I agree about Morricone - it is amazing how much he did with seemingly simple effects. He had an extremely original approach, in that it was very different from the somewhat turgid orchestral treatment common before him. One of the most startling examples that comes to mind was those strange guttural male choir effects in the Leone films. I think he had more influence on contemporary film music than many people realize.
Which reminds me of my favorite of the Italians - Nino Rota. His music for Fellini is some of the greatest film music ever composed. Listen to the score of Juliet of the Spirits for one. But his concert music was equally good - unlike a lot of film composers (such as Herrmann - though Herrrman did some great chamber pieces like the Souvenir de Voyage). Another more recent Italian I really like is Pino Donnagio, who is generally known for his Brian de Palma scores, but the best one I've heard is the score for "Don't Look Now" - one of the greatest psychological-supernatural films and for which he created a melancholy, neo-baroque Albinoni-like score for strings, guitar, harp, percussion and pipe organ that adds immeasureably to the ambiance of the film.
On the subject of lousy orchestration it's true it can almost subliminally affect the audience. Though most of the time I don't think that happens. Most film music is either merely functional or basically irrelevant. In other words, usually it is just pablum that goes with the scene like a more of less effective sound effect, but never does anything really expressive. And only the finest composers raise it from that mediocre level. Very rarely do I notice truly terrible film music. Most of the time it is simply forgettable.
Today we are living in a time when almost every film composer copies two people - John Williams (who copied Korngold) and Bernard Herrmann (who copied no one and is the most original American composer in any medium of the twentieth century - except maybe for Duke Ellington). Film music right now is starting to sound - to me at least - as uniform and by-the-numbers as the saccharine, overly romantic, Liszt-Rachmaninoff-Tchaikovsky style of the 1940s studio films. The most important thing that a composer today must do is to stop copying these people and do something original. That's one reason I like Elfman because though he is influenced by Herrmann, (as in the "Batman" score for example the intro being close to a re-write of "Journey to the Center of the Earth") he has somehow managed to create something different and recognizable as his own.
Which reminds me of my favorite of the Italians - Nino Rota. His music for Fellini is some of the greatest film music ever composed. Listen to the score of Juliet of the Spirits for one. But his concert music was equally good - unlike a lot of film composers (such as Herrmann - though Herrrman did some great chamber pieces like the Souvenir de Voyage). Another more recent Italian I really like is Pino Donnagio, who is generally known for his Brian de Palma scores, but the best one I've heard is the score for "Don't Look Now" - one of the greatest psychological-supernatural films and for which he created a melancholy, neo-baroque Albinoni-like score for strings, guitar, harp, percussion and pipe organ that adds immeasureably to the ambiance of the film.
On the subject of lousy orchestration it's true it can almost subliminally affect the audience. Though most of the time I don't think that happens. Most film music is either merely functional or basically irrelevant. In other words, usually it is just pablum that goes with the scene like a more of less effective sound effect, but never does anything really expressive. And only the finest composers raise it from that mediocre level. Very rarely do I notice truly terrible film music. Most of the time it is simply forgettable.
Today we are living in a time when almost every film composer copies two people - John Williams (who copied Korngold) and Bernard Herrmann (who copied no one and is the most original American composer in any medium of the twentieth century - except maybe for Duke Ellington). Film music right now is starting to sound - to me at least - as uniform and by-the-numbers as the saccharine, overly romantic, Liszt-Rachmaninoff-Tchaikovsky style of the 1940s studio films. The most important thing that a composer today must do is to stop copying these people and do something original. That's one reason I like Elfman because though he is influenced by Herrmann, (as in the "Batman" score for example the intro being close to a re-write of "Journey to the Center of the Earth") he has somehow managed to create something different and recognizable as his own.
