A Fistful of Film Music

Morricone, Ennio

album cover

The Sauce in the Spaghetti Western

A lonesome, troubled hero rides into the frame. We know he's lonesome by the whip-poor-will off in the distance, and from the trebley electric guitar that clippety-clops along in dusty isolation. A showdown looms, and as the storm clouds gather, the bad guys march in, accompanied by foreboding snare drums rattling away.

These techniques are part of the prolific Italian film composer Ennio Morricone's enduring contribution to music in film. Over a twenty-year career that began in the slapdash world of low-budget spaghetti Westerns, Morricone has developed an aural shorthand of specific moods and atmospheres, a lexicon that's been copied by virtually everyone in film—both in outright imitation and in campy send-up. But as this career survey argues, Morricone's film scores are more than an endless parade of predictable sonic cues. From his early films (A Fistful of Dollars) through more nuanced ones (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) to contemplative later projects (The Mission), Morricone starts with these mood-setting devices then slips in deeply felt and surprisingly affecting melodies.

The composer, whose first instrument was the trumpet, orients everything in his scores around singable motifs; even the pastoral scenes where the music serves as pure plush backdrop push, sometimes with glacial slowness, toward an overarching theme. Disc one is heavy on the campier moments in Morricone's filmography. The second disc showcases his more mature work, and it's uniformly stunning—a series of invitingly lush scenes and precise orchestrations that are grand and stirring. Without any visuals.

Genre: Classical
Released: 1995, Rhino
Key Tracks: "The Ecstasy of Gold," "Navajo Joe," "March of the Beggars."
Next Stop: Bernard Herrmann: Music from the Great Hitchcock Movie Thrillers
Book Page: 523

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