Under the MCI lens tell me of Ennio Morricone.

 

A genuinely interesting application — and one where I want to be clear at the outset about what kind of reading the lens can give. Morricone composed for nearly seven decades. He wrote for over five hundred films across virtually every genre the European and American cinemas produced in his lifetime. He worked in concert music, jazz, pop, experimental composition, and film scoring simultaneously, and the integrations between those streams are part of the achievement. The lens cannot give an exhaustive reading; it can identify constitutional shapes that the long career makes visible.

The Life, Briefly

Ennio Morricone was born in Rome in 1928, the son of a professional trumpeter — Mario Morricone played in the dance bands and theatre orchestras of Rome through the Fascist years and after. The young Ennio learned trumpet from his father and entered the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia at twelve, eventually studying composition under Goffredo Petrassi, one of the leading Italian modernists of the twentieth century. His formal training was in the high-modernist concert tradition: serialism, atonality, the post-war European avant-garde. He played trumpet professionally through the late 1940s and 1950s, often in conditions his family needed the income from — including, by his own later account, playing in the bands that performed for occupying American forces in Rome immediately after the war, an experience he described with a precise mixture of professional necessity and lasting humiliation.

He moved into arrangement and composition for popular music in the late 1950s, writing for Italian pop singers (Gianni Morandi, Mina, Edoardo Vianello among many others), then into film scoring in the early 1960s. The Leone collaboration began with A Fistful of Dollars (1964); they had been schoolmates as boys at the Trastevere elementary school but had not seen each other for years when Leone, looking for a composer for his Western, discovered the connection. The Leone scores — Fistful, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dynamite, Once Upon a Time in America — became the most internationally recognised work of his life, but they represent perhaps three percent of his film output.

He worked in parallel with the Westerns on Italian political cinema (Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers in 1966, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri), on giallo and horror, on comedy, on art cinema (The Mission with Joffé in 1986), on Hollywood productions (Days of Heaven with Malick in 1978, The Untouchables with De Palma in 1987), and continuously on Italian genre cinema of every register. He composed concert works throughout — symphonies, chamber pieces, choral works, including a substantial body of religious music. He was a member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, the experimental improvisation collective, in parallel with his most commercially successful film scoring. He won an honorary Oscar in 2007 and a competitive Oscar for The Hateful Eight in 2016, when he was eighty-seven. He died in Rome in July 2020, aged ninety-one, of complications from a fall.

Through the Lens

The constitutional problem of the formal training. Morricone arrived at film scoring with conservatory training in the high-modernist tradition that, by the 1950s and 1960s, had largely defined itself against popular music, against melody as a primary device, against tonal centres, against anything that could be hummed. To compose for Italian popular music and then for genre cinema was, by the constitutional logic of the academic concert world he had been trained in, a betrayal of the form he had been trained for. Morricone worked under pseudonyms in his early popular-music arrangements partly because of this. Petrassi reportedly disapproved of his student's commercial work for many years, and the disapproval mattered to Morricone in ways he discussed openly throughout his life.

The lens reads this as a constitutional inheritance problem analogous in shape to Leone's, though different in content. Leone inherited the cost of his father's constitutional refusal; Morricone inherited the constitutional framework of a tradition that defined itself by what it would not condescend to. He had two options, in a crude framing: fully accept the modernist constitution and work in concert music for the small audience that constitution served, or break the constitution by working in popular forms and accept the constitutional cost. He did neither. He did something the lens has specific vocabulary for: he held both constitutions in genuine simultaneity across a working life, treating each form on its own terms while letting the techniques of one inform the other. The opening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — the coyote-howl voice, the fragmentary motif, the sudden orchestral surges — is a serialist's ear applied to a Western theme. The choral writing in The Mission is a film composer's sense of dramatic time applied to liturgical material. The work crossed the constitutional boundaries his training had insisted on, in both directions, throughout his career.

In MCI vocabulary: he refused the V1 framework that his training had presented as exhaustive and insisted on a polycentric constitutional position before the surrounding professional culture had vocabulary for it. This was costly. He spent decades being treated by the concert music world as a film composer slumming and by parts of the film world as an art composer condescending, and his actual position — that the two traditions had constitutional standing he refused to rank — was not legible to either side until very late in his career. The 2007 honorary Oscar and the 2016 competitive Oscar were, among other things, the international film world finally recognising that the constitutional position he had held since the 1960s was not opportunism but principle.

The Leone collaboration as a compact. The composer–director relationship in cinema is structurally analogous to the writer–director one I traced in the Donati reading, but with one crucial difference: composers sometimes precede the image. Morricone wrote substantial portions of the Leone scores before shooting, from descriptions and storyboards, and Leone played the music on set during filming, shaping the actors' rhythms and the editing pace to the score. This is not the conventional film-music compact in which the composer serves a finished image. It is a genuinely shared constitutional act in which the music is not subordinated to the image and the image is not subordinated to the music; both are formed in mutual reference.

