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Mozart of film music
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By Adam Sweeting
Friday February 23, 2001
Among the many extraordinary achievements in Ennio ...By Adam Sweeting
Friday February 23, 2001
Among the many extraordinary achievements in Ennio Morricone's career, two in particular stand out. Firstly, he has composed the scores of more than 400 films, including several of the best-known ever written. Secondly, he has never won an Oscar. Maybe that will change this year, with Morricone's nomination for his score for Malena. But, since he's up against the likes of Gladiator and The Patriot, he isn't holding his breath.
Quite how the Academy has managed to overlook a man who has been one of the defining influences on film music for the past 40 years must remain as bewildering as its determination to equip Tom Hanks with a shooting gallery of statuettes; but Morricone wasn't the only one who felt that his luck must surely be in on Oscar night 1986, when his score for The Mission was nominated.
"I definitely felt that I should have won for The Mission," he declares, holding court in the classical splendour of his spacious Rome apartment. "Especially when you consider that the Oscar-winner that year was Round Midnight, which was not an original score. It had a very good arrangement by Herbie Hancock, but it used existing pieces. So there could be no comparison with The Mission. There was a theft! But, of course, if it was up to me, every two years I would win an Oscar."
Settling back on his sofa in a woollen sports shirt, tortoiseshell glasses and slip-on loafers, Morricone appears to be a fragile 72-year-old; but since he's capable of launching into passionate outbursts, during which he semaphores with his arms while bouncing enthusiastically up and down, this may be an elaborate disguise. The maestro's tone is ironic, and I'm having his conversation translated to me from Italian, so it's difficult to gauge the precise extent of the outrage he feels towards the cloth-eared Californians. Maybe if he'd been content to keep running variations on A Fistful of Dollars, or his agonisingly beautiful score for Once Upon a Time in the West, there would now be a row of Oscars on his mantelpiece instead of the tasteful array of blue-and-white ceramic vessels. But he has prided himself on evolving his music over the decades, and would die of shame rather than resort to becoming a cluster of soundbite cliches.
Morricone long ago made the decision that he would remain rooted in Rome, where he was born in 1928. More decisive still has been his courteous but firm determination not to speak English, a considerable (and impressively perverse) accomplishment, considering he has worked for so long in an American-dominated industry. So, however often he may have collaborated with Brian de Palma, Mike Nichols or Warren Beatty, he has made sure he has done so from a European perspective.
"I was offered a free villa in Hollywood, but I said no thank you, I prefer to live in Italy," he reveals. "You can see my decision as either a distinctive factor or as a limitation. I don't feel it is a limitation." Apart from anything else, he would find it hard to live in a town where movie composers routinely farm out their compositions to batteries of professional arrangers. To Morricone, this is an outrageous abdication of professional responsibility. "I invented the formula of 'music composed, arranged and conducted by Ennio Morricone'," he stresses. "Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry."
It was his work on the "spaghetti westerns" of Sergio Leone during the 1960s that turned Morricone into a household name almost on a par with Leone's stone-faced star, Clint Eastwood. The composer's daring juxtapositions of sounds, from surreal whistling noises to spine-rattling electric guitars and ghostly soprano voices, became an inseparable part of Leone's fevered re-imagining of the western genre. Morricone also seized upon real-life sounds and loaded them with ominous meaning, like the coyote-howl motif from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and the deafening tick of the pocket-watches counting down the climactic shoot-out of For A Few Dollars More. He didn't conceive his scores as something to play over the pictures but as growing organically from the fabric of the movie.
"I come from a background of experimental music which mingled real sounds together with musical sounds," he explains, "so I used real sounds partly to give a kind of nostalgia that the film had to convey. I also used these realistic sounds in a psychological way. With The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I used animal sounds - as you say, the coyote sound - so the sound of the animal became the main theme of the movie. I don't know how I had this idea. It's just according to your experiences, and following the musical avant-garde."
A childhood aptitude for music earned Morricone a place at Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory when he was 12. With some musical theory duly drummed into him, he found himself working as a trumpeter, frequently playing on recording sessions for film scores. "Most of these scores were very ugly, and I believed I could do better than this. After the war, the film industry was quite strong here in Italy, and the New Realism in Italian cinema was really wonderful, but these new realistic movies didn't have great music. I needed money and I thought it would be a good thing to write film scores, but I never asked anybody in the film industry for work. I thought, 'A film-maker must call me because he thinks what I write is fine.' So it happened that a director called me, then again, and then again, and again. At last people realised that I was good and my career was rising. That's what happened, and now they keep on calling me."
Although he had first met Sergio Leone when they were both eight and attending the same school, it wasn't until 25 years later that their professional partnership began. In the meantime, Morricone had cut his professional teeth by scoring a string of Italian films, pulling together his tastes for jazz and popular music with a solid grounding in the intellectual rigours of the avant-garde. Quiz him on his musical roots and he tips his hat to some of the most uncompromising figures of 20th-century music, including Boulez, Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono. Not that he has set out to terrify his listeners with atonal atrocities. It's more a matter of absorption and evolution.
