{"id":14589,"date":"2020-08-03T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-03T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=14589"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:18:54","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:18:54","slug":"the-lush-brilliance-of-ennio-morricones-dollars-symphony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-lush-brilliance-of-ennio-morricones-dollars-symphony\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lush Brilliance of Ennio Morricone\u2019s Dollars<\/i> Symphony"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Few artists can plan a career for themselves, especially in the uncertain world of filmmaking. Most work has to be taken as it\u2019s offered, which is why so many artists end up jacks of all trades. This was certainly the case with Ennio Morricone, who began his career not in films but in a variety of roles within the music industry\u2014playing trumpet in jazz bands, writing original compositions for theatre, radio and television, and (as a studio arranger for the RCA Victor label) working on arrangements for pop music artists. After spending some years ghostwriting film music, Morricone got his first solo film composing job with 1961\u2019s Il Federale<\/em> (The Fascist<\/em>). That gig was only a few years before he met up with director Sergio Leone, who also had a circuitous path to filmmaking: after working for just over a decade as an assistant director, Leone got his first solo directing job in 1961, with The Colossus of Rhodes<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film on which Morricone and Leone first collaborated, 1964\u2019s Per un pugno di dollari<\/em> (A Fistful of Dollars<\/em>), would be a watershed moment for both of them, catapulting their respective careers to huge success. Fistful<\/em>, along with its sequels (1965\u2019s Per qualche dollaro in pi\u00fa<\/em> aka For A Few Dollars More<\/em>, and 1966\u2019s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo<\/em> aka The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly<\/em>), reinvented the Western by remixing various elements of mythology, cinematic history, and new styles and techniques. Morricone\u2019s music was constructed in much the same way, pulling from a variety of influences and sources to create a trilogy of scores that retroactively work as a makeshift symphony, a work that is highly thematic and forever changed the sound of the Western, influencing future film scoring for decades after.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many a great collaboration, the meeting of Morricone and Leone on Fistful<\/em> was by total happenstance. Leone had shot the movie in Almeria, Spain, on old standing sets utilized by one of the film\u2019s co-producers, the studio Jolly Film. Fistful<\/em> was considered the \u201cB\u201d production to another Western shot concurrently with it on the same sets, Mario Caiano\u2019s Bullets Don\u2019t Argue <\/em>(1964), for which Morricone had already been hired as composer. Suggested by the producers to Leone, Morricone was brought onto Fistful<\/em>, whereupon he realized that he and Leone had attended the same primary school at the same time. This camaraderie allowed the duo to work through a rough period of attempting to find a direction for the film\u2019s score, which the tone-deaf Leone couldn\u2019t communicate to his composer further than demanding that Morricone emulate Dimitri Tiomkin–in particular his \u201cEl Deg\u00fcello,\u201d which had been used in Rio Bravo<\/em> (1959). Morricone wrote a beautiful Deg\u00fcello (a bugle call traditionally used by the Mexican army) for Fistful, <\/em>and it forms the basis of the film\u2019s emotional center, marking that sound and style\u2019s importance to the Dollars<\/em> films early on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As for a main title that would double as a signature theme for the movie\u2019s antihero, the magnificent stranger played by Clint Eastwood, Morricone and Leone were stumped. But during a meeting where prior recordings of Morricone\u2019s music were being played, the composer\u2019s 1962 arrangement for ex-pat American pop singer Peter Tevis of the Woody Guthrie song \u201cPastures of Plenty\u201d came on, and Leone insisted it be used. Morricone had played up the \u201cWestern\u201d aspects of Guthrie\u2019s ode to migrant workers for Tevis\u2019 cover version, using a whistling vocal, a male background choir (whose near-incomprehensible vocals can be better understood with Tevis\u2019 lead vocal intact) and even a whipcrack. In the revamped version for Fistfu<\/em>l, Morricone removed Tevis\u2019 vocals and added even more Stratocaster guitar, perhaps influenced by Monty Norman\u2019s guitar-led theme for the James Bond films. The overall sound of the cue indeed gives Eastwood\u2019s bounty hunter a thematic signature, one which not only came to be known as iconic Western music but which Morricone would carry over into the next two Dollars<\/em> pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to the success of Fistful<\/em>, Leone\u2019s sequel, For a Few Dollars More<\/em>, is bigger and grander in scope, a direction which Morricone\u2019s score ably follows. The main title theme for the film is a clear sequel to Morricone\u2019s \u201cPastures\u201d cover, bringing back the whistling, male chorus, and Stratocaster guitar. However, there are two new elements: gunshots in place of the whipcracks, and a jew\u2019s harp. This is an indication right from the start that the