Reference.com

Ennio Morricone

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Ennio Morricone, Grand Official of OMRI (born November 10, 1928), is an Academy Award-winning Italian composer especially noted for his film scores. He has composed and arranged scores for more than 500 film and television productions. He is best known for the characteristic sparse and memorable soundtracks of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) which have been frequently cited by many in the film industry as some of the greatest film scores ever composed. He is sometimes also credited as Dan Savio or Leo Nichols.

Although only 30 of his film scores are for Westerns, it is these for which he is best known. His more recent notable compositions for film include the scores for The Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986), The Untouchables (Brian DePalma, 1987), Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), Lolita (Adrian Lyne, 1997) and Malèna (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2000). He received the Honorary Academy Award (Lifetime Achievement Award) in 2007 (although he never won an Oscar in competition), only the second film composer to do so (the first being Alex North).

Morricone makes no qualitative distinction between his film scores (which he collectively calls "applied music") and his by now more than 100 concert pieces (termed "absolute music"). He has collaborated with industry giants, most notably Quincy Jones and Celine Dion. An admirer of Morricone's compositions for many years, Jones enlisted his longtime songwriting collaborators Alan and Marilyn Bergman to write the lyrics that Dion sang to Morricone's Once Upon A Time In America theme.

Biography

Morricone was born in Rome and was educated at the Conservatorio, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in the trumpet and composition under Goffredo Petrassi, and choral music and choral direction. Impelled by his father Roberto to also take up the trumpet, he had first gone to Santa Cecilia to take lessons on the instrument while still perhaps as young as 9. Ennio formally entered the conservatory at either 12 or 14 years of age, these being the difficult years of World War II in the heavily-bombed "Open City": the composer remarked that he mostly remembered the hunger. Many years were spent in study, giving him the extraordinary level of technique all his music exhibits. His wartime experiences influenced many of his scores for films set in that period.

In the beginning, he regarded himself to be destined to compose modern classical music, but this changed when he was invited to write arrangements for popular Italian songs, something that was completely unfamiliar to him at that time. A particular success was one of his own songs, "Se telefonando", sung by Mina.

Ten years earlier, in 1956 he had married Maria Travia, who bore him three sons and a daughter (in order of birth: Marco, Alessandra, Andrea [Andrew], and Giovanni) and has written many lyrics (including the Latin texts for The Mission) to complement her husband's pieces. With mouths to feed, he began writing music for films in 1961 but continued to work in uncompromising classical composition and arrangement, initially influenced by John Cage — particularly the American's use of silence — but writing more in the climate of the Italian avant-garde where such figures as his near-contemporaries Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio were leading exponents.

He was deeply influenced by his teacher Goffredo Petrassi, to whom he has dedicated concert pieces. Few have been made available on CD (in stark contrast to his very many widely available soundtrack CDs) and many have yet to be premiered. The elderly maestro has spoken to the Italian press about his ostracism. Those who concern themselves with "serious" music have been unable or unwilling all these many years to esteem someone who made a living by making soundtracks for Westerns. Slowly, interest and acceptance are coming. The championing of his work, particularly Voci dal silenzio (his response to the September 11, 2001 attacks) by the renowned conductor Riccardo Muti has helped reduce that snobbery. Nevertheless, Ennio Morricone continues to compose as he always has, not at a piano, but writing everything in longhand directly onto a full score "with few mistakes"; he "remains baffled" by other composers' use of professional orchestrators, almost the norm in Hollywood.

Film scores

In 1964 he began his famous collaborations with Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. For Leone he wrote the score for A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964) and continued with a number of other Spaghetti Western films. By 1968 he was reducing his work outside of film and in the same year wrote twenty scores for films. His collaboration with Leone is considered one of the finest collaborations between a director and a composer. He scored all of Leone's films from A Fistful of Dollars to Once Upon a Time in America.

Morricone's score of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), is his most famous. Along with the William Tell Overture from the Silent period and The Magnificent Seven by Elmer Bernstein, it is one of the most recognizable pieces associated with the Western genre. Although he is most famous for writing the scores of Leone's films, he was more at ease with directors such as Giuliano Montaldo and Gillo Pontecorvo. (Ironically, Morrricone himself loathes the epithet "spaghetti western" — intended as a pejorative — but a term long since become affectionate.) Morricone frequently collaborated with childhood friend Alessandro Alessandroni, who performed as the whistler on many of the Sergio Leone soundtracks, and many besides, together with his "Cantori Moderni", a flexible troupe of "modern singers", and only one of them — the soprano Edda Dell'Orso — for whom Morricone composed many pieces specifically to exploit (at the height of her powers) her particular vocal gifts — "an extraordinary voice at my disposal".

He received his first Nastro d'Argento in 1970 for the music in Metti una Sera a Cena (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1969) and his second only a year later for Sacco e Vanzetti (Guiliano Montaldo, 1971) where he had made a memorable collaboration with the legendary American folk singer and activist Joan Baez. He received his first nomination for an Academy Award in 1979 for the score to Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) and another in 1986 for The Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986), 1987 for The Untouchables (Brian De Palma, 1987), 1991 for Bugsy (Barry Levinson, 1991) and 2001 for Malèna (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2000).