"From my faith in experimental and avant-garde music, I have consolidated this into a different way of composing which takes account of what has happened in music in the last 50 years, and which can communicate something to the audience," he suggests. "This is a normal process. People who are in a revolution and constantly changing go back to normality after that, so things change, then they calm down and become normal again."
Morricone's success with Leone's films meant that he risked becoming known as a specialist composer who scored cowboy movies. "This was a serious mistake," he points out, "because I have scored 400 films and only 30 of them are westerns. If you scroll through all the movies I've worked on, you can understand how I was a specialist in westerns, love stories, political movies, action thrillers, horror movies and so on. So in other words, I'm no specialist, because I've done everything. I'm a specialist in music."
Paradoxically, a film composer must be able to conceive strong musical ideas for a score while remaining receptive to the director's wishes. The potential for conflict is clear. "I have to see a definitive cut of the film before I even start thinking about the music, let alone writing it," asserts the maestro. "After seeing the movie I tell the director what my feelings are and what I would like to do. He accepts what I say, or discusses it, or destroys it. Eventually we have to find a compromise. If the director has no musical creativity, he always imagines something he has already heard, so I have to convince him to leave his ideas aside. I have to trust a director and he has to trust the composer. You have to like each other, otherwise it won't work."
You'd hardly expect it to click perfectly every time, and it doesn't. In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini recruited Morricone to work on arrangements for the soundtrack to the notoriously obscene Salo (120 Days of Sodom). Morricone didn't like the music he was given to work with, and Pasolini didn't want to show him the whole film, apparently because he feared Morricone would be horrified and walk off the project. "I eventually saw the movie in a theatre and I didn't like it," the maestro reports, firmly. "It wasn't to my taste."
Morricone has had much happier experiences with Brian de Palma, a director he likes and respects. His percussive, staccato score for The Untouchables earned an Oscar nomination in 1987, but even so, the project wasn't without its moments of anguish. "De Palma is delicious!" Morricone says. "He respects music, he respects composers. For The Untouchables, everything I proposed to him was fine, but then he wanted a piece that I didn't like at all, and of course we didn't have an agreement on that. It was something I didn't want to write - a triumphal piece for the police. I think I wrote nine different pieces for this in total and I said, 'Please don't choose the seventh!' because it was the worst. And guess what he chose? The seventh one. But it really suits the movie."
Morricone has grown skilled at fulfilling the professional requirements of his trade, but some projects are naturally closer to his heart than others. His music for Gillo Pontecorvo's classic exposition of revolutionary struggle, the Battle of Algiers, seemed especially personal, and the music accompanying the freedom- fighters has echoes of Bach's Passions. "It was a movie about freedom of people when Algeria was under French power. France recognised it too, because they abandoned Algeria after that. It was good to be at the director's side and to feel sympathetic for what was right. With another score I composed, Novocento, for Bernardo Bertolucci, a theme from this became a national hymn for Spanish socialists. Films don't really have a political effect, but people understood the message of the music."
But since scoring films must always be a collaborative venture, it is in his non-cinematic work that Morricone has been able to work out more abstract musical ideas. At his Barbican concerts in March (his first-ever concert performances in Britain) he will conduct a pair of concert works alongside a selection of his scores. Fragment of Eros features soprano, piano and orchestra, while Ombra Di Lontana Presenza uses viola, recorder and strings.
"It's chamber music, but it's not really all that strange," he promises. "I want people to know about all the kinds of music that I write. Some believe I just write film scores, which is not true. With a film score, it is really for the film-makers and the audience. This other music is what the composer feels, and it's more personal."
Considering his age and his track record, you'd imagine Morricone might fancy putting his feet up. "You go back to what Bach composed and how much Mozart wrote in 33 years, and you see I am unemployed compared to this," he chortles. "I would like to relax a bit, but this is not the right year to do it."
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Ennio Morricone: They shoot, he scores
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Ennio Morricone has provided film directors such as Sergio Leone with exotic music for more than fou...Ennio Morricone has provided film directors such as Sergio Leone with exotic music for more than four decades. He's the maestro. And doesn't he know it, says James McNair
Published: 11 March 2004
Interviewing Ennio Morricone, one must observe the protocol. He insists on being called "maestro". As a 75-year-old Italian who also happens to be the greatest living film-score composer, he is worthier of the epithet than most. It also chimes with the grandeur of his central Rome apartment, a 17th-century property with crystal chandeliers and views of the Forum.
Disappointingly, pressing the maestro's doorbell elicits a monotone buzz, not the stirring "Ay-ee ay-ee ah!" of his theme for Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Having gained entry, we are led to a short, slightly frail-looking man in a blue cardigan and tortoiseshell glasses. The maestro nods, then pats the antique chaise he's sitting on. He wants our pretty blonde translator, Roberta, to join him there.
