Ennio Morricone’s music for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight

1 May 2017 – 10:30 pm Posted in Film Music, Western Classical Music

Written by:
Mohammad Hadi Majidi

After watching Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, The Hateful Eight, everyone was excited by its novel music besides the beautiful scenes of blood and guts.

The Hateful Eight is the first collaboration between the world-famous film music composer, Ennio Morricone, and Quentin Tarantino as a famous director.

The presence of Tarantino who is known by films like The Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill which are characterized by his “nonlinear storylines, satirical subject matter, and his personal aestheticization of violence“. Morricone, as a multi-style composer whose styles have made him one of the most versatile, experimental and influential composers of all time, made this collaboration so attractive.

Tarantino starts working on civil war events of America from his movie “Django Unchained” and The Hateful Eight is his second film on the wild west era and maybe Tarantino chose Morricone as the film composer, because of his wide experience on Spaghetti-western movies.

A composer like Morricone, could rest on his “laurels, and compose scores with those everyday sounds he was first known for“. However, he decided to write a different music in a different style and with different voices. “I’m continuously thinking about music, continuously researching and attentive. I cannot just remain still,” he says. “I don’t want to remain conservative; I want to go ahead and look at the future.”
So that the orchestration of the overture part of the film is so innovative. Morricone combines the real voices of an orchestra with some new electronic techniques as he says, “Quentin Tarantino and his film really deserve a music of their own.”
To create that original score for Tarantino, Morricone largely turns to tools unavailable in 1964, like synthesizers, which drive the tense, gloomy eight-minute overture. (Morricone’s compositions for The Thing, used in The Hateful Eight, were some of his first work with synths in the early 1980s).
The experimenting composer isn’t above technological advances, but he’s quick to warn young composers of the dangers of seductive technology. “Electronic instruments have to be used to justify something that doesn’t exist, not to replace for instance an orchestra,” he says. “If you use the synth just to recreate the sound of an existing musical instrument, it is wrong. But if you use the synth to create a sound that doesn’t exist, that’s a very wise way to use it.”

In this movie, there are lots of scenes in which Morricone has created the feeling of humor among the horrible violent scenes of the movie. One of the best examples or maybe the most memorable part of the movie is the Lincoln’s letter scene in which we observe lots of murders and a flood of blood everywhere, also we know the characters depth of crime, and while the character reading the Lincoln’s letter that is about beauty and glory of patriotism and duty, Morricone wisely match this scene whit a glorious fanfare music in the background that just make us feel funny about the meaning of patriotism and glory.
The director, Tarantino had reused Morricone’s music in several of his other films: Django Unchained, IngloriousBastards, and Kill Bill. But for The Hateful Eight, he knew he wanted an original soundtrack for the first time.
“This material deserved an original score,” explained Tarantino in an interview with Christopher Nolan. “I’ve never thought that way before. I didn’t ever want to trust a composer with the soul of my movie.” But he decided he could trust the man whom he describes as his favorite composer in history.
Morricone urges his listeners to hear The Hateful Eight score apart from his previous work—especially from the enduring legacy of his spaghetti Westerns. “Forget the work that I’ve done in the past for the Italian Western or for the Sergio Leone movies,” he says.

The other attractive point of the film’s music is the songs that Morricone and Tarantino had chosen for the movie. Especially the song “Jim Jones at Botany” Bay that Jennifer Jason Leigh sings with a guitar, is the traditional Australian folk ballad , which dates from the early 19th-century.

The soundtrack of the movie won a Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Original Score on 28 February 2016.
The opening track, “L’ultima diligenza di Red Rock” (Versione Integrale), was released as a single online on December 15, 2015. In December 2016, it gained a nomination for a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition for Mr. Morricone.

This entry was written by HarmonyTalk
Tagged: .

Nasser Masoudi: The Voice of Gilan and a Legacy of Iranian Music

In Iranian music, certain singers have become emblematic of their homelands through their distinctive voices. Historical figures such as Eghbal Sultan, who epitomized the grandeur of Azerbaijani music, and Taj Isfahani, who conveyed the authentic essence of Isfahan, serve as notable examples from the Qajar era. Nasser Masoudi occupies a similar position; his voice emerged as a symbol of Gilan while also achieving national acclaim. Before him, Master Ahmad Ashurpur represented Gilan’s musical landscape, but his extended residence outside Iran limited his continuous engagement in the music scene. In contrast, Masoudi’s consistent presence allowed him to introduce the voice of Gilan to audiences across Iran.

