More Morricone
My guess about Clint Eastwood presenting to Morricone turned out to be right. (What was Quincy Jones doing in the spectator box with Morricone and his family? He always had close ties with Italian-American musicians like Mancini and Sinatra, plus there's the whole film composer fraternity thing. But I've never heard anything about an EM-QJ link.) As one writer predicted (in one of the better articles I've seen about Morricone) the musical tribute was "cornball" and unrepresentative. He wonders why EM has apparently given his blessing to the "awful" tribute album, but in my experience EM never says anything bad about anyone. Of every director he worked with: "Bellissimo!" As for the "mainstreaming" of Morricone, it seems like that's always been going on across the Atlantic. There are many "Best of" type albums on European labels that recycle the same old 30 or 40 most accessible pieces. Even back in the 80s, when I was in high school, the foreign exchange student from Italy at our school immediately knew who Morricone was when I asked her.
The article is also right in saying that there is the highbrow Morricone and the schmaltzy (or sentimental). Clearly most fans prefer the sentimental. That is part of why it is hard to get useful opinions on his albums. The Red Tent is a great test case. In the LP version, Side A is romantic, melodic Morricone; Side B is one long track of experimental Morricone. Most fans think it's half a good album (Side A) with a bunch of noise on the other side. There are of course other Morricone fans who think his best stuff was done in the sixties when he combined pop music with avant garde. Since then, they think, it's been a devolution into romantic schmaltz.
Actually, I'd divide Morricone's output into four broad types: Europop (represented well on the Mondo Morricone CD set), sentimental (Cinema Paradiso, Malena, etc), experimental (Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, or the Ipecac label's Crime and Dissonance -- by far the best such anthology), and finally subdued tonality (The Mission, Marco Polo, etc). I stress the subdued part since this is what generally marks the difference between it and the sentimental stuff. Both are tuneful (in contrast to the experimental work) but one sort makes you think of an album from 101 Strings, the other can be listened to by a classical music fan without embarrassment.
It would be going too far to say that a Morricone album (or any album) changed my life. But the Virgin release of his Chamber Music, right on the heels of The Mission and The Untouchables certainly forced me to reconsider a lot of my teenage prejudices about music. Based on what I was then familiar with, I expected his concert music to be fairly tonal, even lyrical. The album started off with a tolerable Sextet -- pretty chromatic, but nothing beyond say Hindemith or Poulenc. Then came "Musica per 11 Violini" which was a straight-out serial composition. No melody to hang on to whatsoever. I was shocked. At that age, I had the typically reactionary view that avant-garde composers wrote their music because they lacked talent for writing melodies and pleasing harmonies. Thus they hid behind the experimentalist label, making their chaotic noise seem superior to backwards-looking composers like Copland or Britten. Clearly this was wrong as a general rule.* Morricone was choosing to write music like this, since he was perfectly capable of writing melodies. In many ways I agree with music critics who have recently pronounced twelve-tone music a dead-end to go along with the anti-novel. Intellectually interesting, yes, but ultimately sterile and too abstract to ever seep into the general aesthetic consciousness the way at-one-time outrageous music like that of Wagner and Stravinsky eventually did.
Still, I stuck with the album and listened to the pieces many times. Eventually Musica per 11 Violini and Suono per Dino would become two of my favorites from the disc. I realized that in a sonic world without flowing melody (or funky beats), there are other patterns for the mind to catch a ride with. Morricone was great in using undulating dynamics, give-and-take pizzicati, and so forth to give each piece a dramatic structure and arc. Could one say that Morricone was a fashion victim of sorts, pouring his creativity into the (sterile)** molds of the post WWII European avant-garde? I suppose you could say that, and at the same time not diminish his ingenuity. From what I've read, his later concert music does break away from serialism and supposedly relies on a blending of melodic materials with avant-garde techniques -- much as his film music had been doing all along.