The creator of more than 400 film scores, Morricone was born in the Rome of Mussolini in 1928. He started composing at the age of six, and by 12 he was studying music under Raffaele Petrassi at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory. His first score was for Luciano Salce's 1961 film Il Federale (The Fascist), but it was the outré, highly evocative music he composed for the spaghetti westerns of his schoolfriend Sergio Leone that brought Morricone to the fore.
But this meeting has been prompted by the release of Arena Concerto, an album of live performances of some of his best-known works. Much of it was recorded in the suitably epic surrounds of the Verona Arena, with Morricone conducting a 90-piece orchestra and 100-strong choir.
His big brown eyes fixed on the middle-distance, he tells me he admires Stockhausen, Monteverdi and Stravinsky. "I like that he took ideas from folk music," he says of the Russian modernist. "Did I learn from Stravinsky? Of course. But no composer, not even Stravinsky or Bach, invented music. One builds on what was previously composed, making use of the fresh resources that are newly available."
We talk about his score for A Fistful of Dollars: about its church bells, whip-cracks and Hank Marvin-gone-loco guitars. These last were the work of Allesandro Allesandroni, who was also responsible for whistling that score's main melody. Mindful of Allesandroni's fine vibrato, I venture that whistling is a dying art whose deft execution is now largely the preserve of men over 50. "You're deluding yourself there," Morricone says. "Besides, Allesandroni was quite a young man when we recorded A Fistful of Dollars. Perhaps there is a dearth of whistling talent in England, however: it's so cold there nobody feels happy enough to whistle."
The maestro's work with the late Leone is a tiny part of his output. Whether working with iconoclastic Italians such us Pasolini and Zeffirelli, or Hollywood heavyweights such as Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty, Morricone always furnishes directors with wonderfully simpatico music. He is also the composer's composer, one anonymous peer noting that "his scores can lend gravitas even to rubbish like Disclosure and Mission to Mars." But he is more likely to be remembered for his fine choral and world music-influenced score for Roland Joffé's The Mission.
In the late 1980s, when a Herbie Hancock-supervised treatment of bop standards for Round Midnight scooped the Oscar that many felt The Mission's soundtrack should have won, word was that Morricone was highly miffed. Now, however, he says that never having won an Oscar isn't important. "I simply want to carry on expressing my ideas. Other people see the moment of creativity as magical, but it is not. That's just a romantic notion. For me, it's simply, 'I have to get from A to B. How am I going to achieve this?' You have to be like the painter who knows his brush strokes. In the end it comes down to technique and experience. Sometimes a small idea will come without warning, but after that, I insist once more upon craft. If you know how to do your job, you will get a result. It's very simple."
There are times when the maestro displays the kind of plain rudeness that can be strangely endearing in the elderly. He orders an espresso for everyone in the room but me. He rolls his eyes when he thinks my questions particularly ridiculous. He makes eye contact three, maybe four times in the whole interview. "I was up very late last night," he says at one point. Momentarily, I read this as some kind of apology, but then he follows through with: "Just how many questions do you have?"
Weary as he is, Morricone has the energy to stroke Roberta's hair. And gently to prick her arm with a toothpick, smiling devilishly. Our translator isn't fussed. "Would you like some of my espresso?" she asks me. Jab, jab, goes the maestro's toothpick.
When not busy at his recording studio in Rome, Morricone says he enjoys cinema and working out a little at home. He is partial to the computer chess program Mephisto, and plays chess with his son, Giovanni, who usually wins. Mostly, though, it is still sound that sustains the maestro, his passion for the atonal melodies of "absolute" music providing succour when composing chamber and orchestral works not destined for the cinema.
Does he have a sense of diminishing time in which to write the music he has left? "No, I feel quite relaxed about it," he says. "Things used to be much more frantic, but now I say no to a lot of offers, and have more time to think about my work. There are private ambitions, things I won't tell you. If life is to go on, there must be challenges. But if I don't manage to realise the ambitions I have left, it doesn't matter, and I won't suffer because of it. I will simply do what I can."
And what of Quentin Tarantino and Kill Bill? Was the director offended when Morricone declined his offer to compose for the soundtrack? "First of all," Morricone says, "I didn't speak to him directly, so I don't think he would have been offended. Second, I was asked only to compose two or three minutes of music, and I wasn't going to do all that work for three minutes. It also seemed strange that there was such a huge amount of money on offer, so I said no. In the end, Tarantino called another composer who imitated my style. He wanted a Morricone-like composition and he got one."
It is perhaps insensitive to finish by asking the maestro what music he'd have at his funeral. I do so, though, framing the question as delicately as I can. "I think it's important that other people choose that music," he says. "And I want to have a secret funeral. I don't want anybody other than my family knowing about it. When the funeral is over, then people can know that I'm dead. That way I won't disturb anyone, and they won't waste money on flowers."
