Last Night A Mixtape Saved My Life

Giuseppe Tornatore's precious documentary about Morricone, “Ennio”, has been in cinemas for a few days now, and gathers an impressive amount of testimonies of gratitude towards the composer. From Gianni Morandi to Quentin Tarantino, from Quincy Jones to Bruce Springsteen, to fellow composers John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Nicola Piovani, the film makes plain just how many artists are aware of a deep artistic debt to the Italian author who, perhaps alongside Giorgio Moroder, may well be the most influential figure of the second half of the 20th century in music.

“Ennio” brings together words and music, surveying the artist's entire career. Among the many aspects it brings to light, one in particular deserves further exploration: his success, largely forgotten today, as an arranger of pop songs throughout the Sixties. Recent decades have indeed seen the well-deserved celebration of the maestro, revered internationally above all for his westerns, but also for his soundtracks of a more orchestral, melodic bent (“The Mission”, “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso”, “La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano”, “Canone inverso”, etc.) and for his ventures closer to the avant-garde (both inside and outside film music: see the compilation “Crime And Dissonance” curated by Mike Patton, and works such as Gruppo di improvvisazione nuova consonanza and The Feedback). Apart from perhaps “Se telefonando” and a handful of other tracks, his contributions to the pop scene, though thoroughly embedded in Italian popular culture, are only rarely linked to the name of the man who gave them the shape that made them immortal.

So here is a necessarily condensed overview of the moments that, for a good decade, made Ennio Morricone the most hyped name on the Italian pop scene, prompting artists of huge national standing to turn to him to arrange songs we now remember as classics. From his debut in the traditional field with Mario Lanza (1959) and Miranda Martino (1960, remembered here with two purely pop tracks), the composer stood out for an imaginative, lavish style, in which the arrangements, rather than simply serving as backdrop, duet with the vocal line, placing themselves on the same level. During this period, Morricone often used pseudonyms (Alfred Arnold Cocozza, Dansavio, Leo Nichols) so that his pop career wouldn't draw attention within the classical-contemporary circles he still regarded as his main environment. A turning point came with Gianni Meccia's “Il barattolo” (1960), for which Morricone dared a bold move: at the heart of the arrangement, instead of the orchestra, are the graceless clangs of an actual metal can, struck in a way that is rhythmic and melodic, yes, but above all chaotic. Almost a disruptive element, yet one that makes the track absolutely iconic.

From then on, his arrangements increasingly feature intrusions of what might be called “musique concrète”: events halfway between a riff and a timbral surprise, which function less as phrases in a musical discourse than as distinctive presences, around which the track's recognisability ends up being built. Sometimes these are produced by the orchestra; often, though, they're an opportunity to exploit instruments still unusual for the time: the twangy electric guitar paired with the harpsichord (“Corri corri”, 1962), the electric or electronic organ (“Cicciona cha cha”, 1961; “Go-kart twist”, 1962). In “Pinne, fucile ed occhiali” an important protagonist is the splash of water associated with a dive, and in the crucial “splash” the voice is multiplied by reverb; in that track, as in countless others, the backing choir's voices play a central role. Particularly important in this respect is his partnership with his friend Alessandro Alessandroni's Cantori Moderni, whose bouncing vocalisations are the “concrete” core of the playful beguine “Abbronzatissima” (1963) and, in a more enveloping guise, the backbone of “Il mondo” (1965).

The liveliest tracks are those in which Morricone most clearly shows his eclecticism, soaking up and filtering the trends of the moment like a sponge: instrumental surf, twist, doo-wop. But even the more classically inclined pieces are made immortal by the same distinctive elements. As the many artists who drew inspiration from the maestro recall, the exceptional nature of his style lies above all in the incisiveness of his counterpoints. Although he claimed to “hate melody”, Morricone had an extraordinary gift for inventing instrumental hooks that, without stealing the scene from the vocal line, completed and contrasted with it, amplifying the emotional richness of the song. The nocturnal flute line in “Il cielo in una stanza” (Morricone's rearrangement dates from 1962), the echo first of brass and then of dissonant piano and strings in “Sapore di sale” (1963), simulating the ebb and flow of waves: these are simple devices, in some cases even minimalist, that don't draw attention to themselves but worm their way into memory, becoming indelibly bound up with verses and choruses.

The famous “Se telefonando”, composed and arranged by Morricone to words by Maurizio Costanzo, reveals the sheer clarity of the maestro's inspiration. A melody built on just three notes, a driving rhythm with a highly unusual placement of accents, and a dizzying key change in the middle of the chorus: these are the ingredients; the rest is a class that is hard to emulate. Rightly, the song is remembered as one of the masterpieces of Italian music as a whole.

All these characteristic traits appear together in his earliest western experiments too, foreshadowed in 1961 by the reworking, for Nico Fidenco, of the biblical theme from “Exodus” (which shows a marked increase in instrumental grandeur). The reinterpretation of Woody Guthrie's “Pastures Of Plenty” (1962) is, with hindsight, the most significant moment: recorded by the Californian Peter Tevis, it would become the testing ground for “Per un pugno di dollari” (A Fistful of Dollars), sharing with that theme its entire arrangement of bells, whip-cracks and ocarina. As the decade wore on, Morricone's pop contributions were increasingly folded into his torrential film output, which allowed him considerable variation in mood: from the boisterous “Uccellacci e uccellini” (1966) to the disillusioned little march of “Filastrocca vietnamita”, on through to the unforgettable track that closes the compilation. “Here's To You”, offered by the composer to Joan Baez towards the end of the sessions for Giuliano Montaldo's “Sacco e Vanzetti” (1971), is the spiritual peak of pop Morricone, and probably also the track that best foreshadows the evocative grandeur of his soundtracks in the decades to come. As in “Se telefonando”, the building blocks are very few but perfectly assembled: a melodic ostinato, the organ set to its most crystalline register, the folksinger's clear voice. And a masterful, baroque multi-voice structure, which turns a handful of chords into an overwhelming ascent towards Heaven.

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11/12/2025