Ennio Morricone and the Stuff
of Cinema
Dan Golding July 2020
There are those who write music for the movies, and then there are those
whose music reshapes the stuff of cinema. Ennio Morricone, who died in July
this year, was one of a handful of composers in film history who could
comfortably claim to be one of the latter: from the moment he shot to
international prominence in the 1960s, cinema has always been and will always
be part Morricone. He wrote more than 500 film and television scores over the
course of a 60-year career; he redefined ossified cinematic genres; and perhaps
most toweringly of all, with his collaborations with director Sergio Leone, he
composed some of the few snatches of film music that are easily recognised by
those who do not easily recognise film music.
Morricone, a child musician in Mussolini’s Italy, then jazz trumpeter and
arranger of pop tunes in the 1950s, turned to film and television composition
as the 1960s arrived. Though his first film score proper, Luciano Salce’s Il
Federale (The Fascist, 1961), was a standout, his early
film compositions were largely for light drama and comedy. These were films
that rarely saw the light of day outside of Italy: sex comedies like La
voglia matta (Crazy Desire, Luciano Salce, 1962), teen comedies
like Diciottenni al sole (Eighteen in the Sun, Camillo
Mastrocinque, 1962), and Lina Wertmüller’s rarely-seen debut, I
Basilischi (The Lizards, 1963). These films proved Morricone’s
imagination and industriousness, and by 1964 he was composing music for half a
dozen films a year.
Even before we get to his work for the cinema, the early musical life of
Morricone is as instructive as that of many of those who have shaped film music
the most, like Erich Korngold (performing for Mahler and Emperor Franz Josef in
1900s Vienna), Bernard Herrmann (writing radio music for Orson Welles’ Mercury
Theatre on the Air), and John Williams (jazz pianist and session musician
for Henry Mancini). Morricone talks of his early work for Italian RAI radio and
in particular, his arrangements of pop tunes of the day as an experience of
avoiding and “break[ing] the rules of the craft… the danger I saw in
craftmanship, even then, was that it could become a habit and conservatism.”1 As a great example, in 1961, Morricone arranged the
classic canzone napoletana “Voce ‘e notte” for
pop singer Miranda Martino by throwing in a few
brief excerpts of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. To today’s ears,
the resulting sound is an inspired appropriation that foregrounds his later
unlikely borrowing of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” for his score for Sergio Sollima’s La Resa Dei Conti (The
Big Gundown, 1967). In 1961, though, Morricone’s work was not just
unorthodox: it challenged the sanctity of a nostalgic musical tradition and was
heavily criticised at the time for its adventurousness.
Of course, it is for his work on the western, and in particular, his
collaborations with director Sergio Leone that Morricone is still perhaps most
enduringly famous today. These were his breakthrough films, both with the
general public in Italy and internationally. The latter did not come quickly,
however: though the films in the dollars trilogy were released in Italy in
1964, 1965, and 1966 respectively, it wasn’t until 1967 that all three were in
cinemas in the United States. And even then, the critical reception was chilly.
Bosley Crowther as usual missed the mood of public sentiment in the 1960s in
his review for the New York Times, describing A Fistful of
Dollars as “Filmed in hard, somber color and paced to a musical score
that betrays tricks and themes that sound derivative.”2
Morricone had been contacted by Leone in 1963 to compose for A
Fistful of Dollars, and the two men quickly realised that despite not
having seen each other for almost thirty years, they had in fact gone to the
same primary school. “Are you the Morricone who used to go with me to Viale
Trastavere?” asked Leone, incredulously.3 Morricone at that time knew nothing about westerns and was not
enthusiastic about the Kurosawa classic (Yojimbo, 1961) that Leone
delightedly showed the composer by way of inspiration. But Morricone saw the
archetypical and mythic basis for what Leone wanted to do with this story and
agreed to write him some music.