When I apologise for ending on a sombre note, the maestro replies with a rare smile. "That's OK. The important thing is that we have reached your last question."
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The good, the bad and the classical
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June 3, 2001
Famous for his atmospheric but melodic film scores, Ennio Morricone has also written...June 3, 2001
Famous for his atmospheric but melodic film scores, Ennio Morricone has also written prolifically and experimentally for the concert hall. As he prepares to conduct two rare performances of his work at the Barbican Centre, Brian Hunt talks to him in Rome
WHEN Ennio Morricone conducts his own compositions at the Barbican this weekend, the two disciplines in which he writes - film scores and concert music - will be separated by a mere 20-minute interval. Yet, in terms of public awareness of his music, the gulf is immense. It isn't hard to guess which half of the programme has caused the two nights to sell out. Such is the fame of Morricone's scores for Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti Westerns that it even eclipses more recent successes, including The Mission and Cinema Paradiso, let alone his "serious" work.
Avant garde: Morricone made his name with the parched sonic landscapes he created for the spaghetti Westerns such as The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
His is not a solitary predicament. Bernard Herrmann's chamber music was unmemorable, his scores for Hitchcock unforgettable. Morricone's fellow Italian Nino Rota composed for the great Fellini films, but his symphonic works have created scarcely a ripple.
When I meet the 72-year-old composer in his flat in Rome, he is courteous rather than warm, alert and animated behind the dapper but unremarkable exterior. The interview is conducted through an interpreter; despite writing for Hollywood in the later part of his continuing career, Morricone has never learnt English. If this suggests an unwillingness to become fully immersed in the movie world, then there is other supporting evidence.
He is known to become irritable if too much emphasis is placed on his work with Leone. When I ask if he feels that, over his career, he has found the right balance between movie scores and concert music, his answer is ambiguous. "For many years - 20 at least - I wrote no concert music. The balance was wrong then. By the 1980s I had written no more than 10 concert works. Today, however, I have about 70 or 80 pieces."
But in terms of public appreciation? "In writing a film score you are absolutely aware of the public, and of writing music the audience understands. I would never think of distracting a film audience with complicated music. I saw my task to be making things easy for the audience, while retaining my dignity as a musician.
"I have worked with directors who encouraged me to write complicated music. These films have not turned out to be blockbusters; in fact, few people have gone to see them. This was a lesson for me. Although I was proud of the music, I had to be aware of what had happened, and why. The audience for movies does not usually have a high musical culture."
It's both an illuminating and an evasive answer. To put it in context, one has to look at the conflicting influences on Morricone's early musical life. His father played trumpet in night-clubs, and it was as a player on the same instrument that Ennio entered the St Cecilia Academy in Rome, where he also studied harmony and composition. By day, he analysed classical scores from Palestrina to Stockhausen; by night, he deputised for his father in music halls.
Marriage in 1956, and the birth of a son a year later, increased the need to boost his income. Working in radio and television, he acquired a reputation for fluency rather than originality. But his gravitation towards the Italian film studios, in the early Sixties, provided more scope.
The pressures and deadlines were not a worry for him. "When I was at school, if I had to do my homework in three days, I would do it in one, so I then had two days to myself. I took the same approach to my composition exams at the Academy. To me, it was like a race. If I was given 36 hours to write a fugue, I would allow myself eight.
"By setting myself these early deadlines, I knew that, even if I failed my own test, I would still have time left. Because of this, when I started writing movies, I never suffered. If I have ideas, I can write quickly. The trouble is, one can waste a lot of time looking for ideas."
When Morricone's name was put forward for A Fistful of Dollars, the first in the line of Sergio Leone westerns that would peak with Once Upon a Time in the West, the director was reluctant to consider him. He thought Morricone's previous scores were too derivative, but, as the composer pointed out, pastiche was exactly what he'd been asked for.
Happy to break away from symphonic Romanticism tinged with cowboy ballads, Morricone invented for Leone a bizarre yet coherent style of astonishing originality. Choruses burst from nowhere and disappear as abruptly; harpsichords and Jew's harps twang, bells chime; animal cries mingle with a wailing harmonica, and a wordless soprano voice or eerie, whistled melody floats across the parched landscapes.
It should come as no surprise to learn that the man responsible for these sonic collages was thoroughly familiar with avant-garde techniques. Morricone had even visited Darmstadt in Germany, the fortress of experimental music, to attend a seminar by musical iconoclast John Cage.
"During his concert everything happened," says Morricone. "He was reading the score all the time. After five minutes of silence, PING! Then he'd turn the page. After another two minutes of silence, he'd switch a radio on. After an hour of that, the audience was so angry that it was almost rioting. Crazy! I was laughing and angry at the same time."
Later, however, Morricone realised that Cage had been deliberately provoking the severe serialists who clustered at Darmstadt, "those composers who were being experimental without using their brains. Cage has had an influence, not on my music, but on my thought, making what was instinctive turn into science."
