Morricone’s a great film composer because he’s classical
OrchestrasA special Slipped Disc report by Susan Hall in New York on MOMA’s month-long focus on the Italian composer Ennio Morricone:
The Museum of Modern Art and Cinecitta have joined forces to present a month-long retrospective on the film scores of Ennio Morricone. American filmmakers depend on words. Morricone does not. So he musicalized Lauren Bacall’s famous definition of a whistle in To Have and Have Not, making actual whistle notes the go-to sound for films set in the American West.
Morricone also musicalizes ideas and characters. Johann Sebastian Bach gets his name spelled out.
Morricone was classically trained and throughout his life composed absolute music, without a subject, as part of his classical oeuvre. This in addition to his famous 500 film scores. He regards the director as the ultimate arbiter of a film score. His non-film work is his personal expression.
An early proponent of sounds in music, a charming film clip portrays him clucking, clicking, tapping and torrenting ‘las’ with his voice and hands. The cry of wolves opens one film after Sergei Leone tired of the whistle.
Morrecone regarded the human voice as the greatest of instruments, coming from the body alone. Memorably he wrote a ballad for Joan Baez in Sacco and Vanzetti.
For Morricone, the music could serve as the entire track, no sound effects were needed. He composed and integrated them.
Getting a taste of this Maestro’s work, you feel that he was full of music waiting to burst out. Early on, he found music in the sounds of bells, whips, and wood blocks. He could have been an original member of Bang on a Can.
Morricone responded to each director’s script with a unique musical style. Sometimes he came close to underlining action. At other times, and intriguingly, he played against the storyline and character. Memorably he wrote a Requiem for the removal of children’s bodies from a collapsing city in the Battle of Algiers. For Mission, one of his most admired scores, he combined the music of Jesuits and the Native Indian tribes. The effects of colonialism are contrapuntally described.
Always there is a beat. He has been captured on film demonstrating how a four note phrase intrigues by placing the emphasis on a note at a different position each time the phrase recurs.
Cinema Paradiso inaugurated the retrospective. We quickly learn that a kiss is never just a kiss, as Dooley Wilson suggests. Kisses are cut from films projected for a church-going audience. The outtakes form a montage at the end of the film. The musical phrase that underlies each of the kisses echoes Frank Loesser’s “I’ve never been in love before,” with a one note difference. Kisses are delivered by Silvana Mangano and Vittoria Gassman, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Georgia Hale and Charlie Chaplin, who faints after his kiss, Olivia de Haviland and Errol Flynn. Each gets the same phrase, which sometimes plays to sweetness, and at others, Mangano’s long legs.
Leit motifs and themes were composed before shooting began. Many directors played Morricone music on the set while shooting. Miles Davis’ score for Louis Malle’s first film, Elevator to the Gallows, and Otto Preminger’s insistence that Duke Ellington come to the Michigan peninsular for the score of Anatomy of Murder are rare instances of a composer as integrated in the film process as Morricone was.
Morricone hated the post production experience in America. It was, he observed, all about words. Dialogue reigned supreme. Tom Johnson (Academy Award, Sound,Titanic) recently told me that his job was to make sure the dialogue was clear. For Morricone this nption deeply betrays the role of music in film.
It may also provide a clue to why American classical music venues have so much trouble attracting audiences. If what audiences want are words, they are not going to find them in concert halls. Occasionally the new form of concert, a live performance of a film score accompanied by screening of the film, attracts new audiences. Yet they are there not to hear composer Bernard Herrmann, but rather to see the sign “Bates Motel,” or perhaps to salivate over James Stewart and Kim Novak’s kiss in Vertigo.
Morricone argues in his scores that in the beginning there is not the word. There is a note, a sound. Greta Gerwig starts Barbie with Richard Strauss. Strauss via Stanley Kubrick.
Kubrick is the only director Morricone wishes he’d worked with and did not. Yet we have Bertolucci, Pasolini, Malick, Tarentino, Stone and so on. A wild, wonderful world of Morricone sound now at MoMA.
He’s a great film composer first and foremost because he is a genius — one of the greatest composers of all time. This being said he probably wouldn’t be the same kind of composer, absent his classical training.
There are immense talents in film music — talents which rival and even outshine many supposedly more “legitimate” composers. Film composers do not have the recognition they deserve due to the incidental character of their work (which in most cases yet can stand on its own) and due to a certain snobbery in classical music that views film music as a lesser art form, when in fact many contemporary composers simply can’t hold a candle to most of these film composers. Film composers, as opposed to some in contemporary music, can’t afford to write music they can’t hear. They also tend to have a solid grounding in harmony and counterpoint. This, by the way, might also be valid for many pop, rock, jazz and new age composers — but that’s another discussion altogether. What most of them do have in common, however, is the way that they still write in a tonal language.
There are so many to list. John Williams is a genius, an immense composer. So is Alberto Iglesias. So was, in the US, Angelo Badalamenti who worked with David Lynch. Jerry Goldsmith. Hans Zimmer. Nicholas Britell. In France, Francis Lai, Georges Delerue, François de Roubaix, who was self-taught and immensely gifted. More recently, Mathieu Lamboley.
Some classical musicians look down on such music, implying it is easy to write. It is not. It takes immense talent. It literally is an art form standing on its own. And most importantly, it is music people usually enjoy.
