Morricone: Hollywood’s Score Keeper

Pressed to pick his favorite Ennio Morricone score, Warren Beatty hems and haws. But he doesn’t hedge too politically long in naming Morricone his favorite scorer.

“There isn’t much that he’s done that I haven’t really loved,” says Beatty, who recently hired Morricone to do the music for “Love Affair,” his next production. “I always felt there’s nobody better than Ennio to create a haunting theme. And I think he has as thorough an understanding of movies as any composer in the world. You could make a very good case--not that these cases are worth anything--but I don’t know who’s a more significant composer in the world right now. Do you?”

Beatty isn’t going out on too terribly tenuous a limb: Many scoring buffs would agree with the star’s appreciation of the man he refers to as “the maestro.” What’s for certain is that no other European scorer’s services are coveted nearly so much in Hollywood circles as those of Morricone, whose popularity on these shores has risen even as, after decades of work here, he still politely declines to learn English.

And it’s a given that no other film composer who’s enjoyed Morricone’s consistent level of esteem has turned out anywhere near his body of work, which amounts to more than 250 movies over the last 33 years, the most recent being the current box-office topper, “Wolf.”

So, where to place him in the pantheon?

“It’s interesting to gauge his place in film music because, despite all that success, I’d say for a long time he was very underrated,” says scoring expert Steven Smith, author of a hailed Bernard Herrmann biography. “I don’t know if it’s American chauvinism, but the fact that he didn’t win the Oscar for ‘The Mission,’ which was considered a shoo-in, some could almost perceive it as a snub. I think he has not received his due in this country.”

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Besides “The Mission”--the choral/orchestral combination that seems to be the one film score sitting in just about everybody’s CD stack--Morricone was also nominated for the gently luminous “Days of Heaven,” the throbbing “The Untouchables” and his previous collaboration with Beatty, “Bugsy.”

But although in recent years he’s been associated more with a kind of lush, emotive romanticism, his name may be forever popularly tagged to the stranger, sparer sounds he concocted for the Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns of the ‘60s, most famously the instantly recognizable strains of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

How does a composer stay in vogue for nearly 3 1/2 musically turbulent decades?

“I never wrote music that was en vogue , a la mode ,” says Morricone, 65, through a translator, on a visit to Los Angeles to receive a career achievement award from ASCAP. “The music that’s fashionable, when it’s fashionable, it’s already over. So the only answer is to write music that will serve the director in such a way that he can carry on with the film and give it the meanings that he wants to give it.

“I have tried to impose things that meant something to me personally--such as the choice of the timbre in the music, the strange sounds, the application of using contemporary music with simple, hummable, thematic, melodic tunes . . . “

Morricone has regrets about having given up the hallowed halls of what might loosely be considered classical music early on in favor of movie scoring. But some of his admirers suggest that writing for the movies has almost certainly allowed him to be more innovative than more traditionally “serious” performance music might have, if only because of the wider variety of instrumental combinations possible--a Morricone trademark ever since he combined weird whistlings, wordless sopranos and twangy electric guitars in the classic Leone Westerns.

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Says Smith, “The great thing about a film score is you can create a totally original instrumental ensemble for each project, and Morricone’s very good at doing that. He can move from traditional melodic orchestration to something very alive and contemporary-sounding. A score like ‘The Untouchables’ can employ a very modern rhythmic sound--a driving, almost disco-like beat that captures the staccato rhythm of gunfire, almost, or the sense of a manhunt.”

For “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” Morricone found his stylistic solution in imagining the sound of a coyote heard from a distant hillside, and trying to find instrumentation that might best represent that lonesome howl in purely musical tones. This year, he was faced with a different sort of lupine inspiration: Mike Nichols’ “Wolf,” whose music is smoothly frantic and full of classic romantic portent. But he categorically refuses to categorize the movie.

“It has within itself a great force of humanity,” says Morricone. “Therefore I don’t consider it a suspense thriller, even if it has some very strong moments of tension in it. It’s a film that has its own character, its own personality, its own different cinematic style.”

Typically, Morricone doesn’t quite articulate what that unique character is. He tends to speak of his own work with some reluctance and in generalities. And getting a bead on “the maestro’s” own personality is not necessarily any more definite.

“In person, he’s very much all business, very cool,” says one puzzled admirer who’s spent time around Morricone. “I don’t know how to read it, except that he’s an artist type whose passion must all come out in the writing process.”

Beatty, on the other hand, reads Morricone’s lack of gregariousness as a lack of pretension: “I find him to be without affectation, both in his manner and in his music, so that everything counts. That same kind of humility or modesty or reticence that he has in life, he has in his music.”

If Morricone has the modesty Beatty claims for him, it still doesn’t cause him to suffer fools gladly. The composer is famous for railing against other scorers who use orchestrators to arrange their music, a practice that’s considered a necessity by most of Hollywood’s busier composers.

“A composer who does not do his own orchestrations, it’s a serious defect to consider him a composer 100%,” says Morricone. “Either he’s not capable, or he’s lazy, or he’s capable but he doesn’t love his own profession--three negative things that make him a halfway composer. I am comforted in what I say by the consideration of the great composers of centuries ago, Beethoven and Bach and Stravinsky and Mozart--they didn’t have arrangers, orchestrators.”

If Morricone’s disregard for the supposed shortcuts of his musical contemporaries makes him sound a little, well, contrary , he seems on the other hand to have uncommon respect for the filmmakers he collaborates with. The maestro says his first and foremost aim is always to serve the director’s vision for a film, and then serve his own purposes in using that vision as a springboard for music that will eventually wind up a self-sufficient work of art via CD.

“The true mark of a film composer,” he says, “is to find the path which serves his dignity as a composer, and serves the public and the producer, but especially serves the director. This conditioning does not impede the composer. It may take off or explode and ensure his creativity with this new freedom, found above the obligations of the film.”