Ennio
Morricone
Programme
2 - radio script final draft
Score [A]
A THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY – Main title (*) 2.35
Commentary With Score A playing underneath
The infamous spaghetti western. Born in the 60s and derided
for decades as a kitsch dissolution of the most epic of
American genres. But many people missed what the so-called
spaghetti westerns were about. Firstly, they were Italian.
Secondly, they were operas. Violent, maybe – but so
is Shakespeare. Bombastic, yes – but so is Rossini.
Full of pastiche, passion and power, spaghetti westerns
are typified as much by their soundtracks as they by their
imagery.
Italian movie scores overall are possibly the only modernist
take on what in most other cultures has remained a turgid,
high-art 19th Century affair. Where America still favours
the Wagnerian overdrive, Italian cinema has always had its
ear to pop music on the radio. There are many reasons which
separate Italy from the American tradition. Key factors
include Italy’s folk and oral tradition of song; Italy’s
thorough technological integration of its post-war film
industry with its post-war recording industry; and Italy’s
sheer delight in the excessive, heightened, ornamental and
pneumonic aspects of record production.
Today on Traces of Soundtracks we’re focusing on the
composer and one composer alone who embodies this entirely:
Ennio Morricone – master of the spaghetti western
score, maestro in any genre, and composer of over 400 film
scores to date.
In
Sergio Leone’s 1968 film ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST,
Morricone provides one of his most sophisticated scores.
In the film’s opening, three cowboy hitman wait for
their target to emerge from a train that has just arrived
at a barren outpost. With no victim in sight, the hitman
are about to leave, but are halted by a wailing harmonica
– complete with distended reverb. The hitmen’s
response mirrors our double-take: is this a sound effect,
part of the music score, or simply unqualified noise? Well,
it’s all that and more. It’s Morricone.
Score [C]
C 1. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST – Man With Harmonica
3.25
C 2. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST – La Posada 1 1.35
C 3. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST – Addio A Cheyenne
(*) 2.35
Commentary [D] With Score C.3 playing underneath
There are many instances of musical grandeur and thematic
orchestration in the opulent soundtrack to ONCE UPON A TIME
IN THE WEST. Yet they all whirl round the harmonica’s
morbid leit motif as both aberrant aural sign and composed
musical device. This harmonica theme appearswhenever the
hero played by Charles Bronson appears. And he mostly appears
with harmonica in mouth, breathing through it to play his
signature seething which symbolises the revenge he seeks.
The harmonica also expresses the memory of the hero’s
brother being hung – Bronson’s character was
forced to play the instrument as he watched his brother
die. Bronson’s character thus becomes his harmonica,
wearing it around his neck like a dead albatross; inhaling
its dissonant odour each time he exacts revenge on all complicit
in his brother’s death. The name of Bronson’s
character? Harmonica. The notes he plays also form the recurring
high-pitched train whistle, symbol of the train company,
whose owner has hired numerous hitmen to kill him.
Score [E/F]
E ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST – La Posada 2 1.25
F 1. VERGOGNA SCHIFOSI – Main title 3.15
F 2. VERGOGNA SCHIFOSI – Reprise (*) 3.15
Commentary With Score F.2 playing underneath
The Main Title Mauro Severino’s 1969 film VERGOGNA
SCHIFOSI (translated as DIRTY ANGELS). It’s a world
away from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST – but that’s
Morricone: a master of many style. Morricone has always
expressed a fondness for the human voice. But his attraction
to vocal sonority is quite distinct from the quest for the
penultimate operatic aria. Morricone perceives and employs
vocal colours and types in relation to each other. In effect,
Morricone orchestrates dialects and diaphragms, tongues
and tones. In the multi-layered vocalese of VERGONA SCHIFOSI,
the effect is like a musical version of the vociferous din
resonating at Rome central station, visited by an angel
from above.
That same angel appears in many of Morricone’s scores.
She’s actually human: the inimitable Edda Dell’orso.
