ennio morricone will be eighty on november 10th of this year. he's scored over five hundred film and television soundtracks since the early sixties, including the good, the bad and the ugly, cinema paradiso, mission to mars, the untouchables, lolita, and perhaps most famously, the mission, for which he was nominated for an academy award (he's been nominated 5 times and was awarded an honourary oscar last year, he's also won 5 BAFTAs). he grew up in rome on a diet of trumpet lessons, and intense training in harmony, choral music, choral direction and composition. he went hungry as a child during the second world war, was influenced by american minimalist john cage and pioneered italy's own musical avant garde. he is one of the only composers for film who orchestrates by hand, and writes his full scores in longhand, not only without a orchestrator or technology, but without even a piano.
tonight morricone conducted the roma sinfonietta and the nuovo coro lirico sinfonico romano in lucca's piazza napoleon. this is a smallish square bordered by cafes and plane trees (called sycamore in america), with intimate acoustics bouncing on renaissance facades. morricone played as part of lucca's summerfest, italy's most celebrated summer concert series. it isn't often that one hears a contemporary composer run through the highlights of his ouevre under a tuscan summer night sky.
morricone's work is at times modern while referencing the classics, jazz, hymnal, electronic, era-specific, over the top, innovative, soaring, minimal, sentimental, illustrative, edgeless and then completely magical. maybe because he scores for film, his themes establish themselves quickly and then, after building on a phrase for a few moments, they drift to a close, and for the purpose of tonight's performance they segwayed into a new theme for a new film. one could liken tonight's performance to a pops orchestral concert for those afflicted with ADHD. morricone doesn't dwell, but rather plays in a genre or mood, offering little pieces, still always displaying his signature complexities and counter intuitive melodic choices, afterwhich he moves on. perhaps this is what is necessary for a composer working in collaboration with another artform, and in order to stay employed, morricone has exploited an ability to marry versatility, shared vision and his own style and technical skill. i took in his understated conducting, his casual focus, the breadth and experimentation in his instrumentation, and thought, "this guy's a pro."
it's valuable, when caught up in the idea of the artistic auteur, to remember the importance of phrases. by phrases i mean, i'm just going to make a phrase: a piece of something, an entry, a moment, a mark. this adjusts the pressure of the giant task of creating the perfect masterwork. i can even see now that the masters themselves create their masterworks one phrase at a time, and can even perform them in the same manner. when listening to morricone's melodies, i wonder, "did he write that little piece and then sit back in his chair and say "yes"? eventually that little line became the two-hour score of a major motion picture, and his music brought to life a narrative and an emotional state, the colour, texture and connection to a story. yeah, rome. day. built. not. really?
