Beyond the Western: The Staggering Range of Ennio Morricone

Features—

May 6, 2021

Fame, as the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño once observed, is reductive. “Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished,” he wrote in 2666, an epic novel published after his death.

What Bolaño identified as the flattening effect of fame—distinct from its friendlier relation, familiarity—is worth keeping in mind whenever we consider the legacy of Ennio Morricone, who died last July at ninety-one. His body of work sprawls across some 500 films, enfolding a magnificent expanse of sound and exerting an incalculable influence. But through the aperture of pop culture, it’s often summed up with scarcely more than a jot of music, a slender yet sturdy motif you might fairly characterize as a meme. This of course is the two-bar exchange that anchors Morricone’s title theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a 1966 Sergio Leone western starring Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name.

A version of that melodic fragment may now be jangling like spurs in your head—but for the sake of explication, it’s a startling call-and-response patterned after a coyote howl. The first phrase is a slurring trill (“oo-wee-oo-wee-ooo”) played on the ocarina, a humble ceramic flute. Answering it is a three-note line (“wah, wah, wahh”) that sharpens the intrigue as effectively as an echoing cry through an empty canyon. As New York Times critic Jon Pareles suggested in a 2007 profile of the Maestro: “That theme was typical Morricone: a tenacious melody put across by an unlikely, unpretty, arresting combination of instruments.” As paired with the color-blocked silhouettes of Iginio Lardani’s title sequence, it was instantly iconic.

For Morricone, it was also a cross to bear. “I get really annoyed, because even though only eight percent of my film scores were for westerns, most people only remember me for those films,” he once told BBC Channel 4 News (which translated his remarks from Italian). “So sometimes I’m quite disappointed, because I’ve written for so many other types of films.”

In fairness, the sharply inventive character of Morricone’s music for Italian westerns—better known as “spaghetti westerns,” a term he found demeaning—would be achievement enough for most film composers, who are lucky to own a single cinematic lane. His contribution to the Italian western subgenre includes a series of other celebrated films by Leone, including the masterwork Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). He worked extensively with two other Sergios, on films like Compañeros (Sergio Corbucci, 1970) and The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1966). Throughout these soundtracks he made brilliant use of ambient effects, like the crack of gunfire; unlikely instruments, like the harmonica and Jew’s harp; haunting, often wordless vocals; majestic, judicious swells of strings; and the flinty, reverberating twang of electric guitar. And he put it all together in a manner utterly of its time, following the lead of George Martin’s groundbreaking production with the Beatles, which made tape effects and microphone placement part of the expressive palette for a recording. “The studio is that kind of tool now,” saxophonist-composer John Zorn said in the liner notes to his 1986 Morricone tribute The Big Gundown, “a way of composing, of documenting music on tape rather than score paper. It is the twentieth century’s notational revolution.”

The impact of Morricone’s sonic palette and pop-art instinct in these films has endured, and not just in an homage like Zorn’s, or Ludwig Göransson’s in The Mandalorian. Kris Bowers, the jazz pianist who scored Green Book, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, and the forthcoming Aretha Franklin biopic Respect, received one of his first lessons in film music from Kobe Bryant, who advised him to study the motivic development in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Another composer-arranger with a foothold in jazz, Darcy James Argue, hears in these scores the particular insight of an ensemble musician: “Because Morricone started his career as a trumpet player—in musical theater and jazz-adjacent music, but also in experimental avant-garde music doing effects on the mouthpiece and that kind of thing—coming at it from a player’s perspective seems to be something that informed the way that he wrote.”

Argue also points out the level of detail associated with a composer like Duke Ellington, who wrote parts custom-fitted to the personalities and capabilities of his band members. “You think of the incredible colorful effects in all of the spaghetti westerns,” he says, “and organizing the music from the perspective of the person performing the actual part is a real hallmark. To play that harmonica part in Once Upon a Time in the West—it’s not a generic harmonica part. It’s for this specific player with this specific sound and this specific skill set.” (That player’s name, for the record, was Franco de Gemini.)

What isn’t noted often enough is the way Morricone adapted many of the signature strategies from his westerns in a dazzling range of other film scores. The soundscapes vary greatly, but the sensibility is one and the same. It doesn’t take away from his landmark accomplishments in one area, then, when we celebrate the richness and depth of the others. To that end, here are several Morricone scores worth crowing about, each from a different decade and cinematic genre—all of them featured in a series of the composer’s work now playing on the Criterion Channel. Along with their ingenuity in terms of timbre and color, they all share an astute awareness of character and plot. Taken together with Morricone’s famous outlaw themes, they highlight a genius perfectly at home in his medium, indomitable and irreducible.