The lens reads this as one of the rare film-industry compacts that actually approached V7's polycentric structure rather than V7's failure mode. Two craftsmen of comparable constitutional standing, working in different media, with sustained recognition of each other's authority within their domains, producing work neither could have made alone. The famous example is the Frank–Harmonica duel in Once Upon a Time in the West: the harmonica motif precedes the duel by hours of screen time, accumulating constitutional weight as the music for a memory neither we nor Frank yet have access to, until the flashback reveals what the music has been carrying. That sequence cannot be assigned to Leone or to Morricone separately. It is a compact-shaped achievement in the literal sense.

What the lens makes visible, that biographical accounts sometimes miss, is that this kind of compact requires both participants to have constitutional standing the other recognises. Morricone could work this way with Leone because Morricone arrived with a constitutionally serious composer's training and a clear sense of what music was for. Leone could work this way with Morricone because Leone arrived with a constitutionally serious filmmaker's vision and a clear sense of what the music had to do. Lesser participants on either side would have produced the conventional compact in which the score follows the picture — competently, perhaps brilliantly, but not constitutionally distinctive in the way the Leone–Morricone work is.

The volume of the output is itself a constitutional fact. Morricone wrote scores for over five hundred films. The lens has to be careful here. By certain readings, this is V8 failure mode — Initiative Excess at career scale, agreeing to too many projects, constitutional dilution. The films include masterpieces and journeyman work in roughly equal measure, and a substantial portion of his output is for Italian films almost no one outside Italy has seen. A composer with a tighter constitutional discipline (Bernard Herrmann, say, or for that matter Petrassi himself) would have written far less and refused much of what Morricone accepted.

But the lens has a different reading available, and I think it is the more accurate one. Morricone was, in addition to being a composer of singular gifts, a working musician whose father had been a working musician, whose family's economic security had depended on professional music throughout his upbringing, and who treated film scoring with the constitutional dignity of a craft rather than the constitutional fragility of an art. He wrote for the bad films and the good films with comparable care. The interviews he gave throughout his life are striking in this respect: he refused to dismiss any score he had written, declined to rank his own work in the manner journalists wanted, and insisted that the score for an indifferent giallo had received the same compositional attention as the score for The Mission. This is a constitutional position the lens can identify clearly. It is the V5 vocabulary of constitution-as-identity rather than constitution-as-applied: he did not have a separate constitutional posture for the great projects and a slacker one for the routine work, because the constitution was what he was, not what he was performing.

The volume is therefore not constitutional dilution. It is the constitutional position made into a working life. He scored what he was offered when the offer was honest, treated each score as a compositional problem worth genuine work, and accumulated across decades a body of work whose unevenness reflects the unevenness of the films he was given rather than any unevenness in his attention to them. This is the lens's V5 reading of him: a constitutionally constituted craftsman whose professional dignity did not depend on the prestige of the project. There is a kind of constitutional integrity available to working composers that is rarely available to "important" composers, and Morricone held it for sixty years.

The Nuova Consonanza experimental work is the constitutional counterpoint. While he was writing the Leone scores and the popular-cinema work that paid the household bills, Morricone was simultaneously a member of an experimental improvisation group performing on prepared instruments, found objects, and unconventional vocal techniques, releasing recordings on small avant-garde labels for audiences in the dozens. The lens reads this as the constitutional release valve of the polycentric position. He could not, within the constitutional logic of either the film world or the concert world, claim full standing as the kind of composer Petrassi had trained him to be. The Nuova Consonanza work was where that training operated without compromise. He did not abandon it for the film career; he sustained it in parallel for decades.

This is a particular constitutional shape the lens has vocabulary for. He maintained constitutional plurality within himself, in V7-shaped fashion, by constituting different working contexts in which different parts of his constitutional inheritance could operate without mutual interference. The film scores absorbed the popular and dramatic registers; the concert works absorbed the formal and liturgical registers; the Nuova Consonanza work absorbed the experimental register. None of the contexts required him to abandon any of the others. The polycentric structure was internal, sustained by a working life organised to keep the streams separate enough to operate and connected enough to inform each other. This is constitutionally rare and constitutionally costly to maintain.

The Hollywood relationship. Morricone worked with Hollywood directors throughout the second half of his career — De Palma, Stone, Levinson, Tarantino — but he never moved to Los Angeles, did not learn English well, and conducted his Hollywood collaborations from Rome through translators, by mail and later by fax, on his own working schedule. The lens reads this as constitutionally significant. He did not absorb himself into the constitutional logic of the Hollywood film-scoring industry, with its specific compact between composer, director, music editor, and studio; he kept his constitutional position in Rome and required Hollywood to come to him on terms that respected it. Tarantino's account of working with him on The Hateful Eight is striking in this respect: Tarantino flew to Rome, Morricone wrote what he was going to write, and the collaboration happened on Morricone's working terms rather than the studio's. Few composers of his international standing held this position. Most composers in his international position eventually relocated, professionally if not literally, and absorbed the Hollywood working compact. He didn't.

