ABSTRACT
The Oscar that Ennio Morricone (b. 1928) won in 2016 for his music for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight came after a decades-long succession of nominations for other film scores. But these represent just the tip of the iceberg for Morricone, who since the early 1960s composed music for hundreds of film and television productions. Although dwarfed by this gargantuan record of accomplishment in music for the screen, Morricone’s output as a composer of ‘absolute music’ nonetheless represents a substantial body of work that includes more than a hundred works for various combinations of instruments, voices, and electronic media. This chapter considers several of Morricone’s most significant concert works – including Cantata for Europe (1988), UT (1991), Voci dal silenzio (2002), Vuoto d’anima piena (2008), and Mass for Pope Francis (2015) – within the context of his broader output. It also examines the considerable influence that opera, traditional sacred music, serialism, and musique concrète have had on Morricone’s film music.