Her voice is the first thing heard in Morricone’s
score to Bruno Gaburro’s 1969 film ECCE HOMO (translated
as BEHOLD THIS MAN). Dell’orso murmurs a quasi-Grecian
sem tonal incantation which is picked up and draped around
her corpus by a confined ensemble of flute, viola, harp,
marimba, vibes and percussion. Her siren voice floats throughout
the score, sometimes in close breathy relief, other times
in echoic displacement. The instruments stretch her, mimic
her, replace her, voice her. This uncannily replays the
film’s psychologically tense sexual drama as three
men are captivated by a woman in a remote seaside village.
The Mediterranean primitivism connoted in the main title
to ECCO HUOMO is less a display of avant-garde peformance
techniques and more Morricone’s own portrait of the
sexual revolution in this tersely erotic score.
Score [H/I]
H BEHOLD THIS MAN – Main title 2.09
I 1. DEVIL IN THE BRAIN – Prima Della Rivelazione
5.00
I 2. DEVIL IN THE BRAIN – Viaggio Primo (*) 2.10
Commentary [J] With Score I.2 playing underneath
The sprawling ties between the psycho, thriller and espionage
movies in Italy throughout the 60s and 70s form an encyclopedia
of whodunit clichés. Perversely and playfully, music
played a big role in building the atmosphere to these cinematic
games. The two pieces from the soundtrack of Sergio Sollima’s
1971 film IL DIAVOLO NEL CERVELLO (in English, DEVIL IN
THE BRAIN) provide a snapshot of this generic game play.
True to the modular format of these whodunits, Morricone
takes a brace of themes and then with appropriate perversity
ties them into knotted configurations, each overlaid on
the other. Based on the opening yet incomplete phrase of
Beethoven’s FUR ELISE, Morricone’s undying inventiveness
accelerates us through the harmonic permutations that can
be divined from Beethoven’s simple phrase The result
is a proto-form of spectralism. And despite it’s formal
game play its sensual unimagined by the arch romantic minimalists
develop a decade later.
Morricone seems to have an insatiable appetite for threading
the DNA of a melodic refrain through a series of unexpected
transformations. Part serialist, part spectral mode, he
fashions his own musical motifs in a breezy and open-ended
way. This accounts for two factors that distinguish his
work: 1 – the unique sonic character born by the orchestration
of each score; and 2 – the engaging and innovative
pathways his arrangements draw-out from their original melodic
material. It’s almost as if there is no grand scheme
to be stated by writing suites and movements. Rather, we
are asked to enjoy the scenery wherever we are taken. In
his score for Roberto Fainza’s 1983 film COP KILLER,
the clichés of crime and corruption in the cold dark
city are seeded from stock chromatic scales in the bass
register. But an entirely unique musical tree sprouts forth.
Score [K/L]
K 1. COP KILLER – Symphony for a City – Part
2 4.49
K 2. COP KILLER – Cop Killer 2.50
L 1. THE SERPENT – Assasino Sul Lago 2.57
L 2. THE SERPENT – Astrazione Con Ritmo (*) 4.18
Commentary [M] With Score L.2 playing underneath
You’re listening to Traces of Soundtracks with Philip
Brophy. Today, the music of Ennio Morriocone. Morricone
composed many scores which harkened back to one of his early
serious music projects: the improvization group Nuova Consonanza
Muica. A clutch of dripping and shivering atonal sketches
from his score to Henri Verneuil’s 1973 film THE SERPENT
bears that legacy. Bowed cymbals and prepared pianos are
combined with some abrasive electronics. Their improvisatory
gestures create a thoroughly engaging soundscape, sophisticated
in both arrangement and stereo spatialisation.
But perhaps one of Morricone’s most radical scores
is for the 1970 film by Dario Argento, BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL
PLUMMAGE. Emblematic of the Italian Giallo genre of murder
mysteries and their often violent transposition to the screen,
Morricone conducts and controls the free form improvisations
of this score like a psychiatrist in a strange laboratory.
