The good, the mad and the great Ennio
YOU won’t often see a show like the Spaghetti Western Orchestra. The premise is to recreate Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. The execution is elaborate. The Italian composer used an 80-piece orchestra and choir.
The Spaghetti Western Orchestra are five Australian men — or, as they say, “five slightly crazy, serious musicians” — with an array of improvised instruments.
They play traditional classical instruments, including a trumpet, double bass and grand piano, but the other ‘instruments’ — 100 or so — include coat hangers, asthma inhalers, a duck caller, nail clippers and a bicycle pump.
Footsteps are conjured by rustling a microphone in a box of Cornflakes. For a fight scene, they use a balloon pump, a rubber glove, a rusty door-hinge, and a bottle and then one of them pummels a cabbage. There’s miscellaneous grunting and snatches of dialogue, and the audience help, too; for example, by chiming the aye-eh-aye-eh-eye chorus for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
“We’ve listened very closely to the original tracks,” says Graeme Leak, who performs drums, percussion, trigger sounds, the theremin and the string can. “We also listened to the soundtrack without the vision — just the way the dialogue and sound effects are composed.
“Then, we thought about how five of us can do this when the original scores are for a full orchestra with choir. We tried different things out. We don’t have a soprano, for example. Once Upon A Time In The West really needs a beautiful soprano voice, so I play some theremin instead.”
The quintet were originally the Ennio Morricone Experience but changed their name five years ago, received artistic direction and put away their lounge suits. Today, they’re in costume as bit parts from the films. Leak, whose favourite spaghetti western actor is Eli Wallach (The Ugly in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), is the bank teller. How it all started was freakish.
“It was one of those coincidental things,” says Leak. “I was talking to a friend of mine and asking him what he was up to. This was around 2000. He said he was thinking of putting a band together to play the music of Ennio Morricone.
“The next day, I met Patrick Cronin for the first time, at a party, and I was talking to him and he said the same thing: ‘I’m thinking of putting together something to work with the music of Morricone’. I said: ‘I just had this conversation yesterday’. I brokered the deal. We played around with some of the ideas and it seemed to have a lot of legs.”
The attraction with Morricone is unsurprising. He’s prodigious, having composed the scores for 300 films. He was schoolmates with Leone. “Morricone was prolific,” says Leak. “It depends on which website you read as to his total output, but I remember calculating that in his early days he was doing one score a month. He’s a real composer. He sits at a desk with pen and paper and writes what he’s hearing in his head.”
Leak is enamoured of Morricone’s experimentalism, a philosophy he shares. The Australian has orchestrated remarkable projects. He once got 100 boats to make music. For the closing ceremony at the Melbourne Festival, he led 500 bell ringers in a performance. A few years ago, he was commissioned by the festival to write a piece which entailed getting pole dancers to make music by bashing mallets off the city’s famous Federation Bells installation.
“I always enjoy a challenge,” he says. “I think, in many ways, writing music is about problem-solving, no matter what level you’re doing it. Even if you’re playing the piano, you’re setting yourself up with a bunch of problems that you need to solve. If it’s a piece of aerial pole players, that’s another set of different problems.
“When pole players do play, their play is very rhythmic and gentle. There’s quite a lot of time between each arc of play, so I had to build all of that into their score. It brought a whole new meaning to the word ‘upbeat’.”
* The Spaghetti Western Orchestra performs at INEC Theatre, Killarney, Wednesday, Feb 22; The Helix, Dublin, Thursday, Feb 23; The Black Box Theatre, Galway, Friday, Feb 24; Cork Opera House, Saturday, Feb 25; and The Ulster Hall, Belfast, Sunday, Feb 26.
Further information: www.spaghettiwesternorchestra.com.
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