Ennio Morricone

The Trumpet Player’s Son

Ennio Morricone was born on 10 November 1928 in Rome, the son of Mario Morricone, a professional trumpet player who worked in light-music orchestras, and Libera Ridolfi. He was one of five children, and the trumpet was not a hobby in that house — it was the family trade. His father was his first teacher, the man who taught him to read music and to play.

The formal training was serious. At the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome — which he entered in 1940 — he took a trumpet diploma in 1946, an instrumentation diploma in 1952, and a composition diploma in 1954 under Goffredo Petrassi, the teacher the profile record credits as fundamental to his craft. Before film claimed him, he played trumpet in jazz and light-music bands in the 1940s, then worked as a staff arranger for RAI, the Italian broadcaster, and for RCA — including ghost-writing and uncredited arranging for other composers. In 1958 he attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the beating heart of post-war avant-garde music, and he became a trumpeter in the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Franco Evangelisti’s free-improvisation group in Rome. Hold onto that detail. The experimental streak that later put whip cracks and coyote howls into Westerns — and dissonance into horror — was not a gimmick he picked up. It was his education.

In 1956 he married Maria Travia; they stayed married for 63 years, until his death, and had four children — Marco, Alessandra, Andrea and Giovanni. Andrea Morricone became a conductor and film composer himself. The detail that explains the whole shape of the career: Morricone was a lifelong Rome resident who never relocated to Hollywood and never learned to speak English. On the New York Times obituary’s account, his first visit to the United States came in 2007, at 78, for the concert tour at whose end he received his honorary Oscar in Los Angeles. Hollywood came to him, for fifty years, on his terms. He died in Rome on 6 July 2020, aged 91, following a fall in which he fractured his femur.

Leone and the Sound Nobody Had Heard

His first credited feature score was Il Federale (The Fascist, 1961), for director Luciano Salce — everything before that was the ghost and arranging work. Then came the reunion that changed film music. Morricone and Sergio Leone had been primary-school classmates in Rome, and when Leone hired him for A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), the budgets were tiny — so Morricone replaced the traditional Hollywood symphonic Western sound with what he had: electric guitar, bells, whip cracks, gunshots, Jew’s harp, whistling, chanting voices and wordless soprano.

Those sounds had names attached. The whistling and much of the guitar were Alessandro Alessandroni’s — remember that, because the most famous whistle in cinema is Alessandroni’s, not Morricone’s — and the soaring wordless soprano was Edda Dell’Orso’s. The main title of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, built on a two-note figure imitating a coyote’s howl, became one of the most recognisable pieces of film music ever written; the score was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008.

On Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) the method reached full scale. Morricone wrote individual musical identities for the principal characters — the soaring soprano theme for Jill, the distorted harmonica for the Man with a Harmonica — and, at Leone’s request, much of the music was written and recorded before filming, then played on set so performances and camera movement could be shaped around it. Music first, picture second. That inversion is the single most important working method in this entire biography, and we will come back to it.

Horror, in Three Keys

Here is what makes Morricone essential to a horror wiki: he scored hinge films in three separate horror traditions, and defined the sound of at least one of them.

First, the giallo. For Dario Argento‘s first three features — the Animal Trilogy of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) — Morricone carried his avant-garde formation straight into the murder scenes: dissonant, experimental textures and lullaby-like wordless vocal lines set against violence. That combination — beauty curdling into dread — became the giallo’s signature sound for a decade. The trilogy did not end the partnership, either: he returned to Argento for The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and The Phantom of the Opera (1998), closing a loop of nearly thirty years.

Second, the American studio horror sequel. In 1977 he scored Exorcist II: The Heretic for director John Boorman — a haunting, African-influenced score for an ill-fated film. Be precise here, because the internet rarely is: Morricone did not score The Exorcist (1973). The original’s famous borrowed music is Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells.” His film is the sequel — and, as you will see below, one piece of it had a very long afterlife.

Third, the modern canon. The Thing (1982) is the horror centrepiece of the whole career. John Carpenter is a director famous for scoring his own films; for this one he hired an outside composer, and the composer he hired was Morricone. What Morricone delivered was a cold, minimal, dread-led score — and the finished film does not use everything he wrote. The film was a box-office failure on release and critically mauled, and the score was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Musical Score. A nomination, note — not a win, and not the settled verdict of history. Film and score were both canonised in the years that followed. Both halves of that story are the record; neither half alone is.

