Giant of film music wrote 500 scores including famous ‘spaghetti westerns’

Ennio Morricone, who has died aged 91, was an Italian composer and conductor who wrote the music for some 500 films, including several of Sergio Leone’s ‘‘spaghetti westerns’’. His melodic and evocative scores could also be found accompanying films as diverse as La

Cage aux Folles (1978), The Untouchables

(1987) and The Mission (1986). From the coyote call that opens The Good,

the Bad and the Ugly (1966) to the rolling wistfulness of Once Upon a Time in America

(1984), Morricone’s music was always written with both eyes firmly fixed on the on-screen action. Far more than merely an accompaniment to the drama, it formed an integral part of the mood and atmosphere.

Despite the endearing popularity of his work, he did not pick up an Oscar until 2007, and even then it was an honorary one presented by Clint Eastwood. In 2016 he took home another statuette for the score of The

Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s American Civil War thriller and Morricone’s first complete western score in 34 years.

He famously incorporated everyday sounds into his scores alongside conventional harmonies. They include tin cans, typewriters and gunshots – what he called ‘‘found sounds’’. A Fistful of Dollars (1964), for example, features the chiming of church bells, peculiar whistling and the cracking of whips in its chilly soundtrack.

Morricone’s refusal to live in the United States – even though a studio offered him a villa in Hollywood – set him apart from the mainstream of Tinseltown. He also persisted in a somewhat perverse refusal to learn English – so he could flirt with attractive translators sent by the film studios, he said.

Yet eventually the critics came to consider such belligerence a virtue rather than a hindrance. And, unlike many film composers, he declined to outsource the graft to anonymous arrangers. ‘‘I invented the formula of ‘music composed, arranged and conducted by Ennio Morricone’,’’ he proudly told The Guardian in 2001.

Ennio Morricone was born in the Trastevere district of Rome, when Mussolini was at the height of his powers. He was a classmate of Leone at primary school, though they later lost contact.

By the age of 12 he was enrolled at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, where he later studied trumpet and composition by day, while secretly standing in for his trumpeter father in clubs and music halls by night. Soon he was playing in recording sessions for the postwar Italian film industry.

By the late 1950s he had orchestrated hundreds of songs for Italian singers such as Gianni Morandi and Gino Paoli. However, the big screen was calling. His first full-length score was for Luciano Salce’s The

Fascist (1961); by the time he had completed the music for Leone’s

Once Upon a Time in the West

(1968) his reputation was established.

Between his big-screen works he continued to write non-film music, including a ballet

(Requiem for Destiny), and Riflessi (1990), three pieces for unaccompanied cello. Classical performers in turn paid their respects, with the cellist Yo Yo Ma recording an album of Morricone arrangements. There was also an array of jazz and easy listening music.

Morricone was dismissive of questions about his prolific workload, comparing his dozen or more film scores a year to the output of Bach, who ‘‘used to compose one cantata a week’’; in comparison, ‘‘you will see that I’m practically unemployed’’.

His other film scores included Cinema

Paradiso (1988), City of Joy (1992), and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) – although they fell out when Morricone objected to Tarantino’s use of one of his songs in Django Unchained, saying that the director ‘‘places music in his films without coherence’’. (His objection was also in part due to ‘‘too much blood’’ in Django.)

Morricone was nominated six times for Oscars but, save for the honorary one, he won only once, for The Hateful Eight, late in his career.

That the statuette otherwise evaded him was a rebuke, said some, for his refusal to move to Hollywood. Nevertheless, he picked up a slew of Grammy awards, Golden Globes and Baftas, as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Liverpool.

Despite the widespread acclaim, and his insistence on always being addressed as ‘‘Il Maestro’’, Morricone remained in some ways a modest man at heart. In 2004 he told The

Sunday Telegraph that he was ‘‘satisfied with what I’ve done. But I still think I can improve. You can always do better, you know.’’

Other interviewers found him hard work. David Sinclair wrote of their encounter being ‘‘a case of the good, the bad and the interpreter’’, adding that ‘‘while Eastwood played the man with no name, Morricone is the man with no manners’’.

In 1956 Morricone married Maria Travia. They had a daughter and three sons. –

Compared with Bach, ‘‘you will see I’m practically unemployed’’. Morricone on his prodigious workload