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Ennio Morricone – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

An evening pause: With yesterday’s evening pause in mind, here’s a classical orchestra showing us how they perform spaghetti western music.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

4 comments

  • DDZ

    I like the Spaghetti Western Orchestra’s performance of spaghetti western music better than I like the concert orchestra’s performance. It seems to be a better fit.

  • PeterF

    sort of like drag racing in a Rolls Royce?

  • PeterF

    Sort of like drag racing in a Rolls Royce?

  • Edward

    At the risk of sounding like I am reviewing the music or some movies:

    Morricone’s music was used to great effect to keep audiences entertained during Sergio Leone’s long sequences in which little happened on screen. Leone did this in order to enhance suspense or to create other effects (e.g. in the movie “The Good, The Bad, And the Ugly,” he gave us a sense of sadness over the waste of life during the American Civil War). If it weren’t for the brilliance of Morricone, the images would not have had the same meaning, and the sequences would have had to be shortened, because the audience would want the film to move along, as in the other movies of the time. The combination of imagery and music heightened the audience experience, and that is why we so appreciate Leone’s brilliant movies. (In a way, I think that finding Morricone was the most brilliant move of Leone’s career.)

    Earlier, Hitchcock was able to do a similar 5-minute sequence in “north By Northwest” when Cary Grant’s character is waiting at a bus stop, but such imaginative filmmaking is rare. Together, Leone and Morricone were exceptional.

    All this is to say that it was the imagery that accompanied the music and the music that accompanied the imagery that were important. I think that the Spaghetti Western Orchestra understood this relationship and created new imagery to make the music come to life for us. The emotions that they elicit are different, but these enhanced emotions may be why some/many/most of us prefer their performance.

    On the other hand, the BBC Concert Orchestra, being a regular orchestra, heard only the music (still brilliant, but missing that special something).

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