By JON BURLINGAME
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ennio Morricone is not just the most prolific film composer
of the past 50 years. His is also one of the most innovative
voices in the history of the art form.
Although he's been nominated only five times for the Oscar,
the international film community is unanimous in its praise
for the Italian maestro -- and incredulous that his 350-plus
feature scores haven't garnered the Academy's highest accolade
until now.
"For me, he's singularly the most gratifying
composer," says film scorer Hans Zimmer. "The
technique is there, the intellect, the heart. Nobody else
has written melodies with such emotional force -- and at
the same time, all that wit and humor and craft."
The Academy's failure to give Morricone
the 1986 statuette for his orchestral-and-choral masterpiece
"The Mission" is widely considered one of the
major oversights in Oscar music history. (Herbie Hancock
won that year for the jazzy "'Round Midnight,"
which contained very little original music.)
This year's honorary Academy Award helps
to redress that grievance -- and other perhaps unjustly
overlooked scores since Morricone began writing movie music
in 1961.
"He has a sense of poetry, of invention,
and a joy in experimentation," says composer Charles
Bernstein, one of three Academy music branch governors who
pressed for the award. "He's able to combine a sense
of classical, lyrical beauty with a quirky, playful quality
that no one else has been able to do in quite the same measure."
Morricone's music for Sergio Leone's spaghetti
Western trilogy ("A Fistful of Dollars," "For
a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and
the Ugly") revolutionized Western scores with their
offbeat orchestrations, including electric guitar, wordless
soprano and male choir. "Anybody with less courage
or imagination wouldn't have done it," Zimmer says.
His music combines an often lush romanticism
with seemingly incongruous nods to his own roots in Italy's
avant-garde musical culture of the 1950s and '60s, notes
British film historian Christopher Frayling. And Morricone
insists on personally orchestrating every note, unlike most
American film composers.
"Days of Heaven" was his first
nomination, in 1978 (in addition to "The Mission,"
subsequent nominations were for "The Untouchables,"
"Bugsy" and "Malena"). But at least
a dozen other scores that are now considered classics were
ignored in their day.
Among them are his alternately lyrical and
savage score for Leone's 1969 "Once Upon a Time in
the West," whose harmonica motif figured prominently
in the storyline, and the complex, melancholy music for
Leone's ambitious 1984 crime drama "Once Upon a Time
in America."
"Chi Mai," a stunningly beautiful
theme from his 1971 "Maddalena" soundtrack, became
a top-10 hit in the U.K. after its use in the BBC's "The
Life and Times of David Lloyd George" series a decade
later.
The music from Leone's 1971 Mexican Revolution
tale "Duck, You Sucker" and "Cinema Paradiso,"
the nostalgic 1989 foreign-language film Oscar winner, also
are favorites among Morricone aficionados.
Even when the movies are bad ("Exorcist
II: The Heretic," "Red Sonja," "Mission
to Mars"), the music not only survives, the LPs and
CDs are sought-after by fanatic Morricone collectors worldwide.
"He respects the image," Frayling
says. "Instead of repeating what you're seeing, he
tries to add another layer of meaning through the music.
At its best, it's just blissful the way music and image
come together. And the work stands even when you're not
watching the movie. It's great music."
Date in print: Fri., Feb. 16, 2007,(见此页)
|
