Morricone, Ennio (EN)

Morricone Ennio, *10 November 1928 Rome, †6 July 2020, Italian composer and arranger. He studied at Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia – trumpet under U. Semproni (diploma in 1946), instrumentation under A. d’Elli (diploma in 1952) and composition under G. Petrassi (diploma in 1954). He played the trumpet in various bands and night clubs in Rome, wrote songs and arrangements of popular pieces for RAI, and from the end of the 1950s to the mid-1960s also for a phonographic company RCA. In 1958, he took part in the International Darmstadt Summer Courses of contemporary music. From 1965 to the mid-1980s, he worked (as a trumpeter and flautist; in 1983–85 as a board member) in an avantgarde group Nuova Consonanza, formed by F. Evangelista, which focused on improvisation and was influenced by J. Cage, K. Stockhausen, P. Boulez, La Monte Young, aleatoric music, serialism, concrete music, popular music, and free jazz – which gave him the opportunity to experiment with sound and discover new timbral qualities, which Morricone later used in his works. He was a co-founder of the research centre Istituto di Ricerca per il Teatro Musicale in Rome (1984). In 1991–96, together with S. Miceli, he taught film music courses at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena.

Since 2001, Morricone has performed with orchestras and choirs as a conductor at numerous concerts in Europe, Asia and both Americas, presenting his film and classical music. He has established a permanent collaboration with the Roma Sinfonietta orchestra, with which he recorded his works and given concerts in prestigious halls in Italy, London, Tokyo, Osaka, the UN building in New York, as well as with the orchestra and choir of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. In 2015, in Rome, with the Roma Sinfonietta and the choirs of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and the Rome Opera, he gave the first performance of Missa Papae Francisci. He has also performed with ensembles from La Scala in Milan, opera houses in Rome and Budapest, Orquesta Nacionales de España, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, London Symphony Orchestra and others. In 2013, to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of his film career, he made a tour My Life in Music with the band (including Moscow, Vienna, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, and Santiago), which he resumed in 2015 (20 concerts in 12 European countries). He visited Poland several times.

From the beginning of his career, Morricone composed music for the concert hall, which he called “musica assoluta,” and (sometimes under the pseudonyms Dan Salvio and Leo Nichols) for radio, TV, theatre, revues, and commercials. He wrote and arranged songs – including the famous Se telefonando and Ogni volta – for Mario Lanza, Mina, Mireille Mathieu, Paul Anka, Dalida, Françoise Hardy, Milva, Rita Pavone, Hayley Westenra, Morrissey, John Zorn, Céline Dion and many others. His achievements in the field of “absolute” music include about 150 orchestral, chamber, solo, choral, vocal-instrumental pieces, an opera, a mass, and solo concerts. However, he became famous primarily as a composer of film music. He created soundtracks for over 500 films and series. He began his collaboration with cinema in 1961 (Il federate, dir. L. Salce), in 1964 he composed the music for Per un pugno di dollari directed by S. Leone – the first of the so-called spaghetti westerns that brought him international fame and opened the way to collaboration with many directors (M. Bolognini, G. Montaldo, G. Pontecorvo, P.P. Pasolini, D. Argento, B. Bertolucci), also Hollywood ones from the 70s. In 1988, the film Cinema Paradiso began a long-standing collaboration between Morricone and Giuseppe Tornatore (their last joint film, La corrispondenza, was made in 2016).

Morricone’s music defies attempts at unequivocal stylistic classification. The composer was a representative of the Roman avant-garde of the 1950s, and his artistic path began in experimental music. In Darmstadt, he encountered Stockhausen, Boulez, M. Kagel, B. Maderna and L. Nono, and drew inspiration from their works. Morricone’s early film pieces were completely different in nature than his concert pieces, representing the avant-garde radicalism movement; however, in later years, the composer began to combine stylistic elements of both trends, consistently striving for their synthesis. He used various sources of inspiration and means of expression – for example, in Mission, he reached for sacred music and Indian melodies, in the series of spaghetti westerns, he introduced sound effects such as whistling, vocalisation screams, whispers, cries, coyote howls, hoofbeats, enriched the instrumentation with an electric guitar, harmonica, pan flute, drums, and organ. In both his film and concert music, he skilfully intertwined elements of choral-symphonic music, opera, concrete, popular, folk and rock music, electronic, serialism (Distanze, Musica per 11 violini), and minimalism. In many pieces (e.g. Bambini del mondo) he used the so-called “modular technique.”

Morricone received numerous awards, including two honorary Oscars: for his contribution to the art of film music (2007) and for the music to Q. Tarantino’s western The Hateful Eight (2016), and 5 Oscar nominations (music for Days of Heaven, 1979; The Mission, 1987; The Untouchables, 1988; Bugsy, 1992; Malena, 2001), British Academy of Film & Arts awards – BAFTA (Days of Heaven, Once Upon a Time in America, The Mission, The Untouchables, Cinema Paradiso, The Hateful Eight), Grammy Awards (The Untouchables, Once Upon a Time in America, 2009 Grammy Hall of Fame for the soundtrack to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 2014 Grammy Trustees Award for outstanding contribution to the recording industry), 1999 Felix for “European Contribution to World Cinema,” Golden Globes (The Mission, The Legend of 1900, The Hateful Eight), American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers – ASCAP awards (The Untouchables, In the Line of Fire, Wolf, 1994 Life Achievement Award), 2 European Film Awards and E.W. Korngold Award (1999). In 1992, he was honoured in France with the officer title of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in 2009 with the Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honour, in 2008 with the Orden al Mérito Artístico y Cultural Pablo Neruda in Chile, the title of Commander, Grand Officer and Knight of the Grand Cross of the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (1995, 2005, 2017), in 2019 with the Gold Medal of Pope Francis, in 2020 with the Princess of Asturias Award. In 2020, the Senate of the Italian Republic awarded him the Genio ed Eccellenza Italiana nel Mondo award. From 1996, he was a member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

Literature: A. and J. Lhassa Ennio Morricone. Biographie, Lausanne 1989; The Ennio Morricone Musicography, ed. H.J. de Boer and M. van Wouw, Amsterdam 1990; S. Miceli Morricone, la musica, il cinema, Milan 1994, German ed. Essen 2002; Ch. Leinberger Ennio Morricone’s „The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, Lanham–Oxford 2004; Th. Wagner F. Evangelisti und die Improvisationsgruppe Nuova Consonanza, Saarbrücken 2004; Morricone. Cinema e oltre, ed. G. Lucci, Milan 2007; Ch. Leinberger The Dollars Trilogy. „There are Two Kinds of Westerns Heroes, My Friend!”, in: Music in the Western, ed. K. Kalinak, New York 2012; G. Heldt et al. Ennio Morricone, Munich 2013; S. Miceli Leone, Morricone and the Italian Way to Revisionist Westerns, in: The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, Cambridge 2016; J.-B. Collombin Ennio Morricone. Perspective d’une oeuvre, Paris 2016; Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words. Ennio Morricone in conversation with Alessandro De Rosa, English transl. M. Corbella, New York 2019; F. Sciannameo Reflections on the Music of Ennio Morricone. Fame and Legacy, Lanham–London 2020.