Ennio Morricone
More important, he’s one of the few film composers worth listening to outside the context of a movie: when’s the last time you yearned to hear a sound track CD by John Williams or Danny Elfman? The vast majority of films have a score or incidental music of some kind, but only a handful of visionaries like Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota have achieved legendary status by reinforcing and enhancing the vision of a filmmaker while also creating music that works without the visuals.
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Even if you don’t know his name, you know Morricone’s music–his work for spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Leone and others is now so familiar it’s become the stuff of parody. The twangy electric guitar and spooky whistling (both performed by longtime Morricone sidekick Alessandro Alessandroni), the lonesome harmonica stabs associated with Charles Bronson’s character in Once Upon a Time in the West, the fake ay-ye-ay-ye-ay coyote cry–all have become signifiers for hard-boiled characters from the old west. But that’s only a tiny proportion of his vast repertoire. He’s written more conventionally orchestral scores for Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, and Bugsy–all of which earned Oscar nominations. And perhaps unsurprisingly given the sheer size of his output, he’s created music for loads of sleepers, clunkers, and cult items in a variety of forms: documentaries, spy flicks, horror movies, and giallo films–a genre of stylized Italian thrillers. The movies themselves might be subpar, but Morricone’s done excellent, highly distinctive work on them, creating music rife with daring experiments in melody, structure, and instrumentation.
These pieces were designed for a specific purpose–to creep out a moviegoer, usually–but many of them succeed in their own right thanks to this experimental instrumentation. “Astratto 3,” from Veruschka (Poesia di una Donna), a film about the 60s fashion model, mixes faux-ethnic percussion, woozy wordless vocals, and damped marimba melodies; on “Ric Happening,” sleepy koto notes and haggard bamboo-flute toots drift over blocky percussion; and on “Rapimento in Campo Aperto” an almost comic-sounding Jew’s harp bounces over sinister, sawing strings, but instead of easing the tension it seems to add another level of madness and fury. On “Memento,” snippets of a romantic orchestral work seemingly played through a cheap speaker are layered over dissonant string arrangements, and the effect of them fading in and out of the mix is downright nightmarish.
