ROME (AP) – Italian Oscar-winning composer Ennio Morricone, who created the coyote-howl theme for the iconic Spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and often haunting soundtracks for classic gangster movies Hollywood actors like “The Untouchables” and the epic “Once Upon a Time in America,” died Monday. He was 91 years old.
Morricone’s lawyer and friend, Giorgio Assumma, said the Master, as he was known, died in a Rome hospital of complications after a recent fall that broke his leg.
During a decades-long career that earned him an Oscar for his career in 2007, Morricone collaborated with some of the top directors in Hollywood and Italy, including Brian de Palma’s “The Untouchables”, Quentin’s “The Hateful Eight” Tarantino and “The Battle of Algiers” by Gillo Pontecorvo.
Tarantino’s film would win him the Oscar for best original score in 2016. Accepting that award, Morricone told the audience at the ceremony, “There is no good music without a great movie to inspire it.”
In total, he produced over 400 original scores for feature films.
His iconic films called Spaghetti Western saw him work closely with the late Italian film director Sergio Leone.
Morricone was credited with nothing less than reinventing music for western movies through his association with Sergio Leone, a former classmate. Their association included the “Dollars” trilogy, starring Clint Eastwood as a lone gunman and quick shooter: “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964, “For Pw Dollars More” in 1965, and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” a year later.
Morricone was celebrated for crafting just a few notes, such as those played on a harmonica in Leone’s 1984 film “Once Upon A Time in America,” which would instantly become the motif of the film.
The film is a saga of Jewish gangsters in New York that explores themes of friendship, lost love, and the passage of time, starring Robert De Niro and James Wood. Some consider it Leone’s masterpiece, thanks in part to Morricone’s evocative score, which includes a lush section played on stringed instruments.
“Inspiration does not exist,” Morricone said in a 2004 interview with The Associated Press. “What exists is an idea, a minimal idea that the composer develops on the desktop, and that little idea becomes something important.”
In a subsequent interview with Italian state television, Morricone cited “study, discipline, and curiosity” as the keys to his creative genius. “Writing music, like all creative arts, comes a long way” throughout life’s experiences, he said.
In the late 1980s, Morricone provided the score for “The Hateful Eight,” Tarantino’s 70mm epic in 2015 and the first time in decades that he had composed new music for a western. It was also the first time that Tarantino used an original score.
By accepting Morricone’s Golden Globe for music instead, Tarantino called him his favorite songwriter.
“When I say ‘favorite composer’, I don’t mean the film composer. … I’m talking about Mozart, I’m talking about Beethoven, I’m talking about Schubert, “said Tarantino.
Italy’s head of state, President Sergio Mattarella, in a message of condolence to the composer’s family, wrote: “Both a refined and popular musician left a deep mark on the musical history of the second half of the 20th century.”
Morricone’s soundtracks, Mattarella said, “contributed greatly to spreading and reinforcing Italy’s prestige in the world.”
Morricone’s style was sparse, made of memorable melodies and unusual instruments and arrangements. Their music marked the long silences typical of Spaghetti Westerns, with the characters locked in close-ups, looking at each other and waiting for their next movements. The coyote’s howl, harmonicas, and the mysterious whistle of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” became Morricone’s trademark and one of the most easily recognizable soundtracks in film.
Minutes before giving Morricone the Oscar for his life achievement in 2007, Eastwood recalled hearing the score for “A Fistful of Dollars” for the first time and thinking, “What actor wouldn’t want to go to town with that guy?” of music behind him? ” ?
It was an unforgettable night for Morricone, who had been nominated for an Oscar five times (“The Hateful Eight” was his sixth) but had never before won.
Born in Rome on November 10, 1928, Morricone was the oldest of the five children. His father was a trumpet player.
After studying trumpet and composition at the Conservatorio de la Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in the Italian capital, he began working as a trumpet player and then as arranger for record companies.
“I started working on very easy types of musical pieces for radio, television and then for the theater, and little by little I began to compose the scores,” he told the AP in 2016.
In 1961 he wrote his first score for a film, a bittersweet comedy set in the last moments of fascism called “Il Federale” (known in English as “The Fascist”). That decade also saw Morricone cooperate with Pontecorvo, first in “The Battle of Algiers”, the black-and-white classic depicting the Algerian uprising against the French; and later in “Queimada”, a story of colonialism starring Marlon Brando.
Morricone received his first Oscar nomination for his original score for “Days Of Heaven,” a 1978 film by American director Terence Malick. In addition to “The Oteful Eight”, the others were for “The Mission” (1986), “The Untouchables” (1987), “Bugsy” (1991) and “Malena” (2000).
Shortly before his life, Oscar, Morricone joked that he would have been happy without the coveted statuette, saying, “I would have stayed in the company of illustrious non-winners.”
But he also made no secret that he thought “The Mission,” with its memorably sweet theme song “Gabriel’s Oboe,” deserved the Academy Award. That year, he lost to Herbie Hancock’s “Round Midnight”.
When asked by Italian state television a few years ago if there was a director he would have liked to work with but did not, Morricone said that Stanley Kubrick had asked him to work on “Clockwork Orange.” But that collaboration did not come about because of a commitment to Leona, Morricone recalled.
Morricone is survived by his wife Maria Travia, whom he cited when accepting his 2016 Oscar. Married in 1956, the couple had four children, Marco, Alessandra, Andrea and Giovanni.
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Biographical material for this report was contributed by former AP correspondent Alessandra Rizzo.
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