The highly-influential Italian composer Ennio Morricone died this morning, Monday, July 7th, at the age of 91, following complications from a fall last week in which he broke his femur. The news was confirmed by Morricone's longtime lawyer, Giorgio Assumma.
Nicknamed "The Maestro," Morricone composed over 400 scores over his career for both film and television, as well as over 100 classical works. His innovative and influential approach to soundtracks employed whistling, whip cracks, church bells, ticking clocks, gunshots, and other unconventional noises.
He is perhaps best known for his work on Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western films of the 1960s: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), which earned him a Grammy Hall of Fame award.
“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, reportedly once said. “I’ve had him write the music before shooting, really as a part of the screenplay itself.”
His work deservedly earned him many nominations and awards over the decades. He received seven Academy Award nominations and won two: an Honorary Academy Award in 2007 and Best Original Score in 2016 for his work on Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. Four of his scores were nominated for the American Film Institute's Top 25 Best American Film Scores of All Time list.
Despite the accolades, it's said Morricone disliked being so strongly associated with "spaghetti westerns" as he felt that genre represented just a fraction of his career. He also composed soundtracks for horror (John Carpenter's The Thing), comedy (Pedro Almodóvar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), and crime/drama (Brian De Palma's Prohibition-era film The Untouchables), just to name a very few.
He found inspiration in everything from jazz to pop, rock to electronic, and the avant-garde. He's been cited as an inspiration by Radiohead, Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, and Danger Mouse. And his work has been sampled by the Wu-Tang Clan, Jay-Z, Flying Lotus, Phantogram, and more.
Morricone is survived by his wife Maria Travia, and his four children: Marco, Alessandra, Andrea, and Giovanni.
Check out just a few more examples of Morricone's talent, range, and influence below.
