How Ennio Morricone Changed the Way Movies Sound

Remembering the legendary film composer who defined the sound of Spaghetti Westerns.
Ennio Morricone circa 1995
Ennio Morricone circa 1995. Photo by Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images.

Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. Steven Spielberg and John Williams. Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard. Every visionary filmmaker needs a composer they can trust—someone they can call on to accentuate their work with music. And from 1964 until well into the 1980s, there was no greater director-composer partnership than Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, the Italian film composer who died on Monday in Rome at age 91. It was through his long-term collaboration with the late filmmaker that Morricone created his most iconic scores and helped define the sound of the Spaghetti Western, the Italian film movement spearheaded by Leone and his so-called “Dollars Trilogy” starring Clint Eastwood: 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars, 1965’s For a Few Dollars More, and 1966’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Leone was hardly the only director to take advantage of Morricone’s talents over the last 60 years. In fact, hundreds of filmmakers, among them Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Terrence Malick, partnered with the composer in order to infuse their films with orchestral gravitas and vintage swagger. Morricone’s prolific drive was astonishing: By the end of his career, he had scored more than 500 movies—an especially impressive number, considering how he refused to move to Hollywood and never learned to speak English.

Some film composers consider it their duty to write music that blends into the scenery or prioritizes tasteful subtlety. Not Morricone. His scores are expressive, grandiose, and undeniably audacious in their oddball instrumental choices, from the pan pipes he used in 1989’s Casualties of War to the Haitian drumming and children’s choir he incorporated into 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic. Such boldness was remarkably well-suited to the operatic scope and brooding emotional expanse of the Spaghetti Western. As Leone put it in an interview towards the end of his life, “I’ve always felt that music is more expressive than dialogue. I’ve always said that my best dialogue and screenwriter is Ennio Morricone.”

Consider the famous call-and-response coyote howl that comprises the main theme of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, an instantly recognizable sliver of film music that’s cropped up everywhere from The Simpsons to Ramones concerts. In an inventive touch, Morricone played that same theme on three distinct instruments—including the Ocarina, an ancient type of flute—in order to give each of the film’s three main characters a signature motif. Or consider the climactic duel scene towards the end of Once Upon a Time in the West, which would be unimaginable without Morricone’s roiling harmonicas and simmering guitars. (So powerful was the music that Leone insisted it be played on set while filming the movie.)

After receiving his first Oscar nomination for his work on Terrence Malick’s 1978 drama Days of Heaven, Morricone reunited with Leone one last time for the director’s final film, Once Upon a Time in America, an era-hopping, four-hour gangster epic that arrived in 1984. If that film’s depiction of crime and betrayal among Jewish mobsters seemed complex and unwieldy to viewers, Morricone’s unusually gorgeous score—particularly its centerpiece, “Deborah's Theme”—was just the thing to tie its narrative threads together while adding a sense of elegiac longing.

In the following decade, Morricone created some of his most memorable scores for 1980s films such as the Jesuit drama The Mission (for which he merged indigenous South American and European musical styles) and The Untouchables, as well as the 1991 crime drama Bugsy, for which he received yet another Oscar nomination. They are the kinds of scores that never fade into the background—and if you play them around the house, they can make any mundane moment feel epic and fraught.

Morricone enjoyed a revival in more recent years, thanks in large part to Quentin Tarantino and his endless crusade to make Gen Xers appreciate Spaghetti Westerns. The filmmaker borrowed chunks of Morricone’s preexisting film music to liven up scenes in Inglourious Basterds and his Kill Bill films. Similarly, director Alexander Payne used a chilling motif from Morricone’s Navajo Joe score as a recurring gag in his 1999 satire Election. Such inclusions are a testament to Morricone’s distinctiveness as a composer: Modern-day directors don’t even bother hiring someone to rip him off; they just recycle his original scores. (Yet in 2015, Tarantino finally achieved his dream of commissioning Morricone’s first original Western score in more than 30 years, for The Hateful Eight.)

Meanwhile, the appeal of Morricone beyond the silver screen has proven to be its own phenomenon. In recent decades, he has exerted an outsized influence over rock and pop artists. Metalheads know his name thanks to Metallica, who have routinely used “The Ecstasy of Gold”—the sweeping, celestial climax from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—as concert warm-up music since the mid-’80s, letting the anticipatory roar of the crowd heighten Morricone’s dramatic flourishes. (JAY-Z sampled the same theme on the title track to his 2002 album The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse.) Gorillaz paid tribute to that iconic coyote howl on their 2001 classic “Clint Eastwood,” and Radiohead reportedly took heavy inspiration from Morricone’s lush orchestral scores while recording OK Computer. (No doubt Jonny Greenwood, now an accomplished film scorer in his own right, has taken plenty of his own cues from Morricone.)

Fittingly, on Monday, everyone from Chance the Rapper to Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon to El-P mourned the indispensable composer. As the director Edgar Wright put it, “He could make an average movie into a must-see, a good movie into art, and a great movie into legend.” Movies will be a little quieter, and emptier, without Morricone.