a tonal center. The German label die Schactel issued a 4-CD, 1 DVD set of Nuovo Consonanza’s live work in 2017. It, and original pressings of the combo’s early LPs, fetch big bucks on collectors’s sites like Discogs. But whatever you can afford will afford you musical fascination, which was ultimately what Morricone was all about.
https://decider.com/2020/07/06/ennio-morricone-death/