Ennio Morricone

<p>Ennio Morricone was born on November 10, 1928, in Rome. Trained as a classical trumpeter and composer at the prestigious Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under Goffredo Petrassi, he began his career arranging pop songs for RCA Italiana and composing experimental music with the avant-garde improvisation collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.</p><p>Morricone's global breakthrough occurred in 1964 with Sergio Leone's <em>A Fistful of Dollars</em>, inaugurating the Spaghetti Western genre. Operating on shoestring budgets, Morricone boldly replaced standard Hollywood orchestral lushness with unconventional sonic textures: whistling, jaw harps, gunshots, cracking whips, electric guitars, and Edda Dell'Orso's ethereal wordless soprano. His scores for <em>The Good, the Bad and the Ugly</em> and <em>Once Upon a Time in the West</em> became defining milestones in cinematic history.</p><p>Over a six-decade career, Morricone demonstrated astonishing versatility, composing the sacred oboe themes of <em>The Mission</em>, the nostalgic romance of <em>Cinema Paradiso</em>, and the ominous synth dread of John Carpenter's <em>The Thing</em>. He received an Academy Honorary Award in 2007 and won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Quentin Tarantino's <em>The Hateful Eight</em> in 2016 at the age of 87.</p>