Singing Morricone’s Praises
The eighty-one-year-old Ennio Morricone has been composing hypnotic music for film since the early 1960s, for projects ranging from spaghetti westerns (his whistling, woodwindy five-note theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most recognizable in movie history) to Italian art cinema (Fists in the Pocket, Salò) to French comedy (La cage aux folles) to American horror (The Thing) and pulp (White Dog). In anticipation of this extraordinary (and extraordinarily prolific) composer’s first-ever performance of his own music in Los Angeles (which was postponed as of October 21), LA Weekly assembled an impressive roster of composers—including Mark Mothersbaugh, Marco Beltrami, and Daniele Luppi—to write tributes to Morricone, eliciting not only gushing praise but also irreverence (writes musician and professor Christopher Young: “This guy could knock off tunes like you or I could piss in a bucket”).