The myths that Leone cared for with the dollars trilogy are not the myths
of the Hollywood western up until that point, the “story of the lone stranger
who rides into a troubled town and cleans it up, winning the respect of the
townsfolk and the love of the schoolmarm.”4 In the world of Leone, there are lone strangers and troubled towns,
but little respect and even scarcer love from pure-hearted schoolmarms. The
protagonist – we can’t quite call him a hero – no longer wears a white hat and
a badge. “The English have Shakespeare, the French have Moliere, the Russians
have Chekhov, and we’ve got the cowboy story,” said Robert Duvall about the
western in 2006.5 How shocking it must have been, then, to watch A Fistful of
Dollars in the 1960s, an Italian-West German-Spanish co-production
starring just one American actor, a barely-disguised story from a Japanese
samurai film, and an amorality so plain that when it finally aired on United
States television in 1975, a ham-fisted prologue was added in an attempt to
give moral justification for the film’s events.6
Morricone’s score does much the same to the music of the western as Leone
did to its myths. The sound world of the film is nothing like that of the
traditional Hollywood western, which in the hands of composers like Max
Steiner, Elmer Bernstein, and Jerome Moross was replete with Aaron
Copland-esque horn fanfares, expansive, galloping strings, and folk songs.7 This was music that sung the praises of heroic, chiselled-jawed
cowboys and told us of their Manifest Destiny-imbued adventures over difficult
land (often complete with racist ‘savage’ drum patterns – four beats in a row,
emphasis on the first – for Native Americans.8
By contrast, Morricone’s music for the dollars trilogy drew more on the
country and western-infused pop music at the time, like The Ramrods’ cover of
the Stan Jones perennial, “Ghost Riders in the Sky” (1961), or the surf rock of
The Shadows. Morricone’s instruction was to make the guitar “sound like a
spear,” and the sound was ironic, detached, and above all, cool.9 There was a certain orchestrational genius at work here, too: over
the length of Morricone’s music for the dollars trilogy, you will hear not just
guitars, but choir grunts, Hammond organ, whip cracks, gunshots, ocarinas,
whistles, and the twang of a marranzano (sometimes called a
jaw harp), an instrument that Morricone “associated with bullying Sicilian
kids, who wear cowboy hats instead of a coppola.”10 What kind of mind puts these instruments to work in a genre otherwise
known for its musical grandeur and earnest heroics? By the time of their third
film, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Morricone was not only
writing music for Leone before he had seen a frame of the picture, but Leone
was bringing Morricone’s recordings to set, playing it for the actors, and
timing camera movements to Morricone’s tempo.11 This was cinema in service of sound.
Mentioning Morricone’s inventive instrumentation is by now almost
obligatory, and it was certainly a big factor in how frequently his soundtracks
achieved a certain pop iconicity. An unusual sound at the cinema certainly
sticks in your eye and your ear. But it would be ignorant of Morricone’s
talents to ascribe, even by inference, his success to a certain simple musical
novelty. This was a composer whose most enduring skill was a knack for
emotional resonance of sometimes the most profound degree.
Take Once Upon a Time in America, Morricone’s final, four-hour
collaboration with Leone from 1968. Though the film has the orchestrational
quirk of Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan pipes, it is otherwise a largely traditional
score that showcases the magnificent “Deborah’s theme,” surely one of the most
beautiful melodies ever written for cinema. Through the film, the theme is
usually played just on strings (and sometimes with a wordless vocal
accompaniment by singer Edda Dell’Orso) and is in turns both floridly
expressive and then again almost completely motionless. There is some
similarity to Mahler’s famous Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony (1902), but the
melody and overall effect is entirely Morricone’s, a piece of music to
illustrate “the impossibility of the two lovers in developing a constructive,
edifying relationship.”12
Morricone could never seriously be classified as merely a specialist for
the western (a genre that, by his own calculations, accounts for just eight
percent of his total cinematic output,13 and he frequently found his greatest work through his many enduring
collaborations with directors like Pier Paolo Passolini (“an industrious,
serious man”14, Bernardo Bertolucci (“one of the best Italian movie directors of all
time,”15), Gillo Pontecorvo (“he second guessed everything!”16, Terrence Malick (“a poet, a man of culture,”17, Brian De Palma (“a very reserved and introverted man,”18 and Giuseppe Tornatore (“he absorbs new concepts like a sponge,”19 Once-off and lesser known collaborations with great directors also
included Pedro Almodóvar (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! 1990), Margarethe
von Trotta (The Great Silence, 1992), Wolfgang Petersen (In the Line
of Fire, 1993), George Miller (Lorenzo’s Oil, 1992), and Oliver
Stone (U Turn, 1997).
Morricone created music of sometimes startling variety. His score for Days
of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) is restless and unsettled, sounding
like Saint-Saëns through a funhouse mirror. Morricone’s music for The
Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986), with its tripartite approach of baroque
oboe ornamentations, ecclesiastic choir, and music for the Indigenous Guarani
people, is today much more popular than the film itself. La Cage aux
Folles (Édouard Molinaro, 1978) is full of smizing muzak; Ripley’s
Game (Liliana Cavini, 2002), aging harpsichord suspense; The
Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977) has the expected sound
and fury, but also a sweet, almost romantic guitar, and a truly oddball disco
rock tune for the end credits. Yet Morricone was not a musical bowerbird,
content to borrow between genres and styles: he was just continuing to do as he
had always done, and break the rules of craft.