The Long Game — and the Oscar That Took Fifty Years

Morricone’s first Academy Award nomination came for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). More followed: The Mission (1986), built around “Gabriel’s Oboe” — a famous loss, and a loss is what it stays on this page; The Untouchables (1987) for Brian De Palma; Bugsy (1991); and Malèna (2000), for Giuseppe Tornatore. The Tornatore partnership, which began with Cinema Paradiso (1988), gave Morricone his second public identity: the intimate piano-and-strings lyricist, the anti-Thing — from the same man, in the same career. In 1984 he had closed the Leone collaboration with Once Upon a Time in America, and through the 1990s the horror thread kept running alongside everything else — Wolf (1994) and the two Argento returns among it.

Now the awards ledger, stated exactly, because this is where most biographies get him wrong. Morricone received six competitive Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score — Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malèna and The Hateful Eight — with one win. Separately, in 2007, he received the Academy Honorary Award “for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” That 2007 award was honorary, not competitive: he had lost all five of his competitive nominations up to that point, and no, he did not “win the Oscar in 2007.”

The win came nine years later. For Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) — the first original Morricone score for a Tarantino film; Tarantino’s earlier pictures had licensed pre-existing Morricone recordings, which is a different thing — Morricone won Best Original Score at the 2016 ceremony. He was 87, and at that time the oldest person ever to win a competitive Oscar. And here is the circle closing, the detail that makes this a horror story as much as a career story: the Hateful Eight score is a new score, but folded inside it are three unused tracks from his original The Thing sessions — material Carpenter’s film never used — plus a self-borrowing from Exorcist II: The Heretic, the piece other score coverage identifies as “Regan’s Theme.” The score the Razzies once nominated for worst of its year helped carry him, thirty-four years later, to the Oscar. He stayed active almost to the end: his final film work in the standard filmographies is The Correspondence (2016), for Tornatore.

How He Worked

Three habits define him. First, the desk. Morricone composed at a desk, with pencil and paper — hearing the music in his head and writing out all the parts by hand, rather than composing at a piano. He was a trained trumpeter; he simply did not need the keyboard to compose.

Second, music before the picture. With Leone, pieces were written before a single frame was shot, played on set to inspire the actors, and the film was edited to fit the music rather than the reverse. The normal Hollywood workflow — composer last, scoring a finished cut — was turned upside down, and the Leone films are unthinkable any other way.

Third, sound itself as instrumentation. Whip cracks, gunshots, bells, ticking watches, a Jew’s harp, a voice chanting or soaring without words: Morricone treated real-world noise and novelty instruments as first-class orchestral colour, with character themes doing the casting — a solo instrument standing for a person, the way the harmonica and the oboe do in his most famous scores. He also arranged, orchestrated and conducted his own music, and maintained a parallel career in concert works alongside the films. As for the famous total — you will see “500 scores” in obituaries and “more than 400 film and TV scores” in Wikipedia’s count. Those totals do not reconcile to one number, so this page attributes both rather than printing either as a census.

Why Morricone Matters to Horror

Few composers touch three horror traditions at once. Morricone defined the sound of the Italian giallo in Argento’s Animal Trilogy, scored the American studio horror sequel with Exorcist II, and supplied a canonical score for The Thing — the film that anchors modern science-fiction horror. On top of that, The Thing gives a horror wiki the complete parable in a single credit: hired over a director-composer’s own usual practice, partly unused in the cut, Razzie-nominated in its year — then canonised, and finally partly recycled into the score that won its composer the Oscar at 87. Tell that arc accurately and you understand something true about how horror ages: the work does not change. The verdict does.

Trivia

• Morricone and Sergio Leone were primary-school classmates in Rome — the most consequential school friendship in film-music history.
• The signature whistling on the Leone themes is Alessandro Alessandroni’s, not Morricone’s. Alessandroni also played guitar; Edda Dell’Orso supplied the wordless soprano.
• Morricone recalled that Stanley Kubrick asked him to score A Clockwork Orange and that Leone blocked the collaboration — his own retelling, carried in obituary coverage, and printed here as exactly that.
• By the New York Times obituary’s account, he did not visit the United States until 2007 — aged 78 — despite five decades of work for Hollywood.

FAQ

Did Ennio Morricone win an Oscar in 2007?
No. In 2007 he received the Academy Honorary Award, a non-competitive honour. His only competitive Oscar win was Best Original Score for The Hateful Eight, at the 2016 ceremony, when he was 87.

Did Morricone score The Exorcist?
No. He scored the sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). The 1973 original’s signature music — Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” — is not his.

Is the Hateful Eight score just his unused Thing score?
No. It is a newly written score that includes three unused tracks from his The Thing sessions, plus a self-borrowing from Exorcist II: The Heretic. The unused material supplements the new score; it does not replace it.

How many film scores did Morricone write?
There is no single verified total. Wikipedia counts more than 400 scores for cinema and television, plus more than 100 classical works; obituaries routinely say 500-plus. Both figures are attributed claims, and this page prints them that way.