by Ryan Keaveney

Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who received a lifetime achievement Oscar here Sunday, is the Mozart of the movie music world, having written hundreds of scores in a glittering 45-year career.

The 78-year-old is perhaps best known for the memorable music that accompanied Sergio Leone’s 1960s spaghetti westerns, each score an instantly recognizable classic.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Morricone for “his magnificent and multi-faceted contributions to the art of film music.” Presenter Clint Eastwood translated Morricone’s Italian on Sunday, saying that the director’s “thoughts go out to the artists who have never received this honor.

“And even though they work with enormous commitment and talent, to all of them, he wishes that their work would be recognized as his is tonight.”

Morricone, Eastwood said, considered the Oscar not “a point of arrival, but a starting point to continue writing with the same passion and dedication he’s had since the very beginning on the screen.”

Morricone has earned five Academy Award nominations for original score — for Days of Heaven (1978), The Mission (1986), The Untouchables (1987), Bugsy (1991) and Malena (2000) — but has not previously received an Oscar. “The board was responding not just to the remarkable number of scores that Mr. Morricone has produced,” said Academy President Sid Ganis, “but to the fact that so many of them are beloved and popular masterpieces.”

Morricone has worked with some of the finest film directors of the end of the last century, including Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as Leone, his classmate at school in Rome, and he gleefully tells anyone who will listen that he turned down the chance to fly to Los Angeles to compose a few minutes of music for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

He once told an interviewer: “In writing a film score, you are absolutely aware of the public and of writing music the audience understands. I would never think of distracting a film audience with complicated music.”

He says whenever a director has encouraged him to write “complicated music,” the films “have not turned out to be blockbusters; in fact, few people have gone to see them.

“This was a lesson for me. Although I was proud of the music, I had to be aware of what had happened, and why. The audience for movies does not usually have a high musical culture.”

A good film composer should be able to “write atonal music or a nice melody in C Major, compose in the style of any era or composer, but the most important thing is not to lose your own personality,” he said.

A graduate of Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Morricone began as a nightclub trumpeter, like his father, graduated to arranging popular songs for the likes of Mario Lanza and began composing film music only in 1961. (AFP via Yahoo!)