Part of this also belies the variety not just in Morricone’s music but in
the projects he elected to take on. Morricone composed for plenty of prestige
and film festival favourites, but what also set him apart among many of the
film music greats was his apparent lack of any kind of snobbery or any sense of
his own status once famous. Morricone wrote music for films that would take him
to the Academy Awards and also for low-brow films that other big-name composers
would never have looked at. Indeed, as a product of the Italian film industry,
Morricone genuinely formed a different relationship with what to American eyes
might have looked like exploitation films (and of course, the dollars trilogy
was initially received as such in the United States). Morricone’s fruitful
collaboration with giallo master Dario Argento is the standout
example of this (five films, including The Bird with the Crystal
Plumage in 1970, and The Cat o’ Nine Tails in 1971),
but Morricone also worked on films like Mario Bava’s Diabolik (1968),
Armando Crispino’s Macchie solari (The Corpse, 1975),
Aldo Lado’s La Corta notte delle bambole di vetro (Short
Night of Glass Dolls, 1971), and Luciano Ercoli’s Le foto proibite
di una signora per bene (Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion,
1970). Morricone also composed the title song for one of the many barely-legal
European James Bond knock offs of the 1960s, Agent 077: Mission Bloody
Mary (Sergio Grieco, 1965).
This lack of pretension and his status as a European outside the reach of
Hollywood perhaps allowed Morricone to also take on riskier projects, such as
Pontecorvo’s anti-colonial La battaglia di Algeri (The
Battle of Algiers, 1966) and Queimada (Burn! 1969),
as well as Guiliano Montaldo’s docudrama Sacco e Vanzetti (1971),
for which he wrote both an original score and songs sung, and with lyrics by
Joan Baez.
Interestingly, despite his prolific output and his music’s global
popularity, Morricone has been less of a touchstone for the scholarly project
of film music studies, or soundtrack studies, than other American, or emigre
composers in Hollywood. This absence is mysterious yet curiously persistent. In
James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer’s authoritative Music and
Cinema, John Williams comes up more than a dozen times, with several
discrete discussions of his work; Morricone is mentioned once in passing.20 In Claudia Gorbman’s towering Unheard Melodies, Bernard
Herrmann gets detailed and serious analysis; Morricone does not get a single
remark.21 Perhaps crudely, but nonetheless indicatively, searching for “’Ennio
Morricone’ composer” on Google Scholar returns around a fifth of the results
that “’John Williams’ composer” does. (This is to say nothing of cinema studies
more broadly: no composers are mentioned at all in the 500 words dedicated to
film music in Bordwell and Thompson’s widely used Film Art textbook22.)
Perhaps this absence is because Morricone steadfastly refused to relocate
to Hollywood throughout his career and become a studio composer – though many
of his most influential scores, such as The Mission (Roland
Joffé, 1986) and The Untouchables (Brian De Palma, 1987) were
nonetheless composed for Hollywood. Perhaps it is because while in an icon like
John Williams, composers who followed found a blueprint to work and develop
from, whereas Morricone was always a little too sui generis to
do much with beyond parody or direct quotation. In other words, Morricone is
not as much included as part of a substantial shadow over film music history so
much as he is the shadow himself, a singular, distinct manifestation.
Happily, none of this stopped Morricone from committing his own thoughts on
film music to the page. With academic Sergio Miceli, Morricone wrote a handbook
for film composers adapted from a huge range of seminars given by the pair
called Composing for the Cinema: The Theory and Praxis of Music in Film.
The book also includes a manifesto on the topic of film and music temporality.23 He also invested serious amounts of energy into Alessandro De Rosa’s
fantastic Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words from 2016, which
opens with Morricone recounting his beloved chess battles again the greats:
Boris Spassky (“Probably the peak of my career as a chess player… it ended
half-half, another draw”), Gary Kasparov (“I lost dreadfully”), and Terrence
Malick (“I must admit I was much better than him”).24
For many, though, Morricone’s music has the peculiar honour of being first encountered
outside the cinema, such is its power and position in popular culture.
