RIP Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone the Oscar winner whose haunting, inventive scores expertly accentuated the simmering, dialogue-free tension of the spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone, died in Rome, Italy on July 6, 2020. He was 91. The Italian composer was born in Rome on November 10, 1928, scored more than 500 films, seven for his countryman Sergio Leone and fellow classmate in elementary school.  Ennio, whose first instrument was the trumpet, won his Oscar for his work on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) and also was nominated and robbed for his original scores for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (1991) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena (2000). Known as “The Maestro,” he also received an honorary Oscar in 2007 (presented by Clint Eastwood) for his “magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music,” and he collected 11 David di Donatello Awards, Italy’s highest film honors. Morricone’s ripe, pulsating sounds enriched Leone’s low-budget Spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), starring Clint Eastwood, and his masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Duck, You Sucker (1971). “The music is indispensable, because my films could practically be silent movies, the dialogue counts for relatively little, and so the music underlines actions and feelings more than the dialogue,” Leone, who died in 1989, once said. “I’ve had him write the music before shooting, really as a part of the screenplay itself.” The composer loved the sound of the electric guitar and the Jew’s harp and employed whistles, church bells, whips, coyote howls, chirping birds, ticking clocks, gunshots and women’s voices to add textures to scores not associated with the typical studio arrangement. He leaves his wife Maria Travia whom he married in 1956 and four children Marco, Alessandra, Andrea and Giovanni.