Farhad Poupel: The Voice of the Shahnameh in the Orchestras Around the World

In an era when almost no trace of contemporary Iranian music can be heard in international concert halls, except (so-called!) avant-garde works that owe their existence solely to the fashionable slogans of the “pseudo-intellectual” crowd who have seized the already meager resources for performing classical music from the true artists of the field, the numerous performances of Farhad Poupel’s works shine as a ray of hope for lovers of sincere musical art. Without resorting to trendy slogans, he has kept the flame of Iranian classical music alive purely through the power of his artistry.

Latest posts

From Past Days…

Principles of Violin Playing (X)

Creating sound continuity between two notes in the source and destination positions when left hand position changes and “two different finger numbers” are involved is called portamento. Portamento can be performed on single string or two neighboring strings and with hand moving on fingerboard either upward or downward.

Iranian Fallacies – Global Performance

One of the most important criteria for measuring the quality of a piece of classical music is number of times the piece has been performance by different ensembles and orchestras in different eras. This belief has become so pervasive in some societies, such as Iranian society, that it is considered the only criterion for measuring the quality of a piece of classical music.

Is the Iranian National Anthem a Copy? (II)

In response, it should be said that it is better for the national anthem of a country to use the musical material exclusive to that country; however, some problems might come up in doing so the most important of which include: lack of familiarity of other countries’ music performer with the concerned country’s specific music intervals and special musical technique; and secondly, the strangeness of that music to the foreign listener.

Last Year under the Light of Music

Almost three months into the new Iranian year (starting March 21), it is still not too late to have a look at the last year and the challenges that the musicians faced. The following article was published on the first day of the New Year in the Persian edition of the HarmonyTalk journal.

Polyphony in Iranian Music (III)

In heterophonic variant, two performers perform a single melody simultaneously and change it. Performing and changing a single melody simultaneously by two performers leads to the coincidence of different voices.

Reza Vohdani; Unveiling unpublished works, preservation of Iranian classical music

Reza Vohdani is a renowned name among tar (traditional Iranian instrument) players, especially within the Iranian music community that values the meticulous practice and teaching of traditional music. While Vohdani honed his skills in music theory and tar playing under the guidance of masters like Ali-Naghi Vaziri, Ali-Akbar Shahnazi, Hossein Dehlavi, and Ahmad Forutan-Rad, it is his unwavering dedication to studying, documenting, and teaching the Iranian classical music repertoire that has solidified his prominence in the field. Recently, Vohdani’s family decided to make his preserved works accessible to the wider art and music community. In this regard, The Persian-language newspaper ‘Iran’ spoke with Sadjad Pourghanad, a musician, university instructor, and music researcher, who shared his opinion into the project, as detailed in the interview below.

Principles of Violin Playing (IX)

4.3.1. To practice playing of doubles of notes involving two different fingers, each note is played at separate bows with slow tempo, each note is played perfectly regarding its bass and tenor sounds and then the considered double is played at another bow while considering the resulted sound of the double.

New Technique for Playing Classical Guitar (II)

When the author was working on the piece “Playing Love” by Ennio Morricone (from the legend of 1900), he realized a failure of the Lip Technique. Needing to play a chord in the 14th position of the guitar and in order to complete the harmony, it is necessary to play a harmonic note on the 7th or 5th position; it was not possible to touch the string to play this harmonic note, because the Lip Technique is used for getting the notes and not to touch the string and producing harmonic notes. Naturally, the only possible way to touch the string was to use the nose at the required position and playing the note with the right hand, and this was the best option the author found to how to play such harmonic notes, and where the Nose Technique was generated.

Payam Taghadossi: Talented Iranian-Austrian Cellist

Payam Taghadossi (born in 1989) started his musical education at the age of 4 years with Monika Scherbaum in Bregenz (Austria). At the Conservatory Feldkirch he joined the class of Imke Frank and Martin Merker. Later he studied in Zurich (Switzerland) with Thomas Grossenbacher and Christian Proske, where he 2011 graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance. Two years later as the student of Rafael Rosenfeld he received his Master of Arts in Music Performance diploma and later graduated as a Master of Arts in spezialized Music Performance in 2016 from the Hochschule für Musik Basel FHNW.

Non-profit “Microtona” Project Released

Microtona is a sixty-eight-page Booklet with personal comments by the contributing microtonal artists. The booklet also includes a DVD which consists of 8 original video tracks and 9 original audio tracks. The project is an international one featuring unpublished pieces by composers from Iran, Japan, U.S., France, Austria, Germany and Belgium.