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*Clearly composers do and did hide behind trends to mask their lack of talent. The avant-garde movement, however, has a specially appealing landscape in which fakers hide since even the bare minimum of technical facility needed to write counterpoint or harmony is not necessary. This parallels free-verse, stream of consciousness poetry. The old style hangers-on had to at least learn a little bit of craftsmanship.
**I would say that eminent composers like Gyorgy Ligeti found a way to transcend the "sterility" of that avant-garde sensibility, even while working within it. Ligeti's music is quite fascinating and absorbing even when he doesn't give the listener whistleable tunes to enjoy.
The article is also right in saying that there is the highbrow Morricone and the schmaltzy (or sentimental). Clearly most fans prefer the sentimental. That is part of why it is hard to get useful opinions on his albums. The Red Tent is a great test case. In the LP version, Side A is romantic, melodic Morricone; Side B is one long track of experimental Morricone. Most fans think it's half a good album (Side A) with a bunch of noise on the other side. There are of course other Morricone fans who think his best stuff was done in the sixties when he combined pop music with avant garde. Since then, they think, it's been a devolution into romantic schmaltz.
Actually, I'd divide Morricone's output into four broad types: Europop (represented well on the Mondo Morricone CD set), sentimental (Cinema Paradiso, Malena, etc), experimental (Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, or the Ipecac label's Crime and Dissonance -- by far the best such anthology), and finally subdued tonality (The Mission, Marco Polo, etc). I stress the subdued part since this is what generally marks the difference between it and the sentimental stuff. Both are tuneful (in contrast to the experimental work) but one sort makes you think of an album from 101 Strings, the other can be listened to by a classical music fan without embarrassment.
It would be going too far to say that a Morricone album (or any album) changed my life. But the Virgin release of his Chamber Music, right on the heels of The Mission and The Untouchables certainly forced me to reconsider a lot of my teenage prejudices about music. Based on what I was then familiar with, I expected his concert music to be fairly tonal, even lyrical. The album started off with a tolerable Sextet -- pretty chromatic, but nothing beyond say Hindemith or Poulenc. Then came "Musica per 11 Violini" which was a straight-out serial composition. No melody to hang on to whatsoever. I was shocked. At that age, I had the typically reactionary view that avant-garde composers wrote their music because they lacked talent for writing melodies and pleasing harmonies. Thus they hid behind the experimentalist label, making their chaotic noise seem superior to backwards-looking composers like Copland or Britten. Clearly this was wrong as a general rule.* Morricone was choosing to write music like this, since he was perfectly capable of writing melodies. In many ways I agree with music critics who have recently pronounced twelve-tone music a dead-end to go along with the anti-novel. Intellectually interesting, yes, but ultimately sterile and too abstract to ever seep into the general aesthetic consciousness the way at-one-time outrageous music like that of Wagner and Stravinsky eventually did.
Still, I stuck with the album and listened to the pieces many times. Eventually Musica per 11 Violini and Suono per Dino would become two of my favorites from the disc. I realized that in a sonic world without flowing melody (or funky beats), there are other patterns for the mind to catch a ride with. Morricone was great in using undulating dynamics, give-and-take pizzicati, and so forth to give each piece a dramatic structure and arc. Could one say that Morricone was a fashion victim of sorts, pouring his creativity into the (sterile)** molds of the post WWII European avant-garde? I suppose you could say that, and at the same time not diminish his ingenuity. From what I've read, his later concert music does break away from serialism and supposedly relies on a blending of melodic materials with avant-garde techniques -- much as his film music had been doing all along.
----------
*Clearly composers do and did hide behind trends to mask their lack of talent. The avant-garde movement, however, has a specially appealing landscape in which fakers hide since even the bare minimum of technical facility needed to write counterpoint or harmony is not necessary. This parallels free-verse, stream of consciousness poetry. The old style hangers-on had to at least learn a little bit of craftsmanship.
**I would say that eminent composers like Gyorgy Ligeti found a way to transcend the "sterility" of that avant-garde sensibility, even while working within it. Ligeti's music is quite fascinating and absorbing even when he doesn't give the listener whistleable tunes to enjoy.