Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone was born in Rome in 1928. The son of a jazz trumpeter, he studied trumpet and composition at Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory under Goffredo Petrassi. In the 1950s and early 1960s he worked as an arranger for RCA's Italian label, crafting hit pop records, while also writing experimental concert music.

In 1964 an old schoolmate, director Sergio Leone, asked him to score A Fistful of Dollars, and together they reinvented the Western. Instead of lush strings, Morricone used whistling, cracking whips, gunshots, electric guitar, wordless voices and Jew's harp to create a sound unlike anything in film. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) features his most famous theme, a coyote-like cry that instantly conjures the frontier, and the film's climactic "Ecstasy of Gold" is now a concert-hall favorite. Once Upon a Time in the West followed in 1968.

Morricone was staggeringly prolific, writing more than 400 scores across every genre, from political dramas such as The Battle of Algiers to horror, comedy and art films. In later decades he scored Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables and Cinema Paradiso, with melodies of great tenderness.

He received an Honorary Academy Award in 2007 and finally won a competitive Oscar for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight in 2016. Although his greatest fame came after 1960, his music is as essential to film history as that of the Golden Age masters. He died in Rome in 2020.