It is telling that the harmonica heard in composer Ennio Morricone’s score for the 1969 film Once Upon a Time in the West derives from strangulation.
“Yes,” Morricone once explained to a Belgian TV interviewer, “for the key sequence with the child, we wanted a sound that expresses more pain than what we were hearing. So, Sergio Leone ran to the musician and strangled him. With a compressed glottis, he gave exactly what we wanted. But don’t worry, he is still alive!”
Consider also that Morricone’s main theme for A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was actually a lullaby he’d written previously. Two decades after that film, that yin-yang contrast of innocence and anarchy would echo through the train station of the Potemkin-influenced baby carriage gun battle in The Untouchables (1987), with Morricone’s “Machine Gun Lullaby” again putting soporific baby chimes to the breast of violent dissonance and ominous crescendo.
How does one characterize an astounding career encompassing more than 40 years and 400 film scores? The fabric’s too delicate and expansive for whole-cloth deconstruction, but certainly major intertwining strands are a tragic, childlike musical humility and the daunting discord of the murderous mindset. Sometimes those two components reflect distinctive plot elements—Al Capone’s mayhem vs. Elliot Ness’s white-bread beatitude in The Untouchables. Other times they mirror disparate elements within a character or situation—Bugsy Siegel’s amorous purity pitted against his thoroughbred thughood in Bugsy (1991), or the analogous lover/killer dynamic among the principals in Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
Morricone’s instinctually Hegelian approach to movie scoring is most widely known through his acclaimed 1986 music for Roland Joffe’s The
“There was a contrast between Renaissance music, the music created by the Indians themselves, and the oboe,” Morricone said in a 1995 interview with Cineaste. “These three elements, combined, gave the final result not only in a musical sense, but also in a historical sense, of the communion that existed between the Jesuits and the Indians. . . . I feel very attached to this music. I recognize myself in this piece.”
Spoken not like a Hollywood hack, but like a deeply committed, conservatory-trained composer and trumpeter who does all his own orchestrations—a rarity among movie maestros—and who has written some 50 classical concert pieces for orchestra, chamber groups, and solo voice.
Be advised, however, the 76-year-old Roman-born Morricone, whose father was a jazz trumpeter, is no stuffed shirt, and is as comfortable on earth as he is in heaven, selling his theme for Le Professionnel (1981) for use in a dog food commercial. (“There was a lot of money at stake,” he explained, “and I’m an art collector.” He did later refuse permission to use music from The Mission to hawk deodorant.)
Forgive us, father, for we are prolific. Morricone’s momentum, he says, is not just a commercial matter, but an aesthetic one. He completes a score, on average, in six weeks and has written upwards of 20 in a year. “In taking four or five months,” he told Cineaste, “ . . . a composer could produce an excessive elaboration, an involution, in a sense, so that the result would be much less spontaneous.”
The argument sounds abstract until you listen to albums from individual films or an anthology like the 1995 double-CD A Fistful of Film Music. The “End Theme” from The Untouchables, for instance, with a swashbuckling brass fanfare worthy of Erich Korngold’s ’30s adventure scores, nonetheless has a winningly rough and textured chamber quality, not the polished gloss of an oversized, reverbed John Williams philharmonic track. The sweetly melancholy “Act of Faith” from Bugsy, the heartbreaking “Cockeye’s Song” from Once Upon a Time in America, or the “Four Friends” theme from The Untouchables all have a similarly splendid intimacy, thick not with the studied syrup of Hollywood’s standard aural tear-jerking, but with memory and loss and love.
Morricone’s scores revolutionized films’ use of electronic and other musical effects. They are very much a product of his era, from the happy-Moog overkill of the “Robodog” track on L’Umanoide (1978) to the more subtle synthetic shivers that weave through the string melodies in Mission to Mars (2000). But his most prized effects are human—his early infatuation with the voice of Edda Dell’Orso or whistling in the Leone films to the otherworldly soprano descants in Once Upon a Time in America.
He has a love-hate relationship with melody, having written some of the most haunting of the past half-century, but also imposing cacophonies and disharmonies on them like prison bars around spirits. Perhaps this reflects the tension he feels as a great talent with feet in both art and commerce.
“The public seems to expect a melodic line every time there is an expression of sentimentality . . ., ” he told Cineaste. “[I]n many cases I have tried to . . . encourage the public to identify those sentimental sensations with musical colors instead of a theme. Unfortunately . . . the public still wants to hear a melody.”
Morricone cites Frescobaldi, Bach, Palestrina, Petrassi, Stravinsky and Boulez among his influences, and one can hear in his work baroque ascensions tussling with the romantic radiance of inconclusive seven and nine chords and the modernistic friction of jolting syncopation and chromaticism, as in the snare, piano, and harmonica of The Untouchables’ “Strength of the Righteous” theme. Directors often ask Morricone to write musical motifs for a film as the script is being written, long before production. That’s fitting, since at their best, those themes, which Morricone calls his children, function as characters themselves and have the dramatic weight of smart, sentient beings.
Morricone’s beautiful, scarred, restless children have led us from Leone’s Earth to De Palma’s Mars. But though we’re sometimes unaware, often it’s less the destination than journeying with these exquisitely melancholy but ever-hopeful musical whiffets that we enjoy most of all.
