Ennio Morricone: Lights, Camera…Music!
Bang & Olufsen B&O Magazine
In an illustrious career that stretches back over half a century, Ennio Morricone has scored over 500 films and worked with everyone from Sergio Leone to Oliver Stone, yet at the age of 85, he shows no signs of slowing down.
There are a few things you need to know before interviewing Ennio Morricone. He doesn’t speak English, he likes to be called ‘Maestro’ and, if his reputation is anything to go by, he looks forward to the prospect of talking to journalists with about as much enthusiasm as most of us would have for root canal treatment.
If you ask him a question that annoys or simply bores him, Morricone replies with a weary tone of magisterial froideur that leaves you in absolutely no doubt what he thinks of your line of enquiry, but get him talking about a subject that really interests him and he waxes lyrical with a breathless, almost boyish enthusiasm that belies his age.
Born on November 10th 1928, the oldest of five children, his father, Mario – a jazz trumpeter – enrolled Ennio at Rome’s Santa Cecilia Conservatory when he was 10-years-old. As a teenager, Morricone studied trumpet and composition and completed what was meant to be a four-year course in half the time, spending his days writing classical music and his nights playing trumpet in the jazz clubs of Rome.
“Studying at Santa Cecelia wasn’t fun…it was a lot of work,” Morricone recalls, sitting in his palatial 17th Century apartment overlooking Rome’s famous Piazza Venezia. “I began to study composition seriously when I was 16, and it struck me immediately very deeply. I originally thought I would play the trumpet or become a classical composer, so I was not thinking at all about soundtracks or the movies when I started. There’s no way I could have known what would have happened in the future. I did not have a crystal ball.”
After completing his military service, he became a writer and arranger for radio, television and the stage. In 1960, his Concerto for Orchestra was premiered at La Fenice Opera House in Venice. In 1964, director Sergio Leone approached Morricone to write the score for Per Un Pugno Di Dolari (A Fistful Of Dollars) the first of his iconic Spaghetti Western movies.
“Leone came to my house in Rome to ask me to write the music for A Fistful Of Dollars. Immediately there was a good chemistry between the two of us in terms of what we would have to do together.”
As a rule, Leone asked Morricone to write the music before he had actually started shooting, with the actors and crew often reacting to the music as it was played back to them on the sets in Spain and Italy, so they would get the atmosphere exactly as Leone wanted it.
“He asked me to write them before he started filming, but he would tell me about the story and explain the shots to me,” Morricone explains. “I would propose ideas, and he was always very good at understanding which ones were the right ideas. It’s a typical relationship between a composer and a director. I give him my idea and then he gives me his suggestions and we go back and forth in that way. It was a very collaborative relationship.”
Morricone’s music used an array of strange elements – offbeat orchestrations, Sicilian folk instruments and twangy guitars mixed with haunting harmonica, whistles, whip cracks, ghostly choral harmonies and church bells.
His groundbreaking work for Sergio Leone focused on the sound as a key narrative element within the films. Morricone’s instantly recognizable music either propelled the action along or served as a surreal counterpoint to what was happening on screen, transporting Leone’s films into another world. His ability to match a memorable melody or a specific sound with a character, a scene or an atmosphere is perhaps what makes Ennio Morricone so unique. He paints pictures with music like nobody else.
“I honestly don’t know if I would say that the music was as important as the visual images, but the importance is given by the mix that the director makes between the music and the other visual elements. I compose at my desk without any instrument, as all composers should do. I never write in front of the screen, although looking at the screen sometimes I might get an idea. I write based on the story that the director tells me or on seeing the rushes of the film. There really aren’t any rules.”
Although the music Morricone wrote for Sergio Leone’s films left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape, his frustration that their relatively brief collaboration has overshadowed everything else he has done in his chameleonic career is palpable. “Why are you always asking me about Leone?” he suddenly snaps. “You do know I have worked with over 100 directors? How much more time do you want to spend on this?”
Morricone’s celestial soundtrack to Roland Joffé’s The Mission mixed motifs from sacred music with native Indian melodies and won him more attention than any of the numerous scores he had written since he first made his name with Leone. Although he has been nominated several times, inexplicably, Ennio Morricone has never won an Oscar. Still, he received the Honorary Academy Award in 2007 for his ‘magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.’
He has composed the music for over 500 films since he first emerged with Il Federale (The Fascist) in 1961, which works out at about a soundtrack a month, not counting his numerous classical works. Although you can’t imagine that Morricone has much time for anything that doesn’t involve writing or thinking about music, he still somehow finds the time to pursue other passions.
“I do not look at my watch, so you cannot ask me how much time I spend working, but I write music almost every day. Either I compose or I think about composing. I like watching football, and I also read books or I play chess. If I had not become a composer, I would have wanted to be the worldwide chess champion,” he chuckles. “I certainly have free time – I need it for when I am reflecting. Staying still also means that your mind is working in order to look and find other things to inspire you.”