The Soundtracks: The Sound Italy Put to the World Cinema (1950–2020)

The most honest answer is that Italy in the 1950s and 60s also produced the best cinema in the world — Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, Leone, Pasolini — and that this cinema required music to its level. Morricone and Rota did not work for a lesser cinema that needed background music: they worked on films that were already works of art, and their scores had to be at that level or not serve.

What they created — each in their own way, with completely different styles and with directors who were completely different — was an Italian tradition of cinematic music that influenced everything that came after. When today a Hollywood composer writes for a thriller or for an action movie or for a western or for a romantic drama, the possibilities are high that he is thinking, consciously or unconsciously, about what Morricone and Rota did decades before.

Ennio Morricone: The Master Who Reinvented the Western

Ennio Morricone was born on November 10, 1928, in Rome, the oldest of five children. His father was a jazz trumpeter and he learned the instrument as a child, writing his first compositions at the age of six with a facility that his teachers immediately recognized as exceptional. He studied at the Conservatorio of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

At that school, he had a classmate whose name mattered: Sergio Leone — the director who decades later would create the spaghetti western and who needed for those films a music that no one had attempted yet. "We were not friends, we were classmates," Morricone said years later. "We were seven years old, so we played together, but you can't call that friendship."

What they built as adults was more than friendship: it was one of the most extraordinary collaborations in the history of cinema.

In 1964, Leone asked Morricone — who at that time composed music for radio and television under the pseudonym Dan Savio because he was ashamed to be associated with commercial cinema — to compose the score for Per un Pugno di Dollari (Por un Puñado de Dólares), the first film of the Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood. What Morricone composed was something that American cinema had never heard before: a western music without a traditional orchestra, with whistles, harmonicas, coyote whistles, electric bells, guitars with exaggerated reverb — the sounds of the desert and violence transformed into music with precision and originality that left the world speechless.

They followed Per Qualche Dollaro in Più (1965) and Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo (1966)El Bueno, el Feo y el Malo — whose main theme became one of the most recognizable musical fragments in the history of cinema: the whistling, the voices, the trumpet, the gunshots integrated into the melody. It is not just film music: it is music that exists on its own, that can be listened to without the film and works just as well.

The Dollar Trilogy was just the beginning. With Leone he also composed C'era una Volta il West (1968)Érase una Vez en el Oeste — and C'era una Volta in America (1984)Érase una Vez en América — two of the greatest films in the history of cinema, with two of the best scores Morricone ever wrote. For Érase una Vez en América he composed before Leone shot a single scene: the director asked for the music, listened to it on set while filming, and let the music determine the rhythm and tone of the film. It was the reverse of the usual process.

But Morricone was never just the composer of westerns. His catalog — more than five hundred scores over seventy years — encompasses all imaginable genres: the political cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers, 1966), the thriller of Brian De Palma (The Untouchables, 1987), the historical drama of Bernardo Bertolucci (Novecento, 1976), the intimate cinema of Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, 1988; Malèna, 2000).

Cinema Paradiso — the story of a Sicilian boy who learns to love cinema through the town's projectionist — has one of the most beautiful scores Morricone ever wrote: a main theme of absolute simplicity that nevertheless contains all the emotion of the film, all the nostalgia of lost childhood, all the melancholy of love that could not be. He composed it together with his son Andrea Morricone, at the beginning of a family collaboration that lasted decades.

Morricone was nominated for an Oscar six times before winning. In 2007, he received an honorary Oscar for his career — presented by Clint Eastwood, who recalled that the first time he heard the score of For a Few Dollars More he thought: "What actor wouldn't want to enter the town with that music playing behind?" In 2016, at the age of eighty-seven, he won the Oscar for Best Original Score for The Hateful Eight by Quentin Tarantino — his first competitive Oscar, for the film that his biggest fan had directed. When accepting it, he said: "There is no great music without a great film to inspire it."

He died on July 6, 2020, in Rome, at the age of ninety-one, from complications after a fall that fractured his hip. His lawyer read a farewell letter that Morricone himself had written in advance: "I am Ennio Morricone and I have died." He explained that he had requested a private funeral because "I don't want to bother anyone."

He was ninety-one years old, had composed over five hundred scores, and was saying goodbye to the world apologizing for the inconvenience.