Dollars<\/em> world is becoming more complex and character-filled, as the instrumentation sets up Morricone\u2019s use of not just melody but instruments themselves to identify characters. Eastwood\u2019s bounty hunter is once again represented by the whistling melody, guitars, and choir, but the jew\u2019s harp belongs to new character Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), used exclusively to support his scenes and\/or to indicate his presence or influence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For the third major character in the film (this movie begins Leone\u2019s obsession with trios and triangles), El Indio (Gian Maria Volont\u00e9), Morricone throws in a variety of instruments\u2014Spanish guitar, pipe organ\u2014yet the one that sticks is the sound of music-box-like chimes, diegetically emanating from a mysterious pocket watch that has ties to several characters\u2019 pasts. Morricone uses these instruments in various combinations until the final duel, where the composer puts them together with a conclusive new deg\u00fcello. This climactic scene is notable for Leone stretching out its suspense for as long as possible, a choice Morricone thought wasn\u2019t made purely out of style\u2014according to a 2007 interview with the composer in The Observer, Morricone believed Leone \u201coften kept the scenes longer simply because he didn\u2019t want the music to end.\u201d With More<\/em>\u2019s expanded palette and haunting melodies (with one cue anticipating the lush arrangements of later period Jerry Goldsmith), it\u2019s easy to see why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His work on More<\/em> was so impressive (not to mention his steadily growing repertoire in his other film work), Morricone had reached star status by Leone\u2019s final Dollars<\/em> film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly<\/em>, and his music is a main feature of the movie. While Leone had hoped to arrange for Morricone to compose some music the director could hear ahead of filming on their prior collaborations, the timing never quite worked out. This time, however, it did, and Morricone composed the film\u2019s climactic pieces before shooting began. He also composed a good portion of the music in a traditional fashion, after filming was completed\u2014in fact, this led to the writing of the movie\u2019s infamous main title theme, its iconic vocal refrain inspired by a coyote howl in the first few moments of the very first scene. Once again, Morricone uses distinctive instruments to identify each of the titular trio thematically: a flute for Blondie (Eastwood), an ocarina for Angel Eyes (Van Cleef), and a human voice for Tuco (Eli Wallach), while the use of whistling, male chorus, and Stratocaster keep the overall theme in Dollars<\/em> tradition. The score\u2019s moments of peril, such as Blondie\u2019s trek through the desert at gunpoint, uses complex, atonal arrangements that would be emulated by John Williams in similar desert-set scenes in his work for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The film provides the most pointed commentary of the trilogy on Leone\u2019s mythic view of the American West, as well as the not-so-noble Americans themselves, culminating in Morricone\u2019s original ballad written for the film, \u201cThe Story of a Soldier.\u201d The song underscores not only moments of tragedy during the Civil War (when the story is set) but also the torture of Tuco at the hands of Angel Eyes, solidifying the trope of sadistic violence accompanied by diegetic, beautiful music. As an ironic counterpoint, Morricone saves the most triumphant and ebullient cue not for a noble act or victory in battle, but for Tuco\u2019s discovery of the cemetery where a treasure in gold is buried, in a piece aptly named \u201cThe Ecstasy of Gold.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That cue is one of the two composed prior to filming so that Leone could shoot with it in mind; the other is the score\u2019s\u2014and the film\u2019s\u2014climactic moment, a three-way (or is it?) duel named \u201cThe Trio.\u201d It\u2019s in this scene that the Dollars<\/em> trilogy reaches a thematic (as opposed to narrative) culmination, and Morricone supports that climax by working in a number of elements from the prior films: hard-edged guitar work, a soaring deg\u00fcello trumpet, and even a variation on the chimes from For a Few Dollars More<\/em>. Even though these may not be the same exact characters seen in the prior films, Morricone seems to say, they nonetheless act as stand-ins for their mythic, philosophical archetypes, locked in a struggle as eternal as war. It\u2019s a piece that retroactively makes Morricone\u2019s work on the Dollars<\/em> films act as a symphony, a full composition whose various movements correspond to each movie. In another composer’s hands, Leone\u2019s grandiose and operatic take on the Western may have seemed hopelessly daft. In Morricone\u2019s, the trilogy seems positively transcendent, a master statement on a West that both forever is and never was. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few artists can plan a career for themselves, especially in the uncertain world of filmmaking. Most work has to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":14593,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[1422,162],"class_list":["post-14589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22764,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14589\/revisions\/22764"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}