Rattling, rustling and humming enliven the air like electricity.
This is Morricone responding to the post-Stockhausen world
of acoustics mixed with electronics.
More than possibly any other film composer, Morricone is
one to whom the recording studio is something to be actively
engaged. Only he can write 16thCentury madrigals for wind
ensembles, and record them with echo. Moreso, Morricone
never hides the studio processing from the act of recording.
His recordings and productions are openly plastic –
like all good opera. If only more film composers embraced
this phonological reality of the film soundtrack.
Score [N/O]
N THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMMAGE – Black Glove
Underground (Part 1) 4.56
O 1. MOSES THE LAWGIVER – In God’s Voice 4.35
O 2. MOSES THE LAWGIVER – Lamentation One (*) 4.51
Commentary [P] With Score O.2 playing underneath
From the mania unleashed by voices screaming in pain to
the ominous voice of God himself. The score to the 1974
TV mini-series MOSES THE LAWGIVER required a musical interpretation
of God’s Voice. Morricone undertook the task with
typical flair. 15 years before Martin Scorsese’s controversial
retelling of Christ, Morricone coloured his score with the
Middle Eastern tones that perfectly joined tonality to the
movie’s landscape. More interestingly, Morricone used
atonality and expanded performance technique to supply an
omnipotent sense beyond human scale and form. Only the culturally-deaf
would presume that the voice of God would be humming Strauss.
Morricone’s sensitivity to the emotional shivers that
music can produce beyond the human threshold mark him as
a modern composer uprooted from the pastoral idyllicism
of the 19th Century. Sure, he could conjure forth glistening
chalices of harmony from the bottomless well of beautiful
music, but Morricone’s modern ear could only concede
that beauty as such belongs to a bygone era. Remember, Morricone
comes from the same nation that bore the Futurists.
So when Morricone wishes to sharpen the glint and hone the
edge of his musical rendering, he does so with unnerving
verve. His score to John Carpenter’s 1981 film THE
THING is precisely that: a ‘thing’ of music.
Score [Q]
Q THE THING – Wait (*) 6.22
Commentary
[P] With Score Q playing underneath
Based upon a monstrous mutating form that genetically mimics
human form, Morricone’s score to THE THING is like
a genetic mutation of harmonic scripture as written by musically
gifted humans. But in place of the destructive programme
of many modernist composers, Morricone composes like a cool
scientific observer. He impassively allows the notes to
wither, contract, merge and gorge each other. In his own
way, he echoes what many modernist composers implied: that
nature is impossibly beyond human scope, and that if it
does withhold beauty, it does so at an unhuman scale.
Morricone’s music often comes close to an act of decomposition.
THE THING cries out for this approach, and serves as a symbol
for how music can be stretched to accommodate anything.
THE THING’s score returns us again to the ungainly
meld of the monstrous with the atonal, but listening to
it is not that terrifying. Centuries of theological and
religious dogma collared western musical harmony. But despite
the narrowed field of sonic possibilities available, sublime
music was created. 20th Century atonality in both its strident
and relaxed guise pulls back to reveal a much vaster sonic
landscape. But far from the simplistic rhetoric of ‘the
shock of the new’, Morricone’s film music of
this bent is typically Italian. It’s a polyglottic
savouring of a boldly wide tonal range. His most famous
recent score – THE MISSION – drips with beauty.
But THE THING beautifully drips.
Score [S]
S
THE THING – Humanity (Part 1) 5.11
Commentary [T] With Score S playing underneath
Ennio Morricone. Kitsch and sublime. Earthy and transcendental.
Just as opera reinvents the dynamics of the world upon a
wonderfully plastic stage, so does Morricone’s music
create gilded environments wherein all manner of drama can
unfold. And being Italy, it's a celebratory democratic stage,
where peasant and king can share a meal. Where spine-tingling
string arrangements can blend effortlessly with a wailing
fuzz guitar.
