Ennio Morricone (born November 10, 1928, Rome) is an Italian composer, especially noted for his film scores. He has composed the scores of more than 500 films and TV series. Although only 30 of these are for Western films, it is for this work which he is best known. Morricone's sparse style of composition for the genre is particularly exemplified by the soundtracks of the classic spaghetti westerns, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ( Sergio Leone, 1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West ( Sergio Leone, 1968). In more recent years, his haunting scores for The Mission ( Roland Joffé, 1986), The Untouchables ( Brian DePalma, 1987), and Cinema Paradiso ( Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988) have demonstrated his giftedness and the power of his work.
Morricone was born in Rome and was educated at the Conservatory of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in the trumpet and composition under Goffredo Petrassi, and choral music and choral direction. In the beginning he regarded himself to be destined to compose modern classical music, but this changed when he was invited to write arrangements for popular Italian songs, at which he was completely unfamiliar at that time. A particular success was the song Se telefonando sung by Mina.
In 1956 he married Maria Travia. He began writing music for films in 1962 but continued to work in classical composition and arrangement. In 1964 he began his famous collaboration with Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. For Leone he wrote the score for A Fistful of Dollars ( Sergio Leone, 1964) and continued with a number of other Spaghetti Western films. By 1968 he was reducing his work outside of film, in the same year he wrote twenty scores for films. His collaboration with Leone is considered one of the finest collaborations between a director and a composer. He scored all of Leone's films from A Fistful of Dollars to Once Upon A Time In America. The latter often considered his finest work. His score of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in particular is his most famous and along with the William Tell Overture is one of the most recognized sounds ever affiliated with the Western genre. Although he is most famous for writing the scores of Leone's films, he was more at ease with directors such as Giuliano Montaldo and Gillo Pontecorvo. Morricone frequently collaborated with childhood friend Alessandro Alessandroni, who performed as the whistler on many of the Sergio Leone soundtracks.
