Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone at the United Nations Headquarters.
Ennio Morricone at the United Nations Headquarters.
Background information
Born November 10, 1928 (1928-11-10) (age 80)
Origin Rome, Italy
Occupation(s) composer, arranger, conductor
Website http://www.enniomorricone.it

Ennio Morricone, Grand Official of OMRI[1] (born November 10, 1928), is an acclaimed Italian Academy Award-winning composer. He composed and arranged scores for more than 500 film and television productions.[2] Morricone wrote the characteristic 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), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The Great Silence, and My Name Is Nobody (1973). His more recent compositions include the scores for The Thing (1982), Once Upon A Time In America (1984), The Mission (1986), The Untouchables (1987), Cinema Paradiso (1988), Lolita (1997), Malèna (2000), Mission to Mars (2000) and Fateless (2005). Ennio Morricone won five Anthony Asquith Awards for Film Music by BAFTA in 1979-1992. He was nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Music, Original Score in 1979–2001, winning none of them. Morricone received the Honorary Academy Award in 2007 "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music".[3] He was the second composer in the history of the award.

Contents

Biography

Classical music

Morricone was born in Rome and was educated at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in the trumpet, composition, choral music and choral direction under Goffredo Petrassi, who deeply influenced him and to whom Morricone has dedicated concert pieces. Impelled by his father Roberto to also take up the trumpet, he had first gone to Santa Cecilia to take lessons on the instrument at the age of 9. Ennio formally entered the conservatory in 1940 at the age of 12, enrolling in a four-year harmony program at a music conservatory. In various reports, he completed it in two years or six months (date approximate).[4] These were 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 technical ability that his music exhibits. His wartime experiences influenced many of his scores for films set in that period.

After he graduated, he continued to work in uncompromising classical composition and arrangement. Initially influenced by John Cage — particularly the American's use of silence — he wrote more in the climate of the Italian avant-garde. Few have been made available on CD and some 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.

Early pop arrangements

In 1956, married with three children, Morricone started to support his family by playing in a jazz band and arranging pop songs for Radiotelevisione Italiana[4]. He was hired by RAI in 1958, but quit his job on his first day at work when he was told that broadcasting of music composed by employees was forbidden by a company rule. Subsequently, Morricone became a top studio arranger at RCA, working with Renato Rascel, Rita Pavone and Mario Lanza.[4] A particular success was one of his own songs, "Se telefonando".[5][6] Performed by Mina, it was the standout track of Studio Uno 66, the 5th biggest selling album of the year 1966 in Italy.[7] Morricone's arrangement of "Se telefonando" was a combination of melodic trumpet lines, Hal Blaine-style drumming, a string set, a sixties Europop female choir and intensive subsonic-sounding trombones. The Italian Hitparade #7 song had eight transitions of tonality building tension throughout the chorus.[5][6]

Leone film scores

Well-versed in a variety of musical idioms from his RCA experience, Morricone began composing film scores in the early '60s.[4] Though his first films were undistinguished, Morricone's arrangement of an American folk song intrigued director and former schoolmate Sergio Leone. Leone hired Morricone and together they created a distinctive score to accompany Leone's different version of the Western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964).[4] As budget strictures limited Morricone's access to a full orchestra, he used gunshots, cracking whips, voices, Sicilian folk instruments, trumpets, and the new Fender electric guitar, rather than orchestral arrangements of Western standards à la John Ford. Morricone used his special effects to punctuate and comically tweak the action, cluing in the audience to the taciturn man's ironic stance.[4] Though sonically bizarre for a movie score, Morricone's music was viscerally true to Leone's vision.

As memorable as Leone's close-ups, harsh violence, and black comedy, Morricone's work helped to expand the musical possibilities of film scoring.[4] Morricone was initially billed on the film as Dan Savio.[4]

Ennio Morricone scored all of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns and later films from A Fistful of Dollars to Once Upon a Time in America, including For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once upon a Time in the West (1968). The collaboration is considered one of the examplary collaborations between a director and a composer.

The team

With the score of A Fistful of Dollars, Morricone started his ten-year collaboration with his childhood friend Alessandro Alessandroni and his Cantori Moderni. Alessandroni provided the whistling and the twanging guitar on the soundtracks, while his Cantori Moderni were a flexible troupe of modern singers. Morricone specifically exploited the solo soprano of the group, Edda Dell'Orso at the height of her powers  — "an extraordinary voice at my disposal".

