In the process, he's among the few film composers to make music that works even better off the screen; Rhino Records' 1995 two-disc collection, A Fistful of Film Music, proves how powerful his work is once freed from the confines of the theater. As such, he has been a tremendous influence not just on composers but on the larger pop-music world. "Il Giardino Delle Delizie" from the 1967 film The Garden of Delights eerily presages "Private Idaho" by the B-52's (they're nearly identical); avant-garde composer-performer John Zorn paid homage to Morricone on his 1985 album The Big Gundown (restored and rereleased just last year); and Wall of Voodoo, Adam and the Ants, Portishead, David Holmes and so many other new-wavers and post-rockers lifted their strum-and-twang from Morricone's Westerns. Morricone says only recently did he become aware of how his work informed the music of others, but he's loath to claim himself as an influence.
"I really pay attention to what I have to do less than what the others are doing," he says. "I think that each composer always has to maintain their own personality...Still, everything that's happening in the progress of music, be it that on the high level or be it that on a low level, you need to be aware of. You have to be informed."
Morricone began writing music when he was 6 and enrolled in Rome's Conservatory of Santa Cecilia when he was 12, hoping to master the trumpet, the instrument his father played. But he soon found himself surpassing his professors: He completed a four-year course in harmony in a matter of months. He would end up studying composition by day and playing trumpet in Rome's nightclubs by night, and when he graduated from the school, he left with degrees in orchestration, conducting, composition and, of course, the trumpet. Morricone would go into film composing only after he'd been hired as a session musician on a handful of scores, which he found "ugly"; he was convinced he could do better, especially after having heard West Side Story and Alfred Newman's score for The Robe. Morricone thought he would put on hold, for a little while, his writing for the concert stage. That was nearly 40 years ago, and decades would pass before he began writing and performing music not intended for film.
For a long time, he felt writing movie music made him "a traitor" to the art of composing music; if it wasn't exactly beneath him, it was, at the very least, foreign and frustrating. He'd been trained by some of the best writers and musicians in Italy, and now he was going to make music for movies? For Westerns, for God's sake? It was unfathomable. But soon enough, he realized movies allowed a different kind of freedom--the kind that allows a composer to score a Western today, a political drama tomorrow and a horror movie the day after that. Within those confines was a world of possibilities.
"I started from a much higher point [than most film composers]," he says. "I was not a dilettante. A long time ago, I didn't know what I know today, and it's true: Then, writing for cinema seemed to be a frustration. Almost no one goes into this thinking, 'I want to become a film composer,' but people do go into it saying, 'I want to be a composer.' Therefore, when you change paths, you still have the same creativity that you would in making music for concerts. A composer is worthy of this name only if he has his own personality, even if he does films that are completely different one from another. His style has to come out clearly, even though each film is different.
"The reasons for doing cinema is that if one believes in doing it, it can also give you back a lot. First of all, you're in contact with the orchestra very often. You get to listen to your music continually while you're recording it, and you get to hear it very shortly after you've written it. You can experiment privately and listen to these experiments and learn a lot by doing this, and this I owe to cinema...It has improved within me a general sense of composing. Movies have conditions, make demands, and you must find a way to get over these conditions. You must find a new freedom."
Despite his 72 years, Morricone has little interest in cutting back on his workload; only two weeks ago, he traveled to London for the first time to perform his non-film music, along with selections from his best-known scores. And last year, he scored three films: De Palma's Mission to Mars, Joffé's Vatel and Giuseppe Tornatore's Malena, the latter of which earned him his fifth Oscar nomination (he lost out to Tan Dun's score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). But Morricone was resigned to losing: When his score for The Mission lost in 1987 to Round Midnight, which was nothing more than a collection of jazz standards, Morricone realized it was perhaps never meant to be. Hollywood belongs to the hacks and heathens whose awards are, in his estimation, nothing but "propaganda for the movies." Maybe that's why he stays in Rome and refuses to learn English.