The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful Blog is…Music for Foodies! Every piece of music this week deals with food or dining in an interesting way. Fill your belly, listen to great music, and discover something new in the process…
Day 3 – “The Ecstasy of Gold” from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly by Ennio Morricone
Let’s have our pasta course. Do you like Western films?
Most people do, at least sometimes. There’s nothing like watching rugged, no-nonsense heroes navigate the barren, danger-ridden landscapes of the old West, escaping dilemma after dilemma with understated ingenuity and, if necessary, brute force. The very best films of the Western genre even offer great psychological character development over the course of their plots. What country are your favorite Westerns from? Is it Italy? It doesn’t exactly make sense, but lots of film fans consider some of the best films about the old West to be from among a handful made by Italian filmmakers in the 1960s and 70s. I’m not sure why the director Sergio Leone tried his hand at creating Western films, but his combination of successful low-budget effects, Italian actors who required overdubbing (American star Clint Eastwood excepted), immersive cinematography and a knack for building the suspense of particularly dramatic scenes by cutting from close-up to close-up of different characters present turned out to be a recipe for worldwide success. You can see from this list of Italian Westerns that Leone’s were not the first examples of their genre; but they came fairly early in its history and are spaced more or less evenly throughout its history. Just do a search for “Leone” on that page and you should be able to see the distribution throughout the page. You can also see from that list that Italian filmmakers produced lots of Western films through the 60s and 70s (I didn’t take the time to count; it must be at least 100), but Leone’s are the ones that history has deemed memorable, for whatever reason. When people think of Italian Western films, they usually think Sergio Leone.
Eventually non-Italians began to refer to his genre of Western film by slightly snarky, maybe even borderline-derogatory, but always pasta-related names. In Japan it was the “Macaroni Western” (would that make a Japanese Western an “Udon Western”? How about a “Ramen Western”?) and in America it became the “Spaghetti Western”. So this is our pasta course for the week.
One other element that helped to shape the distinctive atmosphere of Leone’s Italian Western films is their musical scores, which were instrumental, so to speak, in establishing the career of their composer, Leone’s fellow Italian Ennio Morricone. An Ennio Morricone Western score is not of the flavor that probably first comes to your mind when you think “Music for a Western film”. You probably imagine big, bold, tuneful Americana themes played by a large symphony orchestra with some episodes of powerful brass and others of soaring string melody. All of these scores tend to have vigorous, driving rhythms and orchestration that evokes the sweeping panorama of Aaron Copland’s most American-sounding symphonic works. The examples I could offer of stand-out Western scores in this style are numerous, but if you enjoy that sound I would recommend that you purchase this album to get yourself a healthy dose. It is a thoroughly fun and enjoyable listening experience from Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops.
Incidentally, when film composers are trying to evoke the feeling of a Western in a film or franchise that is not inherently Western, that is the style to which they turn. Here are two of my favorite examples of this:
Morricone’s scores for Leone’s Western films do not feel like that. The tight budgets characteristic of Spaghetti Westerns impacted all departments of their production, and the music was no exception. So Morricone was not able to paint on the great symphonic canvas that American composers did for their iconic Western scores, which forced him to be resourceful and inventive. But the result actually fits the other elements of Leone’s film making like the proverbial glove…er, spur?
By the time he started composing scores for Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, Ennio Morricone had logged serious hours composing classical music for the concert hall, playing jazz, and also arranging songs performed by the likes of such superstars as Paul Anka. Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns were just the opportunity that Morricone needed to launch to worldwide success, and he was able to solidify his career as a film composer, which continues to this day. To date he has composed the scores for more than 500 motion pictures.
Since he could not write for a full symphony orchestra, Morricone engineered a style of orchestration for the Spaghetti Westerns that closely reflects the film’s visual style. The picture is always spare, with no frills or extra decorations, and the characters fill the screen with close ups. The characters are visually striking and memorable, but in odd and unsettling ways. The action is direct and graceless in its machismo. Morricone’s musical solution to match style this within his limited means was to pare down the orchestra to a varied chamber ensemble of unusual colors and instrumental combinations. The melodies are stark and bare and the sonorities haunting in their pallor. The music is supplemented with odd sound effects like rhythmic whip cracks and whistles.
The contributions from all of the ingenious and creative artists at work on Spaghetti Westerns yielded a new and unique art form, still distinctive in its effect and still captivating half a century later. By far the most memorable and famous of Morricone’s cues for Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, with the possible exception of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is called The Ecstasy of Gold, also from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The tryptic of the film’s title refers to the three main characters, engaged with each other throughout the film in a race of wits and strength to unearth a rumored cache of Confederate gold buried in a Civil War cemetery. Toward the end of the film Clint Eastwood’s Blondie (The Good) and Eli Wallach’s Tuco (The Ugly) reach the cemetery and square off for the gold before Lee Van Cleef’s Angel Eyes (The Bad) joins the party for the final confrontation.
The Ecstasy of Gold accompanies the scene in which Tuco discovers the cemetery and in a greedy euphoria searches frantically from one side to the other for the grave which is said to hold the treasure. Morricone’s score matches Tuco’s state perfectly with dizzying trumpet and haunting vocal lines that accelerate and raise the temperature steadily over the course of the search. At the climax the chimes enter and make the whole experience rapturous right up to the point that Tuco finally spots the long sought-after grave.
Ennio Morricone has an amazing imagination. If you don’t quite know what I mean by that, watch that scene again but turn off the sound and see what it feels like. Much different, isn’t it? Would you have heard the music Morricone did just from viewing those images?
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