Among the many achievements in Ennio Morricone's career, two in particular stand out. First, he has composed the scores of more than 400 films, including several of the best-known ever written. Secondly, he has never won an Oscar (he was nominated yet again this year for Malena, and yet again failed to win). Quite how the Academy has managed to overlook a man who has been one of the defining influences on film music for the past 40 years must remain as bewildering as its determination to equip Tom Hanks with a shooting gallery of statuettes - but Morricone wasn't the only one who felt that his luck must surely be in on Oscar night 1986, when his score for The Mission was nominated.
"I definitely felt that I should have won for The Mission," he declares, holding court in the classical splendour of his spacious Rome apartment. "Especially when you consider that the Oscar winner that year was Round Midnight, which was not an original score. It had a very good arrangement by Herbie Hancock, but it used existing pieces, so there could be no comparison with The Mission. There was a theft! But, of course, if it was up to me, every two years I would win an Oscar."
Settling back on his sofa in a woollen sports shirt, tortoise-shell glasses and slipon loafers, Morricone appears to be a fragile 72-year-old, but since he's capable of launching into passionate outbursts, during which he semaphores with his arms while bouncing up and down enthusiastically, this may be an elaborate disguise.
The maestro's tone is ironic, and I'm having his conversation translated to me from Italian, so it's difficult to gauge the precise extent of the outrage he feels towards the cloth-eared Californians. Maybe if he'd been content to keep running variations on A Fistful Of Dollars or his agonisingly beautiful score for Once Upon A Time In The West, there would now be a row of Oscars on his mantelpiece instead of the tasteful array of blue-andwhite ceramic vessels. But he has prided himself on the continuing evolution of his music over the decades. Morricone long ago made the decision that he would remain rooted in Rome, where he was born in 1928. More decisive still has been his courteous but firm determination not to speak English, an impressively perverse accomplishment considering he has worked for so long in an US-dominated industry. So, however often he may have collaborated with Brian de Palma, Mike Nichols or Warren Beatty, he has made sure he has done so from a European perspective.
"I was offered a free villa in Hollywood, but I said: `No thank you, I prefer to live in Italy'," he reveals. "You can see my decision as either a distinctive factor or as a limitation. I don't feel it is a limitation."
Apart from anything else, he would find it hard to live in a town where movie composers routinely farm out their compositions to batteries of professional arrangers. To Morricone, this is an abdication of professional responsibility.
"I invented the formula of `music composed, arranged and conducted by Ennio Morricone'," he stresses. "Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry."
It was his work on the "spaghetti Westerns" of Sergio Leone during the 1960s that turned Morricone into a household name almost on a par with Leone's stonefaced star, Clint Eastwood. The composer's daring juxtapositions of sounds, from surreal whistling noises to spine-rattling electric guitars and ghostly soprano voices, became an inseparable part of Leone's fevered re-imagining of the Western genre. Morricone also seized upon real-life sounds and loaded them with ominous meaning, like the coyote-howl motif from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and the deafening tick of the pocket-watches counting down the climactic shoot-out of For A Few Dollars More. He didn't conceive his scores as something to play over the pictures but as an element growing organically from the fabric of the movie.
"I come from a background of experimental music, which mingled real sounds together with musical sounds," he explains. "So I used real sounds partly to give a kind of nostalgia that the film had to convey. I also used these realistic sounds in a psychological way. With The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, I used animal sounds - as you say, the coyote sound - so the sound of the animal became the main theme of the movie. I don't know how I had this idea. It's just according to your experiences, and following the musical avant-garde."
A childhood aptitude for music earned Morricone a place at Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory when he was 12. With some musical theory duly drummed into him, he found himself working as a trumpeter, frequently playing on recording sessions for film scores.
"Most of these scores were very ugly, and I believed I could do better than this," he says. "After the war, the film industry was quite strong here in Italy, and the New Realism in Italian cinema was really wonderful, but these new realistic movies didn't have great music. I needed money and I thought it would be a good thing to write film scores, but I never asked anybody in the film industry for work. I thought: `A film-maker must call me because he thinks what I write is fine'. So it happened that a director called me, then again, and then again, and again. At last people realised that I was good and my career was rising. That's what happened, and now they keep on calling me."
