Ennio Morricone died this morning at age 91. The Italian composer whose atmospheric scores for Spaghetti Westerns helped define the genre and some 500 films by a plethora of international directors had made him one of the world’s most versatile and influential musicians of modern cinema.
We thought we would pick the top scores that Morricone has written that we would consider to be some of his best work and, at the very least, his most influential.
There isn’t another score quite like The Untouchables soundtrack. It brought to the table the new 1980’s production techniques like gated drums and heavy compression, which are present in some of the more driving themes like The Strength of the Righteous while balancing itself with the classic, old-school grandeur of Victorious and Al Capone. The Untouchables soundtrack is an excellent example of Morricone’s versatility.
The second track on Morricone’s most played on Spotify “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission soundtrack, shows off his true depth. Especially when compared to his other work of the period like The Untouchables, which came out a year later, it displays Morricone’s versatility, no better represented than by his strange and enticing track Guarani.
One of the all-time great classics and the quintessential Spaghetti Western. With an initial budget of just over $200k and a return of $14.5 million, A Fistful of Dollars practically birthed the genre. The first in Sergio Leon’s “Dollars Trilogy“, A Fistful Of Dollars set a lot of the common tropes we revere in western movies and helped define the aesthetic for years to come. Keep in mind, that before this period in cinema the Old West had no “sound” as it were — and the musicians who gave it defining sonic characteristics were a bunch of Europeans with names like Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, and Nico Fidenco.
Another of Leone’s films that came out just as the Spaghetti Western wave was cresting, arguably at the beginning of the end for the genre as a whole. Morricone’s style evolved during this time and some of the choices made in Once Upon A Time in the West would go on to echo throughout the rest of his career. The track “Harmonica” from Once Upon A Time In The West would continue to be a heavy influence on his work, reverberations showing up almost twenty years later in The Untouchables.
Entering the 1990’s and Cinema Paradiso, which contains some of Morricone’s more tender, gentle, and, perhaps, understated compositions. “Love Theme” and the “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso” are the most notable and worthwhile listens.
Very rarely does a film score achieve such a level of popularity, transcending the film it originated in and living on in cultural consciousness. Jaws, Star Wars, and Harry Potter, to name a few, have done this successfully with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by Ennio Morricone deserving of that list. So many times it has been used in parodies, homages, and tribute that it has become THE representation of Western cinema as a whole. Instantly recognizable and recalling all the iconography and glorification of a time that never truly existed. A complete fiction dreamt up by a bunch of idealist Italians, and a projection of what people wanted the “Old West” to look like and sound like. Yet it lives on, and it doesn’t seem like the genre is getting any less cool anytime soon.