Ennio Morricone

Born in Rome in 1928 and deceased in the same city in 2020, Ennio Morricone trained at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, where he studied trumpet, composition and orchestration with Goffredo Petrassi. After beginning his career as an arranger for radio, Italian popular song and film, Morricone rose to prominence in the 1960s with the soundtracks for Sergio Leone’s films, notably A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). His musical language blends symphonic writing, repetitive motifs, choirs, marked silences and unexpected timbres, balancing between art music, Italian popular traditions and contemporary research, also nourished by his work within the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Morricone composed for a wide range of filmmakers — from Gillo Pontecorvo to Elio Petri, Brian De Palma, Giuseppe Tornatore and Quentin Tarantino, as well as Roland Joffé — producing scores such as The Battle of Algiers (1966), Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), The Mission (1986), Cinema Paradiso (1988) and The Hateful Eight (2015). From the 2000s onward he also developed a regular career as a conductor in concert, directing his own works on major international stages.