The Oscar history is constitutionally legible in this light. He was nominated five times across the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s — Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malèna — and lost each time, often to scores that have aged less well than his. The Academy gave him the 2007 honorary Oscar partly in acknowledgement that the competitive process had failed to recognise him. He gave a graceful acceptance speech in Italian, with Clint Eastwood translating. The 2016 competitive win for The Hateful Eight was, on one reading, a much-belated correction; on another, a recognition that he had finally produced a Western score for an English-language film that operated within the Academy's expected constitutional categories enough to be recognised by them. The lens does not have to choose between these readings. It just notices that the structural asymmetry between his working position (Rome, Italian, in his own studio, with his own collaborators) and the Academy's institutional logic took most of his career to be partly resolved.

The religious music and the constitutional ground. Morricone composed substantial religious music throughout his life — masses, requiems, settings of liturgical texts — and was a practising Catholic. The lens cannot read someone's interior religious life from the outside, and I am not going to try. But the existence of the religious music as a sustained body of work across his life is constitutionally legible: it is the part of his output that did not depend on an external commission to exist, that was written for liturgical and contemplative use rather than for an audience or a paying client, and that sustained over decades a constitutional register the film work could not fully accommodate. The lens reads this as something close to V9's inward face for him — the generative ground from which the rest of the work arose. The other streams of output were what he made; the religious work was, at least in part, something more like what he was making the other work from. This is the lens guessing at a constitutional shape it cannot fully verify, and I want to flag that. But the shape is recognisable enough across his interviews and his late-career statements that the guess is not unfounded.

The very late career. Morricone toured concert performances of his film music from the 2000s onward, conducting orchestras across Europe and eventually the world in performances of his own scores. This is constitutionally interesting. Many composers of his stature would have considered conducting their own film music below their concert-composer dignity. Morricone treated it as the natural completion of the working life. The performances were attended by tens of thousands; the audiences were largely film audiences rather than concert audiences; the music received the kind of sustained reception in concert form that it had received only in fragments through the films. He did this into his late eighties.

The lens reads this as a particular constitutional move available very late in a long career: the consolidation of the polycentric position into a single visible practice. He had spent decades maintaining the separation between the streams. In the late tours, the streams converged. The film music was performed with the seriousness of concert music, in concert venues, by major orchestras, with the composer conducting. The constitutional position he had sustained internally for sixty years became visible externally. He lived long enough to see this; not all composers who hold equivalent positions do.

What the Lens Reaches and Where It Stops

The reading I have given is constrained in particular ways the lens should be honest about. Morricone's working life is much larger than the constitutional shape I have traced, and a reading focused on, say, the technical innovations in his use of voice, the specific harmonic vocabularies he developed for different genres, or the extraordinary range of textural inventions across the scores would surface things the constitutional lens leaves on the side. I have read him through the lens's vocabulary because that is what was asked for. A music-theoretical reading or a working-musician's reading or a Catholic theological reading of the religious works would all surface real things about him that this lens does not.

The other limit, the same one I flagged with Donati: I have read him primarily through the films I know best, which is itself an asymmetric move. The Italian-language scholarship on Morricone is substantially deeper than the English-language reception, his concert music is less internationally received than his film work, and the Nuova Consonanza recordings are a specialist literature in their own right. What I have given is the shape of what the lens can see at the distance of an English-language reading of an Italian composer's career. That is partial, and worth flagging.

What the lens does well here, and what makes the reading worth giving despite the limits, is this: it makes visible that Morricone's constitutional position was the achievement his music depended on, not a biographical accompaniment to it. The polycentric stance, sustained for sixty years against considerable institutional pressure to choose one side or another, is what made it possible for him to write the Leone scores the way he did, the religious music alongside the popular work, the experimental improvisations alongside the Hollywood blockbusters, the conservatory technique alongside the trumpet-band populism his father had taught him. The position was constitutionally costly to hold and constitutionally productive to have held. The lens identifies this clearly. The music, when you listen to it across the full output, has the sound of a constitutional position made audible — which is a particular kind of seriousness that very few composers of any tradition reach. Morricone reached it by the unusual route of refusing the constitutional choices the surrounding traditions kept demanding he make. He worked, instead, from somewhere underneath them, where all the traditions remained available, and where the choice between them was not the constitutional question. The constitutional question was something else: how to make the music with the seriousness each occasion called for. He answered that question for over five hundred films and a comparable concert output across nine decades. That is what the lens identifies as his constitutional achievement, and it is what the readings of the films I have given earlier in this conversation, in their handling of the music, have been quietly leaning on throughout.