Sometimes, Morricone arrives first in listener’s ears through other people’s
performances, such as Hugo Montenegro’s cover version of the main theme
from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly which in June 1968 peaked
at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and stayed at #1 on the UK Singles Chart
for four weeks. More recently, Morricone’s music has been sampled by musicians
as varied as Jay-Z (“Blueprint2”), Flying Lotus (“Turtles”), and Eminem (“Bad Meets Evil”), referenced by
Kylie Minogue (“Golden”), New Order (“Blue Monday”) and Sly and Robbie (“Boops
(Here to Go)”), and performed by Metallica, Bruce Springsteen, Yo-Yo Ma, Andrea
Bocelli, Quincy Jones, and Herbie Hancock. Bands who have dedicated songs to
Morricone include Dire Straits, John Zorn, and U2 (Morricone endearingly refers
to them as “an Irish band” in Alessandro De Rosa’s book.25)
The sound of Morricone has also been widely heard and parodied in
advertising, for beer, for sports, for gambling in those countries where it is
legal to advertise it, and of course, in several Quentin Tarantino movies – in
short, in the final crumbling mementos to the ceremonial masculinity of
yesteryear, for which Morricone’s music for the Leone westerns in particular
provide bravado without necessarily needing to explain away those films’ ironic
wit and satire. Only occasionally do these reworkings transcend their reuse,
such as Nike’s “Leave Nothing” ad (featuring the evergreen “Ecstasy of Gold”), and some of the deeper
cuts in Tarantino’s films, but Morricone himself seemingly recognised the
importance of the many lives his music took on. “It helps me realize that I am
considered as a sort of spokesperson of my epoch and it means at the same time
that some of my works have entered popular culture, even if indirectly,” he told
De Rosa.26
When the news broke that Morricone had died, The Washington
Post was roundly mocked on social media for their ham-fisted description
of him as the composer of the “‘ah-ee-ah-ee-ah’ theme of
‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’” It is
inelegant, to put it politely, to reduce a titan of the film music world and
his life to a series of vowel movements. But you have to have some sympathy for
what the author was presumably intending. Morricone’s name may not be known by
all, but it is difficult to imagine anyone on planet earth who does not
recognise that coyote shriek of a sound well before they know what film it is
from or who is responsible for its creation. This is the very stuff of cinema
in the broadest possible domain, along with stabbing motions and screams in the
shower, magical red slippers, and the general impression that “Rosebud” is
something important.
Like each of these things, Morricone’s unremitting relevance is no fluke or
gimmick. His abundant music is at times complex and always varied, swinging
easily from austere to outrageous. At his genius best, Morricone’s music is
built on a direct line to something unutterable, something foundational in the
emotional make-up of humans.
This music does not sound like the result of a plan or a strategy,
something compelled to draw out a feeling or emphasise a moment. It simply is.
It was yesterday, it is today, and tomorrow, even in a world without Ennio
Morricone, it will continue to be.
Endnotes:
1. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 10.
2. Bosley Crowther, “Screen: ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ Opens: Western Film Cliches All Used in Movie Cowboy Star From TV Featured as Killer,” New York Times, 2 February 1967, https://www.nytimes.com/1967/02/02/archives/screen-a-fistful-of-dollars-openswestern-film-cliches-all-used-in.html.
3. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 22.
4. Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 32.
5. Kathy Blumenstock, “’Broken Trail’: An Ambitious Trek,” The Washington Post, June 25 2006, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/tv/2006/06/25/broken-trail-an-ambitious-trek/2f55b9de-e14d-4987-baa2-4d205028ee89/
6. James L. Neibaur, The Clint Eastwood Westerns, (Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield, 2015) p. 16.
7. Kathryn Kalinak, How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
8. Claudia Gorbman, “Drums Along the LA River: Scoring the Indian,” in Cinema and the Sound of Music, Philip Brophy, ed. (North Ryde: AFTRS, 2000) p. 106.
9. John Zorn, “Ennio Morricone Was More Than Just a Great Film Composer,” New York Times, July 8 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/arts/music/ennio-morricone-john-zorn.html.
10. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 29.
11. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 33.
12. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 70.
13. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 34.
14. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 35.
15. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 56.
16. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 49
17. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 114.
18. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 77
19. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 85.
20. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, Music and Cinema (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000).
21. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987
22. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008), p. 302.
23. Ennio Morricone and Sergio Miceli, Composing for the Cinema: The Theory and Praxis of Music in Film (Plymouth: Thornbury Press, 2013)
24. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) pp. 3-4.
25. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 34
26. Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 33.
original: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/feature-articles/ennio-morricone-obituary/
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