Finally awarded, Morricone deserves a fistful of Oscars

Composer receives lifetime achievement Oscar for decades as prolific film scorer.

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, February 22, 2007

On Dec. 13, the National Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — known to most people as "those folks who hand out the Oscars" — announced that composer Ennio Morricone was to receive an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. As the academy put it, Morricone was getting his little gold man "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music."

No argument there. But this would be the legendary film scorer's first Oscar, despite five Academy Award nominations, a Grammy, five BAFTA (the British version of Oscar) awards, a Golden Globe and something really cool-sounding called a "Grand Officer Award" from the Italian government.

The question seemed obvious: What on Earth has the Academy been thinking for the past, oh, 40 years?

Of course Ennio Morricone deserved an Oscar before tonight. Of course he deserves the one he's getting now. Not only have his contributions to film music been monumental, more than any other postwar film composer — more than John "Star Wars" Williams or Jerry "Hoosiers" Goldsmith — Morricone's sound and vision can be found throughout popular music.

Born in 1928 in Rome, Morricone planned on being a modern classical composer, studying composition at the conservatory of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. But he began scoring films and TV in 1961 and never really looked back, scoring at a furious rate throughout the 1960s and '70s. The exact number is hard to place, but Morricone scored more than 400 movies and TV shows, from romance to horror, from big-budget masterpieces to junky sexploitation. And, of course, Westerns, which is how most people know Morricone.

Musicians operating in the popular sphere have long shared an affinity for scoring and soundtrack composition. After all, music cues are often very short, some as short as a few seconds, most no more than a few minutes. In other words, the length of pop songs.

Many pop musicians have crossed clean over to soundtrack work. Oingo Boingo's Danny Elfman, he of everything from "Batman" to "Desperate Housewives," might be the most famous. Graeme Ravell, who has composed dozens of soundtracks including "The Crow," "Blow" and "Sin City," spent time in legendary industrial music outfit SPK. Musicians as diverse as Wu-Tang producer RZA, punk icon Ian MacKaye and Police drummer Stewart Copeland have all dabbled in scoring.

But plenty of pop musicians have folded Morricone's soundtrack ideas into their own work. Some like only the hyper-masculine Western stuff. Some bands simply use his themes as walk-out music, while Metallica covered Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold" on its symphonic "S&M" album. The '80s Goth rock band Fields of the Nephilim based their whole duster-and-hat look, not to mention their moody guitar rock, on images Morricone's music provided.

Go to the Web site for the taste-making independent record store Aquarius Records in San Francisco (www.aquariusrecords.org). Type in "Morricone" as the keyword. You get 160 hits. A mere 41 are for soundtracks and themed compilations of Morricone music cues ("Morricone 2000!" "Morricone 2001!," "Morricone Kill: Spaghetti Western Magic From the Maestro!" "Psycho Morricone!").

The rest of the "Morricone" references show up in descriptions for artsy rock albums with urges toward grandeur, foggy black metal acts, orchestral, self-serious indie rock bands such as Godspeed You Black Emperor and, invariably, roots music and Americana. The man is almost a subgenre. Or at minimum, an adjective, like "Kafkaesque" or "Clintonian." "Morricone-esque," "Morricone-ish," "Boy howdy, that sounds like Morricone:" These have become ways of noting both a sound and vision, especially regarding his Western scores.

As much as any country and western musician save Hank Williams (or, OK, Bob Wills), Morricone's music has shaped the popular perception of the American West. Who can hear the wailing intro to "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" without thinking of the dusty American desert? Morricone's music infused the landscape with an existential bleakness that Americana musicians have been vibing off ever since. Indeed, thanks to Morricone, too many alt-country musicians seem to think C&W begins and ends with "A Fistful of Dollars" and too many mediocre scorers think they can slap a lonely guitar twang on a scene and call it "atmosphere."

Of course, Morricone was far more than spaghetti Westerns and collaborations with director Sergio Leone. His less-well-known scores for Italian films produced some wild music, from the faux acid rock and guitar squeaks that sound almost like DJ scratches in "Una Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna" (1971) and the weird drumming and orgasmic moans in "Veruschka (Poesia di una Donna)," to the oblique jazz in "L'Uccello con le Puiume de Cristallo" and the mash-up of sitars, strings and flute in "Metti una Sera a Cena."

Morricone's blending of elements of electronic music with acoustic orchestration often keeps a strong groove at the forefront, the better to illustrate (or at least augment) the action. Many bricolage-crazy musicians are almost impossible to imagine without Morricone's compositions. Jazz avant-gardist John Zorn cut a whole album of Morricone music. Former Faith No More/Mr. Bungle front man Mike Patton released a compilation of Morricone called "Crime and Dissonance" on his Ipecac label.

Morricone also could go big in ways that had nothing to do with the high desert. His score for "The Mission," a tale of the doomed Guarani tribe and the South American missionaries who try to protect them, might be his finest hour. Blending majestic choirs, subtle tribal drumming and a haunting refrain played on both oboe and wooden flute, "The Mission" featured some of the 1980s' most powerful movie music. There really isn't much Morricone can't do, few images for which he can't write music that questions, deepens and amplifies.

In short, the master's Oscar is beyond overdue. Somewhere, almost imperceptibly, the Man With No Name is nodding his approval, justice having finally been served.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926