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

One of the indelible early landmarks in the Morricone canon is his taut, foreboding work for The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s riveting portrait of mid-1950s Algerian insurgency against French colonial rule. As film scholar Jeff Smith notes in a video essay for Criterion’s Observations on Film Art series, Pontecorvo and Morricone composed two dichotomous themes to represent the opposing sides in the film. A stern, martial piece with a heavily chromatic bass line, punctuated by a rat-a-tat snare drum, represents the occupying military force. A more fluid, triplet-based theme is the leitmotif of revolutionary freedom fighter Ali La Pointe (often played, hauntingly, on pan flute). A polyrhythmic thrum of Algerian percussion occasionally predominates in the soundtrack, less as an exotic flavor than as a means of empathic connection, a bridge between the insurgents’ cultural birthright and the sympathies of a Western audience. And Morricone intensifies that invitation to feeling through a dirge on pipe organ, which accompanies images of torture, as well as a plaintive orchestral theme that plays during acts of terror, claiming innocent lives on both sides. Having set up a binary with his score, in other words, the Maestro then uses music to subvert it—bolstering Pontecorvo’s point that in a war such as this, no one emerges with their hands or conscience clean.

A moment of Algerian percussion in The Battle of Algiers

Days of Heaven (1978)

The high Romantic style of the late nineteenth century isn’t the first thing that comes to mind in a discussion of Morricone’s music. But he was deeply fluent in the idiom, as he often reminded us—never more beautifully than in Terrence Malick’s ravishing Days of Heaven, a period depiction of a conflicted love triangle, and a parable of reaping and sowing. Few films have ever achieved such a sumptuous glow, and the music follows suit—openly pulling inspiration from the “Aquarium” section of Camille Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, which Morricone references in his principal theme. The piece titled “Harvest,” with a wafting flute melody, answers the film’s Andrew Wyeth–inspired visual language with a lilting variation on a Copland idyll. And the orchestral love theme, one of Morricone’s tenderest, communicates both the rapture of devotion and, perhaps, a strain of wistful ambivalence appropriate to the situation in the film. Morricone, who always wrote pieces for specific moments in a film, gave Malick an unusual degree of license in reassigning elements of the score to different scenes. This decision surely had something to do with mutual respect, and it paid off—not only in an exquisite end product, but also in the form of Morricone’s first Oscar nomination for best original score.

The principal theme in Days of Heaven

The Mission (1986)

There’s a pivotal early scene in Roland Joffé’s operatic tale of eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries and colonial atrocities among the Guaraní people. It shows the resolute priest Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) stopping in a clearing thick with hostile villagers and playing a soothing melody on oboe, which earns him their trust. This theme, fully orchestrated as “Gabriel’s Oboe” on the soundtrack (with Joan Whiting as oboist), has become Morricone’s most beloved single piece of music, recorded by everyone from cellist Yo-Yo Ma to singer Sarah Brightman (who used it as the basis for her classical-crossover standard “Nella Fantasia”). The melody begins with a Baroque ornamentation and assumes a gradual ascending contour that evokes the Jesuits’ spiritual yearning. Here and throughout The Mission, Morricone is scrupulously attuned—much more so than Joffé, it turns out—to the Eurocentric presumptions of a religious order striving to bring salvation to the jungle. His score features Indigenous instruments, notably Andean panpipes and percussion, in ways that subtly dramatize the shifting relationship between the Guaraní and the Jesuits. (See especially the title theme, which underscores the construction of the San Carlos mission.) The use of choral music also speaks to this bond, as the Guaraní vocalize Christian hymns. At the same time, Morricone brings his full powers of grandeur to “Falls,” which incorporates panpipes and fingerpicked guitar against orchestral strings—articulating both awe at the natural world and a hint of sadness for a paradise lost.

“Falls” in The Mission

Ripley’s Game (2002)

“I’m a creation,” Tom Ripley says during a rare moment of candor in Ripley’s Game. “A gifted improviser.” The line provides a key to understanding the motivations of Patricia Highsmith’s signature antihero, embodied by John Malkovich with pitch-perfect reptilian cool. And by way of some sly diegetic scoring, it also highlights the core relationship in the film, between cultivated taste and its polar opposite, philistinism. Liliana Cavani’s underrated thriller opens on a tensely comic exchange that frames this opposition precisely. (Ripley to a troublesome associate: “Your entire education comes from Classic Car magazine, and you’re dressed like you’re on a condom run for the mob.”) Cut to Ripley, three years later, buying and restoring an antique harpsichord for his wife, Luisa. During the title credits, as she plays a Renaissance piece on the instrument in their Tuscan villa, Ripley sits beside her and improvises a deft, rakish line along a blues scale—the very picture of New World resilience meeting Old World formality. (The harpsichordist is Gilda Buttà, a trusted Morricone collaborator.) Elsewhere in the film, Morricone redeploys harpsichord as a piquant color against the coiled-spring tensions of his orchestration for woodwinds, brass, strings, and electric guitar. That shifting alignment between muted classical refinement and the neon incandescence of a thriller—it’s not just an ideal fit for the film, it’s another manifestation of the Maestro’s savvy and how he never stopped discovering ways to deploy it.

An excerpt from the title sequence of Ripley’s Game featuring a harpsichord duet

Beyond the Western: The Staggering Range of Ennio Morricone

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