Personal rennaissance

An interesting Times profile about Ennio Morricone--whose work in The Good the Bad and the Ugly (the flute, the horns), Once Upon a Time in the West (the harmonica) and Cinema Paradise I've always liked--and a funny/telling quote:

The Maestro of Spaghetti Westerns Takes a Bow, Jon Pareles: For many filmmakers through the years, a certain kind of pilgrimage to Rome leads to the opulent parlor of the composer Ennio Morricone. It’s the place where he has discussed grand concepts and crucial details, and often unveiled new themes on the piano, for the distinctive film scores he has written over the past four decades, from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” to “The Mission.” There are more than 400 of them, though he hasn’t kept count.

Next Saturday Mr. Morricone, 78, makes his long-overdue American concert debut with 200 musicians and singers at Radio City Music Hall. It is the beginning of a triumphal month in the United States that will also include festivals of his films at the Museum of Modern Art and Film Forum, and the release of a tribute album, “We All Love Ennio Morricone” (Sony Masterworks), with performances from Bruce Springsteen, Renée Fleming, Herbie Hancock and Metallica, among others. On Feb. 25 he will be presented with an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, atoning for past omissions. After five nominations, he has never won.

Massimo Gallotta, the promoter who is producing the concert, has been working for more than a year to present Mr. Morricone’s American debut. “It was strange for me that Morricone had never performed here in the past,” Mr. Gallotta said. “He agreed right away. And then I was lucky about the Oscar, the CD, everything.”

Mr. Morricone has given concerts periodically in Europe, including a December performance that drew 50,000 people to the Piazza del Duomo in Milan. At Radio City he will lead the 100-piece Roma Sinfonietta orchestra, along with the 100-member Canticum Novum Singers.

Everyone except Maestro Morricone, as he is called in Rome, considers him startlingly prolific. Along with his hundreds of film scores, he has composed a sizable body of concert music like “Voci dal Silencio” (“Voices From the Silence”), a cantata he wrote in response to “the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and all the massacres of humanity all over the world,” he said. He will be performing that work on Friday at the United Nations, at a concert welcoming the new secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.

“The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one hand and not true on the other hand,” he said in an interview at his home, speaking in Italian through a translator. “Maybe my time is better organized than many other people’s. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed.”

There's a lot more in the article, including an interesting section on how he works and what he leaves out; but that quote jumped out at me.

What makes some talented people prolific, and others not-so-much? It's gotta be more than just organizing your time--right?!

I'd say a key element is your work can't seem like work, it's got to be something you love to do, perhaps even need to do. You have to set up a framework where time plus effort leads to results. And you have to be in a field where measurable output is possible.

I think it also helps to work with, or be around, other productive people. I noticed the Times' audio extra featuring five of Morricone's works, Yo Yo Ma plays two of them. Ma, for me, has always seemed the epitome of productivity; he's involved in so many projects, all stemming out of his mastery of the cello but many no longer directly related. That's another prerequisite, you need to work in a field where you can be productive on various levels and in different ways.

But probably above all is you have to be totally dedicated to one thing, and do it well. Everything stems out of that.

Uncredited photo of Morricone found online.