Like Jerry Goldsmith Morricone has worked extensively for television, everything from a single title piece all the way through to long-running series, by way of variety shows and documentaries. Like Goldsmith he has not been afraid to commit to the television epic, a typical one lasting for some six hours. In 1974, for example, he had composed the music for Moses, starring in the title role the veteran American actor Burt Lancaster, and the following decade, it was the turn of another wanderer, Marco Polo, played by Ken Marshall. In the 1980s he began composing what would become most of the scores for the Italian Mafia television series La Piovra, only one highlight being the malevolently-intoned "Droga e Sangue" ("Drugs and Blood"). See La Piovra 2 (soundtrack), La Piovra 3 (soundtrack), La Piovra 4 (soundtrack), La Piovra 5 (soundtrack) and Treasure of the four crowns Soundtrack in 1983. Concurrent with that and now into the 1990s, he was Music Supervisor for the mammoth television project La bibbia ("The Bible"), the largest production of its kind ever undertaken. In the late 1990s he collaborated with his son, Andrea, on the Ultimo crime dramas. Andrea Morricone is also a composer in his own right but has collaborated with his father on several projects, most notably on the BAFTA-winning Nuovo Cinema Paradiso In 2003 he scored another epic, this time for Japanese television, the Japanese Taiga drama about Miyamoto Musashi, Japan's legendary warrior. Much of his "applied music" is now applied to Italian television films.

Morricone's film music has been recorded by other artists on a number of occasions: Hugo Montenegro had a hit with a version of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in both the United Kingdom and the United States and followed it up with an album of Morricone's music in 1968, and John Zorn recorded an album of Morricone's music, The Big Gundown, in the mid-1980s. Many lyricists and poets have helped convert some of his melodies into an extensive songbook. More recently Morricone collaborated with world music artists, like Portuguese fado singer Dulce Pontes (in 2003 with Focus, an album praised by Paulo Coelho and where his songbook can be sampled) and virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma (in 2004), who both recorded albums of Morricone classics with the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra and Morricone himself conducting. Metallica uses Morricone's The Ecstasy of Gold as an intro at their concerts (shock jocks Opie and Anthony also use the song at the start of their XM Satellite Radio and CBS Radio shows.) The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra also played it on Metallica's Symphonic Rock album S&M. Ramones used the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as a concert intro. The theme from A Fistful Of Dollars is also used as a concert intro by The Mars Volta. His influence extends from Michael Nyman to Muse. He even has his own tribute band, a large group which started in Australia, touring as "The Ennio Morricone Experience". In 2006 Morricone made a guest appearance on the Morrissey album Ringleader of the Tormentors, scoring the string part for Dear God, Please Help Me, recorded in Rome's Forum Music Village Studios, Morricone's regular recording and mixing venue, previously known as the Orthophonic Recording Studio, which is located beneath a church.

Morricone in concert

Since 2001 Ennio Morricone has been on a world tour, the latter part sponsored by Giorgio Armani, with the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, touring London (Barbican 2001; 75th birthday Concerto, Royal Albert Hall 2003), Paris, Verona and Tokyo. Morricone performed his classic film scores at the Hammersmith Apollo Theatre in London, UK on 2006-12-01 and 2006-12-02. He made his North American concert debut on 2007-02-03 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The evening before, Morricone had already presented at the United Nations a concert consisting of some of his film themes as well as the cantata Voci dal silenzio to welcome the new Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. A Los Angeles Times review bemoaned the poor acoustics, and opined of Morricone "His stick technique is adequate, but his charisma as a conductor is zero." The maestro, though, has said: "Conducting has never been important to me. If the audience comes for my gestures then they better stay outside." On 2007-12-12 Morricone conducted the Roma Sinfonietta at the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna presenting a selection of his own works.

Academy Award

Morricone received an honorary Academy Award on 2007-02-25 from Clint Eastwood "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music." With the statuette went a standing ovation. Although nominated five times, he had not previously received an Oscar. In conjunction with this, Morricone released a tribute album, We All Love Ennio Morricone, featuring as its centerpiece Celine Dion's rendition of "I Knew I Loved You" (based on "Deborah's theme" from Once Upon a Time in America) which she performed at the ceremony. Behind-the-scenes studio production and recording footage of "I Knew I Loved You" can be viewed in the debut episode of the QuincyJones.com Podcast The lyric, as with Morricone's Love Affair, had been penned by Oscar-winning husband-and-wife duo Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Morricone's acceptance speech was in his native Italian tongue and was interpreted by Clint Eastwood, who stood to his left. Eastwood and Morricone had in fact met two days earlier — for the first time in 40 years — at a reception. On that occasion, Eastwood explained to the journalists that in "the minds of many, we [Morricone and Eastwood] are linked together, but in the process of making movies, we really never interacted much, and thus never really saw each other". In interviews, Morricone has claimed that Eastwood had called him several times to request his services, but he had always turned him down, decisions which Morricone has subsequently regretted.

Prizes and awards

Discography

Tributes

References

Sources

  • Horace, B. Music from the Movies, film music journal double issue 45/46, 2005: ISSN 0967-8131
  • Miceli, Sergio. Morricone, la musica, il cinema. Mucchi/Ricordi, 1994: ISBN 88-7592-398-1
  • Poppi, R., M. Pecorari. Dizionario del cinema italiano. I film vol. 3. Dal 1960 al 1969. Gremese, 1993: ISBN 88-7605-593-2
  • Poppi, R., M. Pecorari. Dizionario del cinema italiano. I film vol. 4. Dal 1970 al 1979* A/L. Gremese, 1996: ISBN 88-7605-935-0
  • Poppi, R., M. Pecorari. Dizionario del cinema italiano. I film vol. 4. Dal 1970 al 1979** M/Z. Gremese, 1996: ISBN 88-7605-969-5
  • Poppi, R., M. Pecorari. Dizionario del cinema italiano. I film vol. 5. Dal 1980 al 1989* A/L. Gremese, 2000: ISBN 88-7742-423-0
  • Poppi, R., M. Pecorari. Dizionario del cinema italiano. I film vol. 5. Dal 1980 al 1989** M/Z. Gremese, 2000: ISBN 88-7742-429-X

External links

|}



Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Saturday March 08, 2008 at 22:19:32 PST (GMT -0800)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation