An astonishing picture at Open Culture today. It turns out that Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone were schoolmates in Primary School back in 1937. What are the odds? (Similar to those of John & Paul meeting up and Paulie joining John's band back in Liverpool, I reckon.)
And Open Culture feature a nice tribute piece to the departed Maestro, though like nearly all that have been appearing in the last couple of days I don't think they quite grasp the scale of what he accomplished. (Not sure why music from The Godfather features in the Open Culture piece, though.) It's been refreshing to witness the fact that Morricone's genius is now so widely acknowledged - especially given just how long it took the Academy to recognise it and actually give him an Oscar - but it's rare the tributes have covered the extraordinarily experimental music he wrote in the early days for all those Italian movies. Some of it is so much of the avant-garde it makes Stockhausen sound conservative - and, of course, it always worked in whatever film it was intended for.
I reckon the greatest composer of film music by a country mile, and the greatest aural imagination ever.
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