Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone (Italian pronunciation: [ˈɛnnjo morriˈkoːne]) was an Italian composer. He was born on 10 November 1928 in Rome, Italy and died on 6 July 2020 in Rome, Italy.

A favourite pupil of [a776673], he also deputized secretly for his trumpeter father in a light music orchestra. He thus developed two distinct sides to his musical personality: one of these led him to embrace serialism and the experimental work of the improvisation group [a146775]; the other gained him a leading role, principally as an arranger, in all types of mass-media popular music, including songs for radio, radio and television plays, and the first successful television variety shows.

After many minor cinematic collaborations, Morricone achieved wider recognition with [a=Sergio Leone]'s series of four Westerns. There followed important collaborations with directors such as [a1549141], [a467451], [a3153386], [a4424119], [a4424126], Roland Joffé and [a4424108]. Despite inevitable self-repetitions over a total of more than 400 film scores, his work provides many examples of a highly original fusion of classical and popular idioms.

Morricone's non-film works form a large and increasingly widely performed part of his output. Many of them use his technique of ‘micro-cells’, a pseudo-serial approach often incorporating modal and tonal allusions, which, with its extreme reduction of compositional materials, has much in common with his film-music techniques.

Among honours, he won the Academy Award in 2016 for his score to [a=Quentin Tarantino]'s The Hateful Eight and has received five Academy Award nominations between 1979 and 2001, a Grammy and a Leone d'oro, and was awarded the Laurea ad Honorem by the University of Cagliari. Between 1991 and 1996 he taught film music at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena.