Not Fade Away

ENNIO MORRICONE

Film music maestro (1928-2020)

FOR Ennio Morricone, composing scores for film and TV presented a unique challenge. Music, he insisted, should be much more than mere accompaniment. “I always say that in order to work well in a film, music should have the strength of its own specific technical characteristics,” he explained to Uncut in 2015. “It should have a life irrespective of the film it’s associated with… It has its own strength and autonomy.”

This philosophy was borne out by his greatest works, from the ravishing symphonics of The Mission and Once Upon A Time In America to the claustrophobic chills of his avant-garde soundtracks to Dario Argento’s run of late-’60s/ early-’70s Italian horror films, the dramatic peaks of Exorcist II: The Heretic, or The Thing’s unsettling strain of moody electronica. He’s best known for the spaghetti westerns he scored for Sergio Leone during the ’60s – A Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly – a tense audio vérité of jaw harps, whistles, gunshots, whips and mariachi trumpets that came to signify an entire genre.

Known as Il Maestro, Morricone created over 500 scores in an illustrious career that also found room for classical pieces, theatre commissions, radio work, choirs and (with free improv collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza) experimental music. He’d begun as a trumpet player, studying composition and choral music at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, graduating in 1954. Morricone then cut his teeth as an orchestral arranger for, the first of several collaborations with director Luciano Salce. When old schoolmate Sergio Leone hired him for in 1964, Morricone was tasked with devising music as distinctive as Dimitri Tiomkin’s theme for . He described their fruitful artistic partnership, which lasted until 1984’s gangster epic , as “intriguing… it was an excellent collaboration, because he really trusted me. There was a lot of convergence of ideas.”