There are avant-garde aspects to the works in the first half of Morricone's London concerts. For example, Ombre di Lontana Presenza ("Shadow of a Distant Presence") includes a counterpoint between the viola-player on stage and the recorded sound of another player, now dead, to whom the work is a tribute. "It's a new technique," says Morricone, "but that doesn't mean that the piece is difficult to listen to.
"When I started composing, my music was more avant-garde than it is now. When you have been avant-garde there is only one way forward, which is to be less avant-garde. I have always said that my concert music is completely detached from my film scores, yet with time they have become closer, without ever joining."
Even so, by comparison with his chamber and orchestral music, Morricone's film scores use conventional melody and harmony, dipping as readily into pop music's bag of tricks as any other source. The paradox is that, in context, they are more extraordinary. Morricone is unlikely to be among the handful of names that posterity selects from each generation of classical composers. But he has made a vital contribution to masterpieces of the cinema.
It is easy to understand why he might resent being treated as Leone's monkey. In 1969-70 alone he wrote 25 soundtracks; only one was for a Leone film. Furthermore, the story of their collaboration has been well documented, and a mind as sharp and fast as Morricone's would be disinclined to cover old ground.
The history of cinema is full of composers bitter that their work for the concert hall went unappreciated. Morricone does not give that impression, though his classical music is full of personality and deserves more attention than it has received. However, if this year's nomination for Malena wins him his first, overdue Oscar, I hope that the accolade will warm his heart at least as much as the applause in the Barbican.
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Standing ovation for the two sides of Morricone
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Ennio Morricone
Barbican Hall, London
*****
Richard Williams
Monday March 12, 2001
So this...Ennio Morricone
Barbican Hall, London
*****
Richard Williams
Monday March 12, 2001
So this dapper little man, who looks as though he has visited the same barber and eaten the same food at the same restaurant every day of his working life, this is the one whose music added the mythic dimension to the stories of Leone, Pontecorvo, Malick and Tornatore. His arrival on stage in London on Saturday night, giving his first concert in Britain at the age of 72, evoked applause suffused not just with admiration but with gratitude for all those evenings - decades of them - spent in the dark but illuminated by his extraordinary gift.
Many fine composers have made careers in the movies. Some, such as Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota, have left their fingerprints on the history of the cinema. Only Ennio Morricone, however, has produced a body of work which entitles him to be considered as much of an auteur as those directors whose work he has so consistently enhanced in the 40 years since he sat down to write his first film score.
For this concert, at which he conducted the 90 musicians of the Rome Sinfonietta and the 100-strong Crouch End Festival Chorus and Folk Choir, the composer was clearly obliged to concentrate on the sort of work for which he has become famous. But first, and quite properly, he wanted to show us what Ennio Morricone does when he is writing music for his own satisfaction rather than for someone else's strip of celluloid.
The two pieces of chamber music which preceded the interval were the product of his commitment to the avant-garde of the mid-20th century, to the music of the serialists and their successors. Ombra di Lontana Presenza featured two violas - the first, that of Fausto Anzelmo, in person, and the second, that of the late Dino Asciola, the piece's dedicatee, on tape.
Quiet, ruminative, moving from a sustained intensification of simple materials to a narrative based on interlocking fragments, it formed a sharp contrast with Fragment of Eros, a setting of five poems by Sergio Miceli. Performed in Latin, Italian, German, French and English by the soprano Susanna Rigacci, the piece made use of an astringent chromaticism strongly contrasting with the pungent earthiness of some of the verse: "On n'a... on a... on-a-niste," for example, or "I want my rapture like a snake /Between your bosom - between your thighs."
After the interval, we were allowed to see what Morricone does with his day job, organised into three thematic medleys, the first dedicated to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, the second to films of political protest, and the third to films characterised as "tragic, lyric, epic". Anyone still disconcerted by the first half was immediately reassured by the ghostly ululation introducing the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the first part of a triptych in which the glorious ballad theme from Once Upon a Time in the West provided a fine bridge to the galloping climax of A Fistful of Dynamite.
Many among the audience would probably have been happy for that sort of thing to go on all night, but Morricone is understandably sensitive about the closeness of his identification with Leone. The section dedicated to political cinema included an ominous passage from Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, the lovely adagio from Brian de Palma's Casualties of War, and Dulce Ponte's fine singing of the lush ballad from Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco and Vanzetti and the Bolero-based A Brisa do Coracao from Roberto Faenza's Sostiene Pereira.
For the final scheduled sequence the Crouch End singers split themselves into two groups, creating an antiphony exploited in the finale, On Earth as it is in Heaven from Roland Joffe's The Mission, in which the smaller of the two choirs sang along with the beat of conga drums while the remainder were paced by the full orchestra, graphically reflecting the film's examination of a collision between "primitive" and "civilised" societies.
