Ennio Morricone is arguably the best and best-known Italian composer of the 20th century. The only person who could really challenge him on that front is another composer known mostly for his film work, Nino Rota. But where Rota rose to fame because of his collaborations with Federico Fellini and became a darling of the art-house crowd, Morricone cut his teeth and earned his reputation scoring the popular, overblown, psychedelic, wide-screen hallucinations of the mythical old west perpetrated by Sergio Leone in the 1960s, These are the same operatic oaters that gave Squint Eastwood his first real break, films like For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which is still Morricone’s most familiar tune and which has become shorthand for the whole spaghetti western mis-en-scene: the mysterious stranger blowing into town and blowing out again, the dusty showdown shot at hip level, the whole romantic more-macho-than-macho ordeal that those mythical 20 years or so of American history provided.
But Morricone scored much more than overblown horse operas. Comedies, dramas, musicals, horror films, whatever he could get his quill on. And for many years, he poured out music at an unbelievable pace. At the peak of his output, he was averaging writing, arranging, scoring, and recording 50 soundtracks a year. That’s just under one a week for the entire year. The mind boggles – I could barely watch a film a week for an entire year. But although his range was wide and he settled down in later years to a more sustainable pace and more “dignified” fare (he wrote the highly acclaimed score to The Mission), it’s his early work for Leone that really gets me going.
Morricone was a master at arranging, throwing anything and everything into his scores, tradition (or logic) be damned. That’s one of the things that makes his music so exciting – the unpredictability of it, the unusual combination of textures and timbres and, appropriately for Leone, the incredibly overblown melodramatic nature of the music. No single track shows off these elements better than the piece of incidental music from For a Few Dollars More called La Resa Dei Conti (aka Sixty Seconds to What?). The track starts with a mysterious, haunting motif played on what sounds like a music box, before the strings come seeping in to introduce the incredibly close-miked sound of an acoustic guitar strumming to the barest hint of castanets. The guitar is so loud and enveloping that it sounds like you’re inside the instrument. The music marches along at a stately pace for a few moments, gathering momentum, before it suddenly explodes into an insane, Phantom-of-the-Opera organ solo played on the world’s biggest pipe organ. The only other person I can think of who would consider putting a giant pipe organ together with a strumming guitar is PDQ Bach, but he’d be kidding. Morricone is most decidedly not kidding, and the juxtaposition is exhilarating. After the organ solo, the song settles down (if you can call it that), into a trumpet soloing over a incessant string rhythm. A wordless choir adds texture and drama until the whole track is bursting from the seams, rose in teeth, bandoleer across its chest. Just when you think it can’t get any bigger, it doesn’t, reverting back to the haunting music box motif that opened the piece. It is an astonishing piece of work, and one that hardly anybody knows about.
Except for Thom Yorke. I was delighted to turn on the radio one day to discover the lead singer for Radiohead guest DJing on a local station. He was in town, flogging their latest (and greatest) album, OK Computer. I only had a few minutes while I drove from point A to point B, but I listened while he talked about his band’s influences. I was delighted to hear him mention Ennio Morricone as an influence, which is especially noticeable on their track Exit Music for a Film. He talked a bit about the incredible emotionality of Morricone’s work and his unusual taste in timbres and textures and how inspiring the band found all of that. And then, as an example, he played Morricone’s La Resa Dei Conti.
I pulled this cut from a fantastic two disc overview of Morricone’s work called A Fistful of Film Music, from back catalog masters Rhino Records. The set covers the period from 1964 (A Fistful of Dollars) to 1991 (Bugsy) and contains 43 polished little gems, many from films never seen in this country. It is an ear-opening collection and shows the incredible breadth and depth of this modern Italian master and is an essential purchase for any serious music collector.