Mmmmmm……. there is a fundamental difference between film music and concert music, because in film the music is to serve the visuals to create a mood and is secundery, also if it drives the narrative. The attention of the viewer is supposed to focus on the movie and the music is supposed to help with that. In concert music, the listener is supposed to focus on the music, and not upon any visuals that may be there. For that reason film music does not need an independent structure while concert music needs such thing to be coherent.
From this difference onwards, one can spin-out all kinds of discussions, like the one that film composers can engage listeners and famous living concert music composers cannot, because film composers use traditional techniques and tonality, and so many concert composers either don’t, or their craft and invention is weak or non-existent. But that does not diminish in the least the difference between the genres and taking this difference seriously does not mean ‘snobbery’.
Much (probably ALL) film music is quite vulgar and simplistic, in whatever effects. Because ‘taste’ is not an issue with the movies. However, the concert music by film composers can be truly good, and unfortunately their movie jobs can seriously hinder recognition in the central performance culture, like John Williams who lands the most awful, horrifying drivel on the movies but his serious music is entirely different and has true quality, and sounds like early 20C Viennese expressionism. Quite surprising and remarkable….
I think it was Bernard Herrmann who said that a good film score leaves no traces in the spectator – it enriches the movie, the spectator remembers the music, if at all, in the context of the scene. What is remarkable in Ennio Morricone is that many films are remembered because of his scores. By the way, Morricone was also an improviser of avant-garde mus… I mean sonic art, and a member of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
Excellent points.
Maurice Jarre, Alexandre Desplat, Michel Legrand…and, indeed, many more.
Morricone’s score for “The Untouchables” is absolutely inspired as is John Williams’ score for “Catch Me if You Can”.
I think Herrmann, Korngold and Morricone were the greatest film composers; their music is sophisticated and should not be diminished in favour of the longer lines of classical music. There are other excellent film composers, going back to Herbert Stothart, the Newmans, Steiner right through to Alex North. Certainly Jarre’s score for “Lawrence of Arabia” is inspired and magnificent, as is Barry’s for “Out of Africa”. These latter composers used the sense of space to etch out powerfully evocative portraits.
Just rewatched Out of Africa, and the Barry score is as you say. It’s magnificent.
Nobody has mentioned that most prolific of film composers, Philip Glass. I am rewatching Mishima after many years and finding the music inspirational and very appropriate, and I still remember the pulsing score of Koyaanisqatsi, which I saw in London many moons ago.
“Kubrick is the only director Morricone wishes he’d worked with and did not.”
Alas for the likes of Morricone and Herrmann, Kubrick generally preferred using existing classical music.
Herrmann spoke out against this practice, but Kubrick incorporated the music so brilliantly in his films. Watching 2001, The Shining, or Eyes Wide Shut, you would think that pieces by the likes of Liszt, Bartok, Ligeti and Penderecki had actually been written for the films.
The film that combines “the music of Jesuits and the Native Indian tribes” is called The Mission.
I am a huge admirer of Morricone, and like to listen to his music on its own, as well as to welcome it in a film. But he seems to think that music trumps dialogue in a film, as this writer states it. He is wrong.
I agree that he and many others are marvellous composers, and a few of them have written music that can stand alone. But for the most part film scores, however brilliant, are ineffective in a concert hall. We went to a concert of music from top science fiction films, and were astonished to find it so unsatisfactory musically — we left at the interval. Despite its general appeal, it was clearly subordinate to the images and the dialogue that it was conceived to SUPPORT, and too insubstantial on its own to sustain a rewarding concert experience. And I am afraid that included some of the sainted John Williams.
Who can ever forget the power and originality of these: in this first example the music and the screenplay were vastly superior to the film itself (sorry Joe). North conveys the exotic element, as well as the romantic plot – with a keen ear to the music zeitgeist. If anybody thinks that’s easy and glib they are mistaken:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvlZMmQGoQQ
Then there’s this, which is a horse of a different colour: absolutely thrilling!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-zdqvJ_h2s
Korngold does it again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9uTatOnW2Q
And a great composer for film I left off my previous list:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt5C9EruZ94
One should acknowledge the superb orchestral arrangements and playing. Remember that these composers very often only provided music on a couple of staves for later orchestration.
You may be right about their being superior to the films, but these scores strike me as rather trite.
There we must disagree as those scores are synonymous with the films and the narratives to an extraordinary degree. An epic without Rozsa is unthinkable. His score for “Ben Hur” turned that film from a costume soap opera to a film of grandeur. Note; no music was used for the chariot race.
“Ben Hur” is essentially Wyler, actor Stephen Boyd, writer Karl Tunberg and composer Rozsa. The rest is soap, apart from the excellent Hugh Griffith in his scene and Jack Hawkins in his. “Row well and live, 48”.
That whistle effect from “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” is iconic. Every time a “good guy” faces down a “bad guy” in a movie or TV show, I hear that in my head. It really stays with you, reflecting on Morricone’s genius as a composer.
Morricone was also the accompanist/Conductor for song recitals of the great Italian tenor Ferruccio Tagliavini….and no one here seems to know Nino Rota (composed an opera premiered by Mario Del Monaco) which i put on the same level as EM though his output is less extensive