Composing for the Cinema: the Theory and Praxis of Music in Film

Composing for the Cinema The Theory and Praxis of Music in Film Ennio Morricone and Sergio Miceli Translated by Gillian B. Anderson Lessons transcribed by Rita Pagani and edited by Laura Gallenga THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2013 Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by Scarecrow Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morricone, Ennio. [Comporre per il cinema. English] Composing for the cinema : the theory and praxis of music in film / Ennio Morricone and Sergio Miceli ; translated by Gillian B. Anderson. pages ; cm Translation of: Morricone, Ennio. Comporre per il cinema, 2001. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8108-9240-8 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8108-9241-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8108-9242-2 (electronic) 1. Motion picture music--Instruction and study. 2. Composition (Music) I. Miceli, Sergio, 1944- II. Anderson, Gillian B., 1943- III. Title. MT64.M65M6713 2013 781.5'4213--dc23 2013024914 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America To the students of the courses at Siena, Basel, and Fiesole Contents Translator’s Note vii Gillian B. Anderson Editor’s Note ix Laura Gallenga Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii 1 Introduction: The Composer in the Cinema 1 2 Audiovisual Analysis—Part 1 11 3 Production Procedures 53 4 Audiovisual Analysis—Part 2: Elements for the Definition of a Film-Musical Dramaturgy 73 5 Premix and Final Mix: The Recording and Sound Design 129 6 Compositional Elements: Timbre, Use of Themes, Characteristic Stylistic Features, and Combinations of Styles 163 7 Questions and Answers 217 Appendix 1: Composing for the Cinema: A Manifesto 249 Appendix 2: Writing for the Cinema: Aspects and Problems of a Compositional Activity of Our Time 253 v vi Contents Filmography 261 Bibliography [to 1999] 271 Index 277 About the Authors and Translator 295 Translator’s Note Gillian B. Anderson With almost four hundred scores to his credit, Ennio Morricone is one of the most prolific and influential film composers working today. In movie after movie his listeners come away with the conviction that he has achieved something special, and this is a conviction shared by composers, scholars, and fans alike. For all those who have wondered how he does it, these composition lessons will explain a lot. They are designed for composers, but Morricone’s expositions are easy to understand and fascinating even to those without any musical training. To those with a musical background, they are of course even more profound. He discusses his relationship with directors like Leone, Pontecorvo, Pasolini, Petri, Scott, Beatty,Tornatore, the Taviani brothers, Zeffirelli, Joanou, and Joffé, analyzes some of his own scores, and reveals motivations that have not been taken into account in cinema studies, for the spaghetti western, for example. He describes recording session tech- niques and technology and many other specifics of his profession as a film composer. Some things are especially noteworthy. Although Morricone’s tunes are famous, he is not interested in melody per se. While giving the average spectator something to follow, he tries to write music that reveals the person- ality of the players and the character of the drama. He tries to compose music that is not just descriptive of what is already communicated by the image and that maintains its own internal logic. While doing what the director wants, he tries to add something that only the music can. He is passionate about musical expression, entering and exiting carefully to maximize the music’s effect, creating dynamic changes by the addition and subtraction of instruments, relying on implicit sync points as often as possible, doing all the orchestra- tions himself so that the orchestral colors and emphasis that he wants will be realized. He always sets himself some purely musical challenge so that he vii viii Translator’s Note will not feel like a mere artisan/servant of the director but an artist in his own right. Moreover, as Sergio Miceli points out, frequently Morricone uses the music as a force for redemption. These and many other particulars combine to explain why his music always seems to be doing something special, but in the end he insists that there is no one “right” or “correct” solution for a film’s score. His colleague, musicologist Sergio Miceli, is a pioneer in the field of film music. Although most professional film composers analyze movies intuitive- ly, beginners, nonmusicians, and professionals alike will benefit from his well-defined, rigorous formal analyses. Miceli describes many of the signs or signals that a director, cameraperson, scenery designer, costumer, actor, sound designer, and script writer leave in a film. A composer must take these into account when deciding how to set the film to music. Miceli shows how different kinds of preexisting music cause one to read the same scene differ- ently. He analyzes a number of films according to his system of levels, thereby describing a variety of musical solutions to many different kinds of film, and he even shows how sound design can be analyzed. As they have worked together for many years and do not always agree, Morricone and Miceli are shown to interact during their lessons to our mutual benefit. This text is a transcription of lessons delivered live. Although we cannot run the films or play the recordings that were used, where possible I have added information about DVDs, videotapes, and excerpts on YouTube so that the reader can run the actual examples and listen to and watch the films being discussed. In this way one can partially reconstitute the original live lessons. I would like to thank the Film Music Foundation for its support at an early stage of the work of translation and the University of Illinois Press, which published excerpts from chapter 4 in Music and the Moving Image, volume 4, number 2 (Summer 2011), pages 1–29. Finally, I would like to thank Lidia Bagnoli for her help and also Mario Militello of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Editor’s Note Laura Gallenga This handbook was Ennio Morricone’s idea. The text was transcribed and assembled from diverse recordings made during the film music seminars conducted by Morricone and Sergio Miceli between 1991 and 2000. 1 To the transcription of the recorded material Miceli added musical sketches, graph- ics, and various notes and remarks he had accumulated over the years from both teachers.2 Miceli and the editor have performed the complex work of confronting and choosing between the different versions of the same theme from different editions of the seminar and in fact have created an ideal reconstruction that is a synthesis of lessons actually delivered over many years. As for the structure of the seminar and therefore the book, it is important to emphasize that the parts treated predominantly by Morricone contain con- cepts expressed by Miceli, and vice versa. In the parts closer to his compe- tence, Miceli refers often to the themes touched on by Morricone. Therefore, a selective and fragmented lecture would have restored neither the sense of the original lessons nor the thoughts of each teacher, as the work was based on alternation, exchange, integration, and the superimposition of the contri- butions. Inevitably we have had to omit the analytical exercises performed by the seminar participants and the discussions pertaining to the students’ compositional attempts. Their voices, however, are present in chapter 7, “Questions and Answers,” a radical selection of the numerous questions asked of the professors during the different editions of the seminar. Further, by Miceli’s express wish, his historical compendium of music for film, focused above all on the silent film period and intended as a generator of persistent dramaturgi- cal models, has been omitted in this transcription. ix x Editor’s Note After reflection and in consideration of the bond of friendship and of artistic and professional collaboration that has bound the two authors for almost twenty years, it has been a priority for the editor writing this introduction to conserve in the text some interventions and exchanges between Mor- ricone and Miceli that are not always strictly pertinent to the argument being treated, but that faithfully re-create the climate in which the lessons were carried out. In this way, not only an authentic testimonial but also a sort of double human and professional portrait emerges. The perspective of the composer and of the musicologist, the extraordinary multiplicity of experiences of the one beside the didactic-speculative approach of the other, carry us to a series of agreements and disagreements, to a dialectical vivacity that repre- sents perhaps one of the most significant aspects of interest in this work. To the reader it offers the possibility of approaching film-music themes from diverse angles with well-differentiated instruments of interpretation and ap- praisal. I have tried, in other words, to find a compromise between the sim- plicity required of a text in the framework of a handbook and the inevitable heterogeneous vivacity of a text with oral origins.

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