Nino Rota: The Prodigy Child Who Soundtracked Memory

If Morricone was the composer who reinvented genres, Nino Rota was the composer who captured time: the melancholy of the past, the texture of memories, the specific taste of the worlds that no longer exist but that music can preserve.

Giovanni Rota Rinaldi — Nino Rota to all — was born on December 3, 1911, in Milan, in a family of musicians. He was a prodigy in the most literal sense: by the age of eleven he had already written an oratorio. He studied composition with Arthur Honegger and, later, at the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia, with Fritz Reiner. He was director of the Conservatorio di Bari for decades — a serious, rigorous academic figure who could have had a career entirely in classical music.

What he did instead was build one of the most extraordinary filmographies in history, in collaboration with two of the greatest directors of 20th century cinema.

With Federico Fellini he composed the music for sixteen films — practically all of the director's work — from The Road (1954) to Prova d'Orchestra (1979). The relationship between Fellini and Rota was one of the most perfect in the history of director-composer collaborations: the two shared a vision of the world — dreamlike, ironic, melancholic, deeply Italian — and Rota's music did not accompany Fellini's images but inhabited them with the same naturalness with which the characters inhabited the stages.

The soundtrack of 8½ (1963) — the film in which Fellini reflects on the creative process and on the impossibility of making the film one wants to make — is one of the most extraordinary documents of the relationship between music and image in the history of cinema: a music that is at the same time present and memory, real and dreamed, serious and burlesque.

La Dolce Vita (1960), Amarcord (1973), Il Casanova di Fellini (1976): each title a masterwork of Fellini with a score by Rota that was inseparable from the image but also lived independently of it.

For Luchino Visconti composed the music of Il Gattopardo (1963)El Gatopardo, the most beautiful film about the end of a world — with a Sicilian waltz that summarizes in five minutes all the melancholy of an aristocracy that knows it is coming to an end and dances because it does not know how to do anything else.

And for Francis Ford Coppola composed the music of Il Padrino (1972)El Padrino — with that Sicilian theme that became the sound image of the Italian mafia in world popular culture. The score of El Padrino II (1974) gave him his only Oscar.

Rota died on April 10, 1979 in Rome, at the age of sixty-eight. He had composed the music for more than one hundred and fifty films. His legacy is visible in every composer of soundtracks who works today with images of memory, nostalgia or of lost worlds: all of them, at some point, are learning from Rota.

The spaghetti western as a musical laboratory

Morricone's contribution to cinema cannot be understood without the context of the spaghetti western as a cultural phenomenon. The Italian westerns of the sixties — directed by Leone, but also by Sergio Corbucci and others — were films that took the most American of all American genres and reinvented it from a European perspective: more cynical, more violent, more ironic about the myths of the West.

For those films, Morricone invented a music that had no precedents: without the traditional symphonic orchestras of Hollywood westerns, with unusual instruments — harmonicas, pan flutes, human choirs used as instruments — and with a conception of silence as a musical element that changed the way all subsequent composers understood the relationship between music and silence in cinema.

"Inspiration does not exist," said Morricone once. "What exists is work." His scores did not arise from romantic outbursts but from a meticulous analysis of each sequence, of each character, of each dramatic intention. He was a craftsman of absolute precision who produced works that seemed completely spontaneous with that precision.

The Legacy: When Film Music is Music

What Morricone and Rota demonstrated — each in their own way — is that film music does not have to be subordinate to the image. It can be autonomous art that at the same time enhances the image. It can be the thing the viewer remembers when they have already forgotten the plot. It can be the reason why a film reaches places that words and images alone cannot reach.

When someone listens to the theme of Cinema Paradiso and their eyes get wet without knowing exactly why, or when the whistle of Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo makes the body tense before anything happens — that is what film music can do when it is crafted by someone who understands that the composer's work is not to decorate but to reveal.

Editor's note: Ennio Morricone was nominated for an Oscar six times before winning. The Academy gave him an honorary Oscar in 2007 as recognition that they had never awarded him when they should have. Clint Eastwood was the one who introduced him that night and who presented him with the statuette — the actor whose career Morricone had transformed with the music of the Dollars trilogy four decades earlier. Eastwood said that the first time he heard the score of For a Few Dollars More he thought about how lucky the actor was who was going to ride a horse with that music. That actor was him. It took forty years for him to tell him in person.