(Feb. 29) – When he hears the terms “Spaghetti Western”, he stops talking. “It’s an insult to the work of Sergio Leone. Spaghetti is something you eat. The work of Leone is certainly not something to eat”. These are the words of Ennio Morricone, in an interview on Limelight, Australian monthly magazine about arts and music magazine. The Italian composer has gained his successes scoring films and will be probably remembered by generations to come as a composer of soundtracks, rather than of so-called ‘serious’ music: “It slightly bothers me, but I don’t think it’s quite the case. Those who will want to study Morricone the composer will have to take into consideration both aspects of my work”. The collaboration with Sergio Leone was a turning point of his career. “To be honest, I didn’t know very much about Westerns – he confides -, I wasn’t even aware they existed. Those Western movies have been crucial for my career, but of the 500-plus films I’ve worked on, no more than 30 are Westerns, so that’s quite a small percentage: 7 to 8 per of the total”. A final consideration about the cultural value of film scores “They are a part of our daily lives, a medium where all the arts coalesce in an ideal that I often like to define as ‘Wagnerian’. And so historians will have to study film music in conjunction with all other arts that make up the cinematic medium in order to make sense culturally of this age”. (Peg)
FROM JAZZ TO THE OSCAR
Born in Rome in 1928, Ennio Morricone attended the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, studiyng the trumpet, instrumentation for band and composition.After playing the trumpet in several jazz bands, he scored his first movie “Il Mattino” in 1946. Twenty years later, in 1964, he started a profitable collaboration with Sergio Leone, his classmate, composing the music for “For a fistful of Dollars”. In his career he worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, Gillo Pontecorvo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pedro Almodovar, Brian De Palma, Roman Polanski, Barry Levinson, Giuseppe Tornatore. Morricone has received two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, five BAFTAs, and in 2007 the Academy Honorary Award.
