Ennio Morricone, the Italian Composer Who Wrote the Soundtrack of the Far-West

Ennio Morricone has died at the age of 91 in Rome. He was the composer of the score of  more than 500 films, including successful "spaghetti westerns" like "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", "Once Upon a Time in the West" with director Sergio Leone and other box office hits like "Cinema Paradiso", "The Mission" or Brian de Palma's "The Untouchables".  He won an honorary Oscar in 2007, and an outright one for Quentin Tarantino's film "The Hateful Eight" in 2015.  He was recently awarded the 2020 Princess of Asturias Prize for the Arts by the Spanish Crown.

He managed to create an atmosphere of mystery, toughness and humour by orchestrating music based on "howls, gunshots and groans".  Rose Friedman, writing an appreciation for NPR, says that in Western movies, where dialogue was minimal, "music did the talking". Here you can listen to a 4-minute radio report with its script, and a written version of the story. Both can be accessible to B2 students.

The vocabulary level of the reports is challenging, though, and you will find words like "sneaky tricks,  whistles, animal calls, creaks, gunshots, groans, howls, hip, a raucous sound, avant-garde, to be off-and-running, choirmaster, the score, to pay off, to win a prize".