Alessandro Alessandroni
Musician who supplied the haunting whistles in Ennio Morricone’s scores for Sergio Leone
ALESSANDRO ALESSANDRONI, who has died aged 92, was an Italian composer and musician, associated in particular with the cinema; if it was Ennio Morricone who wrote the much-celebrated themes for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, it was Alessandroni who largely provided their sound.
The pair had known each other since both were students moonlighting in nightclub bands in Rome. In 1964, with Alessandroni well established in the profession and widely known for his ability to whistle, Morricone asked him to do a few bars for the film he was working on.
Alessandroni said that when he saw the finished film in the cinema he assumed it would make no money. As it was, A Fistful of Dollars made Clint Eastwood a star, launched Sergio Leone’s international career and catapulted Morricone to prominence.
Yet while its music became synonymous with the Wild West, its main inspirations were European theories about deconstruction and Morricone’s wish to use basic sounds, among them Sicilian folk instruments, bells and whips, and Alessandroni’s whistling. The musician revealed that he blew in such a way that there was very little air emitted, giving an unusually pure, flute-like sound.
Alessandroni also played the surf music-style riff for the theme, using a 1961 Fender guitar. He went on to whistle as he played for the film’s sequel, For a Few Dollars More, and to direct the choral voices that featured in its music. He returned for Leone and Morricone’s masterpiece, Once Upon A Time in The West (1968), whistling for Cheyenne’s Theme, the leitmotif for Jason Robards’s rascally bandit. Meanwhile his group I Cantori Moderni performed the other vocal parts, notably on the rhapsodic theme for Claudia Cardinale’s character Jill, which was sung by the soprano Edda Dell’Orso.
The son of a greengrocer, Alessandro Alessandroni was born in Tor di Quinto, Rome, on March 18 1925 and grew up near Viterbo. By the time that he was 10, although he had no formal musical education, his talent was clear and his father bought him an accordion. His first audiences were customers of a local barber’s shop, where he would play the mandolin.
With the help of a friend, he had mastered the guitar by the time he was 13. Alessandroni would go on to learn more than 30 instruments, including the piano, Hammond organ, violin and sitar. He formed his first band at school, before studying music at Rome’s conservatoire.
On graduating, he was recruited to the orchestra that played for Nino Rota, who composed soundtracks for many of the films of Italian cinema’s golden decades after the war, and who discovered Alessandroni’s talent for whistling. It was Federico Fellini who gave him the nickname of “Fischio” (The Whistler) by which he was often known, though in fact he did not particularly like it.
In the early Fifties, he began to direct a vocal quartet, 2+2. This became the Caravels and then I Cantori Moderni, and featured his first wife, Giulia De Mutiis, whom he married in 1957. In 1967, the two of them sang on what became a hit record, Mah-na Mah-na, later made more famous still by featuring on The Muppet Show.
Alessandroni’s singers appeared on numerous LPs, backing performers, as well as on film soundtracks. He himself composed some 40 of these for the cinema, and featured on hundreds of recordings, among them for such noted films as La ragazza con la pistola (1968), starring Monica Vitti, and the comedy Western Lo chiamavano Trinità (1970).
In 2013, however, he and Morricone were among those sued by the daughter of another musician, Pino Rucher, who claimed that it was he who had played the guitar on the soundtracks of the Dollars trilogy. Both Alessandroni and Morricone denied this, and the case is ongoing.
Giulia De Mutiis died in 1984. Subsequently, Alessandroni married Margaret Courtney-Clarke, a photographer, and in recent years they had based themselves in her native Namibia. He liked to paint, and to read history books, and kept working until the end of his life. He had just finished composing a new opus. A biography of him (in Italian) is to be published shortly.
He is survived by his wife and by two children of his first marriage. A son, Cristiano, died in 2008.