Other film scores

Most of Ennio Morricone's film scores of the 1960s were composed outside the Spaghetti Western genre, while still using Alessandro Alessandroni's team. Their music included the themes for Il Malamondo (1964), Slalom (1965), Algiers (1965) and Listen, Let's Make Love (1967). In 1968, Morricone reduced his work outside the movie business and wrote scores for twenty films in the same year.[8] The scores included psychedelic accompaniment for Mario Bava's superhero romp Danger: Diabolik (1968). The next year marked the start of a series of evocative scores for Dario Argento's stylized thrillers, including The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1969), The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971), and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1974).[4] In 1970, Morricone wrote the score for Violent City. In the same year he received his first Nastro d'Argento 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). Morricone composed the score for John Carpenter's science-fiction/horror movie The Thing (1982), although most of the musical cues Morricone composed did not end up in the finished film.

Morricone has worked for television, from a single title piece through variety shows and documentaries to TV series, including Moses (1974) and Marco Polo (1982). He wrote the score for the Mafia television series La Piovra seasons 2 to 10 from 1985 to 2001, including the themes "Droga e Sangue" ("Drugs and Blood"), "La morale" and "L'immorale".[9] Morricone worked as the conductor of the seasons 3 to 5 of the series. He also worked as the music supervisor for the television project La bibbia ("The Bible"). In the late 1990s he collaborated with his son, Andrea, on the Ultimo crime dramas. Their collaboration yielded the BAFTA-winning Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. In 2003 Ennio Morricone scored another epic, for Japanese television, the Taiga drama about Miyamoto Musashi, Japan's legendary warrior. A part of his "applied music" is now applied to Italian television films.

Tours

Since 2001 Ennio Morricone has been on a world tour, the latter part sponsored by Giorgio Armani, with the Orchestra Roma Sinfonietta, touring London (Barbican 2001; 75th birthday Concerto, Royal Albert Hall 2003), Paris, Verona and Tokyo. Morricone performed his classic film scores at the Munich Philharmonie in 2005 and 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." Morricone, 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.
Together with the Roma Sinfonietta and the Belfast Philharmonic Choir, Morricone performed at the Opening Concerts of the Belfast Festival at Queen's, in the Waterfront Hall on 17 and 18 of October 2008.

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[10]. 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

Main article: Ennio Morricone discography

Top worldwide film grosses

Ennio Morricone has been involved with eight movies grossing over $25 million at the box office[11]:

Year Title Director Gross
1966 The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Sergio Leone $25,100,000
1977 Exorcist II: The Heretic John Boorman $30,749,142
1987 The Untouchables Brian De Palma $76,270,454
1991 Bugsy Barry Levinson $49,114,016
1993 In the Line of Fire Wolfgang Petersen $176,997,168
1994 Wolf Mike Nichols $131,002,597
1994 Disclosure Barry Levinson $214,015,089
2000 Mission to Mars Brian De Palma $110,983,407

Tributes

Morricone's film music was also recorded by other artists. 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. This was followed by his album of Morricone's music in 1968. John Zorn recorded an album of Morricone's music, The Big Gundown, in the mid-1980s. Lyricists and poets have helped convert some of his melodies into a songbook. 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. In 2007, the tribute album We All Love Ennio Morricone was released. It features performances by various artists, including Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, Bruce Springsteen and Metallica.

Inglourious Basterds

A rumor in Hollywood says he might do the soundtrack for the next Quentin Tarantino movie, Inglourious Basterds.[13][14]

Personal life

In 1956, Ennio Morricone married Maria Travia, who has written lyrics to complement her husband's pieces. Her works include the Latin texts for The Mission. They have three sons and a daughter, in order of birth: Marco, Alessandra, Andrea [Andrew], and Giovanni.

References

  1. ↑ Morricone Sig. EnnioPresidenza della Reppublica
  2. ↑ "International Movie Data Base".
  3. ↑ Ennio Morricone to Receive Honorary Academy Award®
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 "About Ennio Morricone". fancast.com.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Se telefonando. HitParadeItalia site".
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Sounds: New Digs. Catalog of Cool site".
  7. ↑ "Top annuali album". HitParadeItalia.it.
  8. ↑ International Movie Database
  9. ↑ International Movie Data Base
  10. ↑ Quincy Jones
  11. ↑ Box Office Morricone
  12. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449088/trivia
  13. ↑ AICN
  14. ↑ IMDB

Sources

External links

Awards and achievements
Preceded by
Robert Altman		 Academy Honorary Award
2007		 Succeeded by
Robert F. Boyle
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Persondata
NAME Morricone, Ennio
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dan Savio
SHORT DESCRIPTION Italian composer
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1928(1928-11-10)
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome, Italy
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH