The complete playlist of Ennio Morricone scores
Born in Rome on November 10th, 1929, Ennio Morricone composed over 500 soundtracks for cinema and television across a supremely impressive career. Though best known for his work on spaghetti westerns like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and The Ugly, he also worked on hundreds of little-known Giallo horrors and erotic thrillers.
After studying Composition at the revered Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia under Goffredo Petrassi, Morricone wrote his first concert works before finding work as an arranger for the Italian broadcasting companies RAI and RCA. His first score was for the 1961 film Il Federale, which opens the comprehensive playlist you can listen to below.
Morricone achieved international recognition in the mid-1960s for his work with Sergio Leone on A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Once Upon a Time in The West and A Fistful of Dynamite. However, he continued to write for lesser-known directors throughout his career, crafting scores for obscure erotic comedies like 1968’s Eat It, which follows a man who spends his entire life eating canned meat and making love.
Morricone took great pride in orchestrating and conducting his scores, but don’t be fooled into thinking he was some stiff traditionalist. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, he redefined the role of the composer, crafting a range of antithetical and experimental film and TV scores. His talent for finding new forms of orchestration won him many awards over the years, including the Golden Lion and an honorary Oscar.
As you may have guessed, Morricone wrote a hell of a lot of music in his lifetime. So much, in fact, that his collected scores add up to a runtime of over 24 hours. It’s unlikely you’ll make it through all of them, so feel free to enable shuffle mode and glide through 60 years of film music – all crafted by one of cinema’s greatest composers. Enjoy.
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