The Not-Entirely-Secret Avant-Garde Life of Ennio Morricone

If you’re any kind of film buff, you’ve heard of —and are today probably mourning the passing of— the composer and musician Ennio Morricone. He was so prolific for so long — he has more than 500 films on his IMDb page — it’s almost hard to believe he was only 91 years old.

Arguably the composer of the most memorable pieces of theme music in movie history — sure, David Raksin has Laura, and Max Steiner has Gone With The Wind, but Morricone has Cinema Paradiso, The Mission, The Battle Of Algiers, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Once Upon A Time In The West, just off the top of one’s head — the Italian maestro was also a huge champion of experimental and improvisational music. When he toured the United States in 2007, conducting an orchestra, the attendees had shelled out their shekels to hear the precisely those aforementioned themes. Many of them had no idea that there was a whole other world of Morricone to explore.

And honestly, a lot of them might not have enjoyed what they heard had they deigned to explore it! His avant-garde music is very far removed from the lush romanticism of his Paradiso score, for instance. But one way that Morricone innovated was in pushing different modes close together, and listening to what happened.

Morricone was a child prodigy who grew into a multi-instrumentalist conversant with a lot of genres. (The percussive accents of some of his most memorable film scores, like the variations on the martial snare drum in Battle of Algiers, no doubt derived from his training as a drummer.) He broke into film music work as an arranger, and began scoring light comedies in the early ’60s.

The early ’60s saw two turning points in his musical development. One was the beginning of his famed collaboration with director Sergio Leone, in the first of the three Clint Eastwood-starring “spaghetti Westerns” that became and remain cinematic sensations. The other was the formation of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. If Morricone with an orchestra was made for Radio City, Morricone with Nuova Consonanza was made for Roulette, or Issue Project Room.

Formed by Franco Evangelisti in 1964, “New Consonance” was an “experimental composers collective” in which the members, all of whom were well-versed in notated music, left that behind and improvised to the outer limits of sonic possibilities. In a 1967 German documentary about the group, Evangelisti says of their audience, “Some even think that we can’t play the instruments, as we don’t play them in a conventional way. It’s a funny situation, because this creates different attitudes among the listeners, which is much better than having a single-minded audience.”

The footage of the group itself in this film, here a septet, aptly demonstrates their approach and its results. Bleats and blats,  block chords and tinklings, and manic sort-of glissandos ensue with nary a musical “theme” in evidence. Morricone, here the trumpet player, sometimes plays only through his mouthpiece. Years later, the New York composer and improvisor John Zorn, who would concoct the epic, excellent 1986 tribute album to Morricone called The Big Gundown, would make entire LPs using only his sax mouthpieces and reeds, and game calls.

In their studio work, Nuovo Consonanza pioneered what’s called “electro-acoustic” music, which blends acoustic instrumentation and electronic manipulation, often incorporating ostensibly non-musical sounds, sometimes involving using an instrument in an unusual way, sometimes involving banging and scraping non-musical items, and also including the form of documentary audio called “field recordings.”

How did this inform Morricone’s film music, if at all? Well listen to the theme for Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (which became a Top 40 hit in a cover by Hugo Montenegro in 1968). Such things are commonplace nowadays, but back then it was not exactly customary to put the sounds of cracking whips and gunshots into music. Nor to pair such apparently disparate instruments as a church bell and a twangy, surf-inflected electric guitar. The use of the chorus to declaim semi-nonsense syllables — all this sort of thing was derived from the experimental modes with which Morricone was playing as a member of Nuovo Consonanza.

This activity also helped him with his prolific output. The genres of movie Morricone scored were almost as varied as the musical forms he pursued. In 1977 he scored Hitch Hike, one of the most memorably sleazy road thrillers ever, and in 1978 Days Of Heaven, one of the most lyrical tragedies of American cinema. In between he shoehorned in a Kirk-Douglas-starring Omen rip-off and maybe a half-dozen other pictures. For the 1971 Spanish-Italian horror picture (that’s “giallo” for you mavens) Cold Eyes Of Fear, Morricone, in collaboration with his frequent right-hand man Bruno Nicolai, enlisted Nuovo Consonanza to extemporaneously create the score while watching picture playback, much as Miles Davis did when concocting the modal jazz soundtrack for Louis Malle’s 1958 thriller Elevator to the Gallows.

In an interview with Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen for Premiere in 1989 (some of which seems a little…well, facetious), Fagen doesn’t bring up Nuovo Consonanza at all. But he does ask a verbose question about Sergio Leone’s own genre-bending, and how Morricones’s scores for Leone’s films function “both ‘inside’ the film as a narrative voice and ‘outside’ the film as the commentary of a winking jester,” finally saying “put it all together  and doesn’t it spell ‘post-modern’?” and further urging “Isn’t that what’s attracting Downtown Manhattan?” The question is answered with a Morricone shrug. The joke was sort of on Fagen, though, because downtown Manhattan, by which Fagen mostly meant Zorn, was as familiar with Morricone’s Nuovo Consonanza work as they were with his movie work. (Which yes, of course they dug, and yes, in part of course because of the reasons Fagen enumerates. But still.)

In the same interview Morricone gave up one trade secret of his conventional scoring: “When I begin a theme in a certain key, say, D minor, I never depart from this original key. If it begins in D minor, it ends in D minor. This harmonic simplicity is available to everyone.”

Much of Morricone’s not-available-to-everyone material is on compilations curated by knowing fans with discographies of their own. The collection Crime and Dissonance, an excellent starter for the more open-eared, was put together by Mike Patton, one-time Faith No More singer turned experimental musician. But even such comps mostly steer clear of the Morricone-affiliated sounds that don’t have a tonal center. The German label die Schactel issued a 4-CD, 1 DVD set of Nuovo Consonanza’s live work in 2017. It, and original pressings of the combo’s early LPs, fetch big bucks on collectors’s sites like Discogs. But whatever you can afford will afford you musical fascination, which was ultimately what Morricone was all about.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.