Although he had first met Sergio Leone when they were both eight and attending the same school, it wasn't until 25 years later that their professional partnership began. In the meantime, Morricone had cut his professional teeth by scoring a string of Italian films, pulling together his tastes for jazz and popular music with a solid grounding in the intellectual rigours of the avant-garde. Quiz him on his musical roots and he tips his hat to some of the most uncompromising figures of 20th-century music, including Boulez, Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono. Not that he has set out to terrify his listeners with atonal atrocities. It's more a matter of absorption and evolution.
"From my faith in experimental and avant-garde music, I have consolidated this into a different way of composing, which takes account of what has happened in music in the last 50 years and which can communicate something to the audience," he suggests.
Morricone's success with Leone's films meant that he risked becoming known as a specialist composer who scored cowboy movies. "This was a serious mistake," he points out. "Because I have scored 400 films and only 30 of them are Westerns. If you scroll through all the movies I've worked on, you can understand how I was a specialist in Westerns, love stories, political movies, action thrillers, horror movies and so on. So, in other words, I'm no specialist, because I've done everything. I'm a specialist in music."
Paradoxically, a film composer must be able to conceive strong ideas for a score while remaining receptive to the director's wishes. The potential for conflict is clear. "I have to see a definitive cut of the film before I even start thinking about the music, let alone writing it," asserts the maestro. "After seeing the movie I tell the director what my feelings are and what I would like to do. He accepts what I say, or discusses it, or destroys it. Eventually we have to find a compromise. If the director has no musical creativity, he always imagines something he has already heard, so I have to convince him to leave his ideas aside. I have to trust a director and he has to trust the composer. You have to like each other, otherwise it won't work."
You'd hardly expect it to click every time, and it doesn't. In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini recruited Morricone to work on arrangements for the soundtrack to the notoriously obscene Salo (120 Days of Sodom). Morricone didn't like the music he was given to work with, and Pasolini didn't want to show him the whole film, apparently because he feared Morricone would walk off the project. "I eventually saw the movie in a theatre and I didn't like it," the maestro reports, firmly. "It wasn't to my taste."
Morricone has had much happier experiences with Brian de Palma, a director he likes and respects. His percussive, staccato score for The Untouchables earned an Oscar nomination in 1987, but the project wasn't without its moments of anguish.
"De Palma is delicious!" Morricone says. "He respects music, he respects composers. For The Untouchables, everything I proposed to him was fine, but then he wanted a piece that I didn't like at all, and of course we didn't have an agreement on that. It was something I didn't want to write - a triumphal piece for the police. I think I wrote nine different pieces for this in total and I said `please don't choose the seventh!', because it was the worst. And guess what he chose? The seventh one. But it really suits the movie."
Morricone has grown skilled at fulfilling the professional requirements of his trade, but some projects are naturally closer to his heart than others. His music for Gillo Pontecorvo's classic exposition of revolutionary struggle, The Battle Of Algiers, seemed especially personal, and the music accompanying the freedom fighters has echoes of Bach's Passions.
"It was a movie about freedom of people when Algeria was under French power. France recognised it too, because they abandoned Algeria after that. It was good to be at the director's side and to feel sympathetic for what was right. With another score I composed, Novocento, for Bernardo Bertolucci, a theme from this became a national hymn for Spanish socialists. Films don't really have a political effect, but people understood the message of the music."
But since scoring films must always be a collaborative venture, it is in his noncinematic work that Morricone has been able to work out more abstract musical ideas. At his Barbican concerts earlier this month (his first concert performances in Britain), he conducted a pair of concert works alongside a selection of his scores. Fragment Of Eros features soprano, piano and orchestra, while Ombra Di Lontana Presenza uses viola, recorder and strings.
"It's chamber music, but it's not really all that strange," he says. "I want people to know about all the kinds of music that I write. Some believe I just write film scores, which is not true. With a film score, it is really for the film-makers and the audience. This other music is what the composer feels, and it's more personal."
Considering his age and his track record, you'd imagine Morricone might fancy putting his feet up. "You go back to what Bach composed and how much Mozart wrote in 33 years, and you see I am unemployed compared to this," he chortles. "I would like to relax a bit, but this is not the right year to do it."