Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)
Monday, July 6, 2020 at 8:00PM by Nathaniel R
Confession, dear reader. Two decades of writing about movies later I still feel ill-equipped to write about one of the largest tools in the filmmaking arsenal: scoring. Ennio Morricone once described music as "energy, space, and time" which is a broad and huge and cosmic enough description to explain away how overwhelming a task it is to write about... especially to those of us who are more visually attuned. As you've undoubtedly heard, Morricone, by all accounts of the all time great composers, has passed away at the age of 91 after a fall which hospitalized him. In the course of his spectacular career, which stretches across six decades of cinema, he helped defined an entire genre (the spaghetti western), and composed the scores for over three hundred movies as well as an alarming number of TV shows on the side.
His six Oscar nominations (Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malena, The Hateful Eight) and two Oscars (one of them an Honorary) don't even begin to cover what he gave to the cinema. He was beloved by auteurs as is amply evident in his filmography. Some of his most famous films and scores outside of those Oscar-honored works include The Good The Bad and the Ugly, La Cage Aux Folles, Lady of the Camelias, Once Upon a Time in America, Inglorious Basterds, Wolf, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, For a Few Dollars More, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and Cinema Paradiso. Do you have a favourite score from that illustrious body of work?
Morricone is survived by his wife of 63 years, Maria Travia, and their four children. He will be missed but his legacy has long since been immortalized.
