Ennio Morricone HHV Records 83 Items

Composer, Arranger, Ghostwriter

Hardly anyone has influenced the film music of the 20th century as much as Ennio Morricone. Today, the Italian is synonymous with the sound of the spaghetti western; he has composed over 400 soundtracks for film and television. With his extensive oeuvre, he has already been considered an inspiration for film composers such as Hans Zimmer, and even rock bands such as Radiohead and Muse. Born in 1928, the composer wrote his first piece at the age of six. After his musical training at the conservatory, he began composing classical music as well as pieces for the theater, and in 1950 he began working as an arranger for radio, helping a number of Italian pop songs achieve mainstream success. He also ghostwrote for major film productions, and in 1961 his name appeared for the first time on the poster for Il Federale – the film marked the beginning of a long-term collaboration between director Luciano Salce and Morricone. Throughout the 60’s he composed and arranged the music for a large number of Italian comedies and discovered his love for this type of film, to which he returned again and again throughout his life.

The birth of the Spaghetti Western

Ennio Morricone had his international breakthrough in 1964, when his former classmate Sergio Leone commissioned him to compose the soundtrack for the western A Fistful of Dollars. Together with the two sequels For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone and Morricone wrote film and film music history at the same time: the spaghetti western was born, while the concept of the soundtrack was revolutionized. Where before the classical orchestration had its place, Morricone now experimented with electric guitars, trumpets, harmonicas and an array of sound effects never before heard in a soundtrack. Through their collaboration, Leone and Morricone thus created a completely new film language that became an international success and shaped the entire Western genre. Morricone was hired by directors Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima for further western films and made a name for himself in the genre with which most associate him today. Yet most of his compositions fall outside that niche, and he himself said, “I want people to know about all the kinds of music that I write.” In 1968 alone he contributed the music to 20 films in a wide variety of genres, and in the years that follow he continued to compose non-stop for horror films, dramas, political films and more. Morricone’s ability to write simple and memorable melodies, as well as his unique orchestral work, enabled him to collaborate with a variety of directors worldwide. Despite his inexhaustible work into the 2010s, he didn‘t receive his first Oscar until 2015 for his soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.

From Rome to Hollywood

In addition to his gigantic oeuvre of film music, however, Morricone also worked as a classical composer from the very beginning. As early as 1964, he co-founded the experimental improvisation group G.I.N.C. and released several records with the collective in the 60‘s and 70‘s. Under his direction, the ensemble formed the first ever experimental improvisation group and can also be heard playing instruments on some of Morricone’s soundtracks. Their album The Feed-back is now a collector’s item and widely sampled in hip hop . Along with a large number of live musicians, he started to tour his film compositions from the 1980s onward, assembling the individual pieces into longer suites, and he worked tirelessly on new film music until his death in 2020. Released in a wide variety of vinyl box sets, however, his oeuvre today is almost unmanageable, so active was the composer over the decades. Throughout his life, Ennio Morricone never learned English, and he remained in his hometown of Rome – he was content with what he had. In his words, "I was offered a free villa in Hollywood, but I said no thank you, I prefer to live in Italy.“