A standing ovation was rewarded by five encores, the first of which - the exquisitely serene Dorothy's Theme from Once Upon a Time in America - was the shortest, the simplest and the most affecting of the evening's offerings. Who would have thought that a disciple of Berio and Nono would turn out to be one of the 20th century's greatest melodists?
It is, sadly, impossible to go and see Once Upon a Time in America again for the first time, or The Battle of Algiers, or Cinema Paradiso, which provided the final encore. But this remarkable evening was certainly the next best thing.
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The Maestro of Spaghetti Westerns Takes a Bow
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FOR many filmmakers through the years, a certain kind of pilgrimage to Rome leads to the opulent par...FOR many filmmakers through the years, a certain kind of pilgrimage to Rome leads to the opulent parlor of the composer Ennio Morricone. It’s the place where he has discussed grand concepts and crucial details, and often unveiled new themes on the piano, for the distinctive film scores he has written over the past four decades, from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” to “The Mission.” There are more than 400 of them, though he hasn’t kept count.
Next Saturday Mr. Morricone, 78, makes his long-overdue American concert debut with 200 musicians and singers at Radio City Music Hall. It is the beginning of a triumphal month in the United States that will also include festivals of his films at the Museum of Modern Art and Film Forum, and the release of a tribute album, “We All Love Ennio Morricone” (Sony Masterworks), with performances from Bruce Springsteen, Renée Fleming, Herbie Hancock and Metallica, among others. On Feb. 25 he will be presented with an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, atoning for past omissions. After five nominations, he has never won.
Massimo Gallotta, the promoter who is producing the concert, has been working for more than a year to present Mr. Morricone’s American debut. “It was strange for me that Morricone had never performed here in the past,” Mr. Gallotta said. “He agreed right away. And then I was lucky about the Oscar, the CD, everything.”
Mr. Morricone has given concerts periodically in Europe, including a December performance that drew 50,000 people to the Piazza del Duomo in Milan. At Radio City he will lead the 100-piece Roma Sinfonietta orchestra, along with the 100-member Canticum Novum Singers.
Everyone except Maestro Morricone, as he is called in Rome, considers him startlingly prolific. Along with his hundreds of film scores, he has composed a sizable body of concert music like “Voci dal Silencio” (“Voices From the Silence”), a cantata he wrote in response to “the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and all the massacres of humanity all over the world,” he said. He will be performing that work on Friday at the United Nations, at a concert welcoming the new secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.
“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 in an interview at his home, speaking in Italian through a translator. “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.”
Maestro Morricone is a flinty, pragmatic character, but one who marvels at what he called “the strange miracle of music.” He looked like a bespectacled businessman, wearing a sport jacket, dark trousers, white shirt and tie. He greeted any generalizations about his work with a shrug, or a terse, “That is up to the audience to decide.” But through the years he has created music that is as memorable as the films it accompanies, and sometimes more so.
Audiences respond to the operatic sweep of themes like the ones he wrote for “Cinema Paradiso” and “Once Upon a Time in America.” Musicians prize the ingenuity of his writing: the unexpected harmonic turns, the odd meters (even in tunes that seem to be marches), the use of silence and wide spaces between instruments. Meanwhile hipsters and producers delight in the almost sardonic themes he wrote for films like “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” and the striking, sample-ready timbres he has invented.
For “1900” he wrote a score that encompasses Italian folk songs and dance music as well as symphonic arrangements. “He is someone with two identities,” said Bernardo Bertolucci, that film’s director. “One is the composer of contemporary music, and the other is this composer of big epics, this popular music for movies. All his life he has been trying to nourish one identity with the other one, and it is as if the two voices were enriching each other. He has a great capacity of harmonizing in himself.”
Maestro Morricone’s parlor, in a palazzo with a view of the Campidoglio hill in the center of Rome, is a Baroque room so large that the grand piano is almost lost amid the lavishly ornamented chairs, couches and tables. A small silver frame holds a family photo full of children and grandchildren. (He has three sons and a daughter; one son, Andrea, is a composer, and another, Giovanni, is a film director.)
At one corner of the room, a doorway leads into the office where Mr. Morricone writes his music. An unobtrusive movie screen, big enough for some multiplexes, can unroll down one wall of the parlor. On the other walls an antique tapestry of the abduction of the Sabine women is flanked by surreal, turbulent 20th-century paintings full of striking colors and brooding shadows.
The room’s mixture of elegant history and menacing modernity echoes the qualities that have made generations of directors — from Sergio Leone with “A Fistful of Dollars” to Terrence Malick with “Days of Heaven” to Roland Joffe with “The Mission” to Giuseppe Tornatore with “Cinema Paradiso” and “Malèna” — seek out Mr. Morricone.
He composes not at the piano or on a computer but at an imposing desk in his writing studio, amid shelves of books, LPs, CDs, tapes and DVDs. On a coffee table supported by a realistic rhinoceros is a neat stack of score paper with all the parts for an orchestra written in pencil: Mr. Morricone’s next batch of soundtracks.
