I’ve moved onto Ennio Morricone at the moment – since I finally worked out that the theme music to the hit and miss Nighty Night is from the soundtrack to My Name Is Nobody.
Morricone is one of my favourite composers, with the soundtrack album to The Mission being one of my favourite pieces of music of all time. (For the record I was recently asked in a work survey what my three favourite albums of all time. Just to be difficult, and because it’s kind of true, I named, The Mission, The Trinity Sessions by The Cowboy Junkies, and Fine Young Cannibals’ The Raw and the Cooked. The last one of those will have certainly changed by next week).
Morricone will be 76 in November, and I guess that his output feels like it’s slowed down of late. But a look at IMDB reveals plenty of Italian and other international work still coming through.
The trouble is, it’s difficult to determine works for which his music is being reused (Kill Bill), where he may have only created the theme music (has he really scored 50 hours of Japanese mini-series Musashi? I doubt it), or full film scores (I have yet to catch Ripley’s Game). I suspect that I need to spend more time surfing the net to find out this stuff.
Maybe I should get out to Japan to do a Lost in Translation tour, and take in Morricone’s June concerts. That’s a wonderful idea – if slightly beyond the bounds of reality just now.