Alan Bishop, bassist/vocalist of Sun City Girls and global music collector, wrote an excellent post about his favorite film scores by legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone.
Above, music from Escalation (1968). From Bishop's post at Forced Exposure:
With over 400 film & TV scores to sift through (containing roughly 6000 tracks), dozens of pioneering 1960s Italian pop song arrangements to his credit, additional library and chamber music composed and recorded, and his albums with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, the task of processing the maestro’s collective universe is almost impossible. Among many things, he is a master at creating the most beautifully powerful, yet simple thematic music for film — songs that are extremely memorable and timeless. And for every memorable track you can name created by any other composer who has ever scored for film, Morricone has created 10 or more that are as memorable or better — a point that is indisputable and all of his contemporaries knew it, whether they were willing to admit it or not. I’m not trying to create a competitive argument among the fraternity of classic film composers worldwide, or their fans. Many other composers obviously have massively brilliant legacies of work. What I am saying is that there is NO argument — absolutely NONE whatsoever. And it is this point that needs to be hammered home much more than it has been. And to further pound this spike into a collective American perspective — a bullshit academy awards lifetime achievement award, where a fragile and bumbling Clint Eastwood cannot even pronounce his words correctly while glossing over his career before introducing him (the entire Eastwood speech was deleted from you-tube probably due to Eastwood’s extreme embarrassment) while Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg stand to applaud for the cameras, is NOT even remotely close to being enough to articulate this. Morricone has always had a certain disdain for Hollywood and the only redeeming factor of him actually showing up to claim the award is that he gave his acceptance speech in his native Italian as the confused audience stared and smiled, pretending to be relevant in his presence.
