Ennio Morricone, famed composer of film scores, has passed at the age of 91.
It's hard to measure the impact of Morricone's work. He scored hundreds of films, shows and other works with a seeming endless variety to his work. For American ears, he broke onto the American film scene as he shattered our expectations of what a Western might sound like and created an entirely new aural concept to match Leone's vision of the world of gun slingers and pioneers.
To this day, I'm uncertain what instruments were deployed for some of his most famous music, but he wasn't yoked to a symphony - though he was quick to employ one, and a chorus, or - maybe most famously - a solo singer. While listeners may often pause while watching a film and guess rightly "is this Morricone?", the diversity of approaches from The Thing to Once Upon a Time in America to Days of Heaven can defy categorization. From electronic instrumentation to oboes to you-name-it, he found the sound of the soul of a film, and made them sing.
