Indietro alla Home PageEnnio Morricone
Applied and Absolute Music
(an interview of Stefano Catucci in Februar
2007)
On February 25th, the night of the
Oscars Ennio Morricone will receive the lifetime achievement
Award for the 300+ soundtracks he has composed since 1961, the
year he worked on Luciano Salce's Il federale. At the
time he was 33. He was born in Rome in 1928, and was the pupil of
one of Italy's greatest 20th century composers, Goffredo Petrassi.
Right from the beginning he combined the composing of classical
music with a series of works that would strengthen his
versatility. As a composer of what he calls "applied music",
Morricone always tried to exploit his experience, so that not
only in his soundtracks but also in the light music arrangements
produced in the 1960s for RCA he would constantly filter an idea,
a sound, an approach to voices or instruments to reflect the more
demanding boundaries of music in those years. We need only recall
the chorus accompanying EdoardoVianello in Abbronzatissima,
with its apparently irregular, out-of-place rhythm, the text
broken up into "nonsense", the pure invention of the
arranger, and compare it with the rhythmic, energetic,
fragmentary choruses that appear like intruders in the
soundtracks of Il buono, il brutto e il cattivo (The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly) for example, or C'era una
volta il West (Once upon a time in the West) - the
legendary "shon-shon" sound - or later in The
Mission.
Morricone himself says he has been a sort of "smuggler",
exporting into everyday music the inventions of serious music of
his time. While for years he continued to compose classical music
as "second nature", keeping it separate from his better
known works, this gap has been narrowing over the past decade and,
thanks to an age that is more generous with the use of "contaminations",
Morricone now gives concerts that include both his "absolute"
and "applied" music, i.e. his much-loved sound tracks.
He will be in New York again in February, on the 2nd at the Radio
City Hall and the 3rd at UN Headquarters. At the UN he will
conduct his own composition, Voices from silence,
written soon after the tragedy of the Twin Towers but dedicated
to the memory of "all massacres".
The Maestro speaks
We caught up with Ennio Morricone in Rieti, prior to a concert in
his honour, just a few days after the news about the Oscar.
In your classical pieces
you use unusual instruments like the marimba or harmonica. But of
course everyone can recall such unexpected, "just right"
sounds in your soundtracks, sometimes with the support of a very
simple theme, just three harmonica notes in Once upon a time in
the West. Your teacher, Goffredo Petrassi, once confessed to me
that he had never met anyone more skilled than you in utilisíng
the expressive potential of the most humble of instruments, like
an ocarina, jew's-harp, reed flute, or a man whistling...
The choice of a sound or a tone is very important, but it cannot
be isolated from all the rest. Music requires simplicity to come
to the point in the shortest time possible. The timbre, or tone,
can be a means to obtain this result. But there would be no
success without a coherent composition logic to properly
highlight the characteristics of that sound, and sometimes to
exploit its defects.
When did you discover this
inclination to choose unusual sounds? Was it like that from the
beginning? Your biographies mention the first compositions at the
age of six...
Never mind that, please, they were nothing, or even worse. I came
across them recently, and even with all the comprehension I might
have for my own childhood, they are terrible. Do you know what I
composed? "Hunts", forest scenes in the style of Weber's
Franco Cacciatore (Der Freischütz),
which I had heard because my father, a trumpet
player, performed them with his little orchestra. I wrote the
pieces for horns only, because I was attracted by the narrative
and epic force of that sound. Come to think of it, it could be
because I had these "hunts" in my blood that I was so
comfortable with westerns.
Like horns, other
instruments you have often used also evoke a sense of distance.
In your music, including your concerts, there is this effect,
together with a light touch.
I think I have developed a personal technique to obtain lightness,
turning to the classical masters of counterpoint. Without going
too deeply into technical detail, I can say that counterpoint
balances the rigid, straightforward aspect of a vertical harmony
consisting of full chords, extending it horizontally so the
harmony emerges from a combination of various waves of sounds.
This is why counterpoint helps define that sensation of lightness
and suspension that has almost become a style "signature"
for me.
Is this how you also
conceive your melodies, with the same need for simplicity and
lightness?
Yes, the melodies, too. Some of the most famous ones I have
written consist of very few notes; sometimes I have risked my
reputation by proposing themes of just three, at most four notes,
but they have always worked very well.
How would you define this
function?
Music is the non-realistic element of cinema. Unless you see the
source of the sound, as happens rarely only when there is a scene
with someone playing or showing a record or a radio being played,
and so on, in films the music comes from an undefined other place,
an abstract place that can very well be identified with the place
where the imagination leads. This means that music requires its
own space, that not everyone is willing to grant, especially
those who insert it in the context of “realistic"
noises, which in addition to ruining the music make it
ineffective. Instead of overriding it with something else, it
would be better not to have any at all.
Sergio Leone understood very well that music needs space to
expand in, and he gave this space. And so the music works as a
basic ingredient of the narrative, becoming a poetic additive.
The success of a sound-track depends very much on the space that
the director gives.
The reason given by the
Academy for awarding the Oscar to your career, after five
nominations in the past, is that your soundtracks have become
"very widely known and much loved masterpieces".
Apparently I have found directors who have given the proper space
to my music. Or if you prefer, my music has taken this space.
For a
long time Ennio Morricone kept separate the categories of
"applied" and "absolute" music (the
latter being classical music written without the
conditions imposed by another art). Early works include
the Sonata for brass, kettledrums and piano,
followed in 1960 with the |