Ennio Morricone, perhaps one of a handful of individuals in history who single-handedly shaped how the world heard cinema, has died aged 91.
Composer of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Cinema Paradiso, The Untouchables, and The Mission, the absurdly prolific Morricone wrote more than 500 scores for film and television, many of which defined genres and cemented a cultural legacy of the likes achieved by few musicians. During his long life in music in Italy, America, and France, Morricone won Academy Awards (including an Honorary award “for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music” in 2007), Grammy Awards, and AFIs, he sold over 70 million records, and he made devotees out of the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, directors Quentin Tarantino and Brian de Palma, rock bands Metallica, Radiohead, Dire Straits, and countless film composers.
It takes a particular kind of genius to look at a cowboy movie and understand that the sound required is a grunting choir, whistling, the electric guitar, cracking whips, and a mouth harp, but that was Morricone. That he also wrote several of the most beautiful melodies ever committed to film – sometimes for the same films as the whips and whistling – is a testament to his versality and imagination. Morricone was the rare film composer both unbridled by generic conventions and possessed of the talent to invent new ones: the tinkle of the gunslinger’s spurs on dirt, the ultra-close up of Clint Eastwood’s narrowed eyes, all proven with the power of the rumbling fate of Morricone’s timpani and the propulsion of his strummed guitar.
Morricone’s music frequently realised iconicity, and the filmmakers he worked with often had the good sense to pull his music into the frame, as with Charles Bronson’s harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West and Jeremy Irons’ oboe in The Mission.
Though a working musician and composer since the 1950s, it was Morricone’s work with director Sergio Leone that launched him to international fame: 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) and A Fistful of Dynamite (1971), Once Upon a Time in America (1984). These films are some of the most successful director-composer collaborations in film history, rivalled only by the likes of Spielberg and Williams, and Hitchcock and Herrmann.
Yet Morricone also found significant creative success outside of his groundbreaking work with Leone, including directors Sergio Corbucci (The Great Silence, 1968), Pier Paolo Passolini (Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), Bernardo Bertolucci (Novocento, 1976), John Carpenter (The Thing, 1982), Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, 1978), Brian de Palma (The Untouchables, 1987), Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, 1988), and Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight, 2015, for which he won his first competitive Oscar). As well as his headline hits, Morricone would also neither shy away from bloody horror films that Hollywood might baulk at (Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970), nor deeply political films that would be banned in several countries (such as the anti-colonial Battle for Algiers from 1966). Such a range of consistent success shows that often, it was Morricone’s music that helped impel these films to greatness. He also composed dozens of concert hall pieces, and spent much of this musical life this century touring and performing his music live in concert.
Considering Morricone’s mammoth list of achievements, nothing is harder to describe than the void that will be left in cinema with his death. His music was enormously sensitive to emotions: “Deborah’s theme” from Once Upon a Time in America, one of the most heartbreaking themes ever written, ebbs and flows and pauses and runs in ways that seem impossibly empathetic for the screen; “Falls” from The Mission fabricates optimism in the face of musical doom; “Ecstasy of Gold” from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is perhaps suspense and bravado literalised in snare drums, choir, and brass.
Today, when kids play act westerns in the schoolyard, when adults parody gunslinger antics in comedies, and when advertising summons a musical sense of ‘60s masculinity and romance, it is not the sound of the cinema that they invoke. It is, and will still be tomorrow, the sound of Ennio Morricone.
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