His extensive background in classical music can be heard in his swelling love themes and in his meticulous orchestrations, which can suggest the stateliness of the 18th century or the eerie dissonances of the 20th. Unlike younger film composers who create their music as studio recordings rather than manuscripts, or who hand off their themes for others to arrange, Mr. Morricone writes full scores and conducts them himself.
“He doesn’t have a piano in his studio,” said the director Barry Levinson, who commissioned Mr. Morricone for “Bugsy,” a soundtrack nominated for an Academy Award. “I always thought that with composers, you sit at the piano, and you try to find the melody. There’s no such thing with him. He hears a melody, and he writes it down. He hears the orchestration completely done.”
Mr. Morricone grew up playing trumpet like his father, who worked in jazz bands and opera orchestras; sometimes Ennio substituted for him at gigs. While studying trumpet and composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Mr. Morricone was also arranging and sometimes writing pop songs. His film scores invoke centuries of popular music, from tarantellas and polkas to psychedelia, lounge pop and avant-garde jazz.
Mr. Morricone has also experimented constantly with timbre, using surf-rock guitar or jew’s harp, panpipes or synthesizer, wordless voices or exotic percussion. For the beginning of “Once Upon a Time in the West,” he persuaded the director, Mr. Leone, not to use conventional instruments at all: just amplified ambient sounds, from the creak of a swinging sign to the screech of an arriving train.
He pushes instruments to the extremes of their ranges and dynamics, and voices too. For “Navajo Joe,” he drew yowls and shrieks from the singers he hired. “When they finished recording, they were crying because what had been done sounded so terrible to them,” Mr. Morricone said with satisfaction.
His approach, he said, reflects his education and his era. “I have studied the expressive methods of the entire history of musical composition,” he said. “At times I turn more toward light music, at times I turn more toward serious music. I mingle things, and sometimes I turn into a chameleon. We are living in a modern world, and in contemporary music the central fact is contamination, not the contamination of disease but the contamination of musical styles. If you find this in me, that is good.”
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. It’s sometimes a conspirator, sometimes a lampoon, with tunes that are as vividly in the foreground as any of the actors’ faces. The sound of an ocarina, the humble potato-shaped ceramic flute, made his name in the 1960s in the theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
That theme was typical Morricone: a tenacious melody put across by an unlikely, unpretty, arresting combination of instruments. “I always follow an idea,” he said, “and if an idea tells me I’ve got to use strange combinations of instruments, then I do what works.” For Mr. Morricone the plan was simple. “I wanted to differentiate three timbres — the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said. “A silver flute, sounding sweet, is the good. The ocarina is the ugly. And the bad is the voices of two men singing together, off key.
“I should not be revealing this,” he continued. “These are family secrets.”
Metallica has been using “The Ecstasy of Gold,” from the same movie, as its entrance music since 1983, and performs its own version of the piece on the new tribute album.
“To me his music is just absolutely inspirational, corny as that may sound,” said James Hetfield, Metallica’s singer and guitarist. “He has taken so many risks, and his music is not polished whatsoever. It’s very rude and blatant. 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. You hear mistakes in it, and that’s just great — if they are mistakes. Who knows? There’s so much character in it, and I appreciate that in such a polished world of soundtracks.”
After he became known for Mr. Leone’s spaghetti westerns, Mr. Morricone went on to write for every imaginable genre: crime films like “The Untouchables,” historical epics like “Burn!,” horror movies like “The Thing,” art films like “Teorema,” even an occasional comedy. He has worked with virtually every major Italian director after Fellini, as well as a long international list.
Mr. Morricone chooses his commissions based almost entirely on his trust in the director, he said. “Sometimes I read the script, sometimes I read the main part of the story, and sometimes I just watch the film when it’s done and that’s it,” he said.
“When you work in cinema, you can’t exclude anything,” he added. “Lately I have scored a film, and the film had not been shot yet. It was just being shot, and I just heard the director’s story of the film. This is not as negative as it seems to be, because it gives the composer the possibility to just express music — music and only music.”
Mr. Levinson said that unlike many film scorers, Mr. Morricone does not want to hear the temporary music many directors use while shooting. He watches a movie without accompaniment and takes notes, sometimes coming up with themes immediately. “They usually give you less time than necessary, but I usually ask for a month,” he said. “When I have to compose I have no holidays. I write every day. And Saturday and Sunday are even better, because the phone doesn’t ring that much.”
Mr. Morricone is wary of having too much music in a film. “It’s useless,” he said. “After a while the audience loses track, and you cannot appreciate the psychological idea and aim that the music has.”
He often presents himself as the servant of the director and the film. “Time is the element they have in common, music and cinema,” he said. “You have to take into account the actors, the plot, the intention of the director and the story you are going to score.”
