Ennio Morricone

Whistle while you work…

“Western films account for just eight per cent of my production,” Morricone has argued. Fair point, but measured by influence the Italian composer’s trailblazing work for Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy and Once Upon A Time In

The West deserve a bigger percentage. Morricone weaved unorthodox sounds (gunshots, watch ticks, coyote howls...) into the soundtrack’s fabric with sizzling guitars, none-more-cool whistling and soaring vocals. Big fan Quentin Tarantino employed Morricone for The Hateful Eight. Boasting 500-plus credits for directors from Mario Bava to Terrence Malick, Morricone is one madly prolific maestro. He scored social cinema, marshalling martial drums for The Battle Of Algiers and beyond, while finding time for comedies, dramatic epics, sci-fi, crime movies, war films, political dramas and more (yes, even Red Sonja), including a Leone reunion for the staggeringly affecting Once Upon A Time In America score. He tours – he’ll be at The O2 in January – and composes outside film, too. Morricone’s operatic emoting found perfect footing with horrors and Italian ‘giallos’, notably Dario Argento’s deep scarlet cine-symphonies. The quietly creepy score for Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage counterpoints beauty with implicit, stalking threat, and despite director John Carpenter’s rumoured disappointment, Morricone’s score for 1982’s The Thing is a chilly masterpiece of mood. The film critic Anthony Lane called Morricone the “conjuror of the beautiful” with good reason. For all the swagger and broil of his western and war themes, Morricone’s music drips with feeling. Between pan-flutes and soaring choirs, his score for Roland Joffé’s The Mission achieved hit-sized transcendence, though it lost at the Oscars to Herbie Hancock’s

Round Midnight. None of Morricone’s lone scores have won Oscars, though his Giuseppe Tornatore work – Cinema

Paradiso, Malèna – really should have. A flawless melodic sensibility powers Morricone’s scores, often beyond their parent films. Even western amateurs know “Ah-ee-ah-ee-ah”. Elsewhere, his pop nous is impeccable: the dreamy theme from 1969’s Dirty Angels (“Matto, giro, giro girotondo…”) is pure earwormery, while the variously jaunty, arch-lounge and guitar-twanging themes for Love Circle, The Sicilian Clan and Danger:

Diabolik are instantly recognisable. Older Morricone pieces have also been borrowed for the likes of Kill Bill and Election.