Writing about Ennio Morricone's music is not easy because as absolute music it contains within itself all meaning and answers and nothing can be added to it. However, even though Morricone's musical aesthetics are still at the beginning of their historical journey, even now we cannot speak of them as film music alone.
His compositions transfigure the perception of film vision, add meaning, reveal truths inaccessible to the language of images. His music is never merely didactic but intrinsically narrative and digs much deeper than a sequence of stills could.
Music that is a bridge between classicism and innovation. There are many classical quotations in the Morricone’s compositions, the liturgical hymn Veni Creator Spiritus and the baroque-style articulation of the phrasing in Gabriel's Oboe, Hoffenbach in Infanzia e Maturità, Debussy in the main theme of Cinema Paradiso, the name BACH concealed in the form of counterpoint in the theme of the Il Clan dei Siciliani, are just a few examples.
At the same time, it is a kind of powerful generative music that contains and creates new music and new genres. Morricone is the inventor of Vivaldi's pop that later flowed into the Rondò veneziano experience, but he is also the unsuspected precursor of the tango nuevo with the song Il Clan dei Siciliani that inspired Astor Piazzolla's famous Libertango.
Because of its nature as geometrically perfect music, it contains a legacy of suggestions, so many of the pieces in this project (the three themes of Cinema Paradiso, Amico, Rabbia e Tarantella, La Califfa, Il Clan dei Siciliani) have the form of the theme with variations according to the counterpoint technique.
It is a music that lends itself to instrumental elaborations, such as those of guitarist Mauro di Domenico, a great musician and close friend of Morricone, who kindly allowed me to duet with his recording of Playing Love.
And it is music that here for the first time becomes part of the repertoire for diatonic accordion, an instrument that can cross the limits of its folkloric literature once stripped of the label of a mere traditional instrument.