But he is more than a functionary. His own personality, what he has called a “musical calligraphy,” comes through. “A composer is conditioned by the film, but he has to find a way to overcome these limits,” he said. “And how does he do this? Through his musical culture, through his great passion for musicians of the past. And doing it time after time, little by little it becomes a style.”
Is his own story in the music? “That’s a romantic idea of composing, that there is autobiographical inspiration in things,” he said. “Some composers, perhaps, they see a woman and say, ‘I’m going to write something extraordinary because I’m thinking of her.’
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ENNIO MORRICONE: THE ITALIAN ICON
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Italian film composer Ennio Morricone once told the British newspaper The Guardian about an offer he...Italian film composer Ennio Morricone once told the British newspaper The Guardian about an offer he received from a Hollywood film studio, one intended to lure him to the United States. “They said they would give me a villa,” he recalled, and you can hear a little barb in his response. “I told them I liked it in Italy, and there was no need to leave Rome, because I only speak with the director about the score, not the studio.”
Given his self-assurance — he didn’t bother to learn English — it’s not surprising that the 81-year-old Morricone has never performed his work in Los Angeles. (He was scheduled to appear this Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl but at press time the show was postponed.) One reason for this, of course, is that his music is designed for inside with the lights off, not outside in an amphitheater. But there’s also the simple fact that the stubborn, opinionated artiste has never felt the need to kowtow in Hollywood. He’s never lacked for work.
Yet for someone so seemingly uninterested in experiencing America firsthand (he’s only played the States one other time, New York in 2007), Morricone’s palette is thick with the American vernacular. His collaboration with Italian director Sergio Leone, for whom he created the iconic scores for A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, was solidified in part after Leone heard Morricone’s 1962 take on Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” sung by American expat Peter Tevis: “California, Arizona, I harvest your crops/Well it’s north up to Oregon to gather your hops.” The melody became a central theme to A Fistful of Dollars, and has since woven its way into the American subconscious. Morricone’s use of jazz was not only innovative, but his particular synthesis, when he decides to employ it, is an eloquently accented Italian translation of an American sound. (Writer David Bither aptly describes the Dollars trilogy as “horse operas.”)
Were those three scores the only ones he ever created, Morricone would have secured his place as a musical iconoclast alongside composers like Juan Garcia Esquivel, Martin Denny and Raymond Scott, visionaries with easily identifiable sonic fingerprints. But Morricone just keeps composing, and, 45 years after his first Leone score, he’s created a body of work as expansive as it is mysterious.
Stateside, he’s worked on Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, Barry Levinson’s Bugsy and Oliver Stone’s U Turn, among many others. His theme for Roland Joffé’s The Mission has become a de facto orchestral standard, and is often employed during do-or-die moments in football commercials, with its chorale gravitas and swirling strings. Morricone’s 1973 collaboration with Joan Baez, “Here’s to You,” has become an oft-covered crowd pleaser, even while the film from which it came, Sergio Sollima’s 1973 Revolver, has been consigned to the dustbin.
What exactly is it about Morricone’s art that’s so magnetic? Sure, the moments of pure freakishness stand out. The childish nyah-nyah voices in Dario Argento’s Bird With the Crystal Plumage, heard on a home stereo excised from the weird chase sequence Morricone wrote it for, are a freaky aural vision, so out there that you wonder about the composer’s sanity. The entirety of Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik is one long acid trip of blurts, string sweeps, trippy interludes and out-of-body voices. During one particularly surreal chase scene — right after plumes of pink, purple and yellow poison gas disorient a carful of men, Morricone capturing the chaos with wailing saxophones and surf guitars — the composer slams one open-chord guitar riff as a car makes its getaway. The reverb sounds like a rumbling muffler. (Later, a man and woman roll around in $10 million worth of bills while an Indian raga plays along on a sitar.)
But just as important is the secondhand Morricone, whose sound has become ubiquitous through the sampling and quoting of his iconic melodies, the best of which wordlessly capture a certain ... morriconia. In Alexander Payne’s Election, when Tracy Flick learns that hunky jock Paul is running against her for student-body president, the screams of Morricone’s “Navajo Joe” fly out of the screen. In the title track to Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 2, an operatic female vocal sample from “Ecstasy of Gold” reinforces the rapper’s menace. Metallica has long covered that same song, which first appeared in the film score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Downtown NYC skronker John Zorn’s tribute album, The Big Gundown, is one of the great jazz records of the 1980s. A generation of ecstatic ravers get the warm fuzzies when the archetypical Morricone whistle blows — the Orb sampled it in their chill-out classic, “Little Fluffy Clouds.” Even Ally McBeal, for heaven’s sake, borrowed his music — along with a host of other pop culture icons, from the Pet Shop Boys and the Ramones to The Lion King and Jackass 2, The Jeffersons and The Sopranos. Who else can you say that about?
Maybe that’s why Ennio Morricone doesn’t perform often in the United States. He doesn’t need to.
supersonic
