0516

Ennio Morricone, from Composing For the Cinema

"I have always thought that in motion pictures the theme is a minor element. In any case, in  contemporary art music, composers do not write themes anymore. None of us is interested in making them. In the cinema, we create a theme because the public needs to follow a thread. They need to listen to the distinct and characteristic succession of sounds that are behind it. But beyond this necessity rests the very limiting fact that the composer at the piano can make the director hear nothing more than the theme. If the composer is a good orchestrator but a terrible pianist, when finally in the recording studio the director listens to the music that has been realized, he might marvel at a result that he did not expect, at colors that the orchestra gives to the theme. If instead, on the contrary, the composer is ... a very good pianist but not a good orchestrator, the director will be disappointed because the theme that he liked at the piano he no longer likes. It can happen. Therefore, my advice is to have the director listen to the theme being played very badly. If he accepts it that way, it will certainly be more attractive to him when you have orchestrated it. I play it badly for him, also, because I am not interested at all in playing it at the piano. If necessary, I sing it to him in my off-key voice. There is a certain director who after years and years confessed to me that he had not understood anything in my communications with him (though I had not suspected it). I had sung the theme to him badly. I had played it for him badly. So he had arrived in the recording studio thinking, “Finally . . .” One does not have the slightest idea about what the musical level of certain directors is. One of them, a dear friend, provoked me by saying, “Try that little piece again, there where the orchestra is tuning up.” But the orchestra was not tuning up: it was executing slightly abstract sounds that I had written for his film."