Here, I would draw a parallel between Morricone and Igor Stravinsky as innovators. He never left Rome for Hollywood or learned to speak English (he wore this as a badge of pride).² I think this is brilliant considering he has scored some of the greatest American Westerns in cinematic history. Morricone’s transition to scoring films also happened to coincide with cinema’s transition away from the romantic and toward the new-wave realism of hardship, violence, and longing, fittingly appropriate for Maestro’s concrète and mechanical-sounding style. Gone were the grand schemes and sweeps of Gershwin and Irving Berlin, music was a means of blunt communication. I loved the piece, and the way the band used it to set the stage for their concert, but it wasn’t until I saw Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight that I became obsessed with his compositional style - so much so that it inspired the overture to my own short film/music video, “Auracle Bone Script.”Īs a member of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, Morricone spent at least a decade prior to scoring his first Western flick working on anti-musical systems and instant composition employing noise-making techniques, which he continued to develop in the modern era.¹ His exploration of the unusual allowed him to create strikingly ordinary lines that quake with unimaginable magnitude using a narrow set of harmonic possibilities (much like the Beatles did with popular music in the 1960s). The band famously prefaces their Seattle 1989 set with one of Morricone’s most popular compositions, “The Ecstasy of Gold,” taken from the film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. As an expert craftsman capable of coaxing exquisite beauty and violent bombast out of an orchestra with the same deftness, Maestro has weaved between opposite extremes to create a magnificent body of work spanning over six decades and 500+ films. Morricone passed away in July of 2020.Īs a young headbanger, I first became aware of Morricone’s work while watching Metallica’s Live Shit: Binge and Purge concert DVD. Ennio “Maestro” Morricone was a composer as revered in the hearts of generations of Americans (whether they realize it or not) as he is in his native Italy.

Dee compose musition