Andrea Morricone – HuffPost 10.10.14
Mike Ragogna: There are so many young people who are driven to make music but they don’t know where to start. I ask everybody I interview this question, what advice do you have for new artists?
Andrea Morricone: I understand. It’s brilliant that you wonder about that. My congratulation to you, because this is evidence that you really care a lot about the younger generation’s people, as I do. It’s a matter of caring for the youngest generation. I’m also very concerned. Very concerned. Because of all that we’ve been talking about. We have experience so we can talk this way and understand each other. But first of all, being a good composer doesn’t mean being a good teacher. Most of the time I would say there’s no good teacher that is not a good composer. [laughs] If you know very well how music works you cannot give up composing at least one piece every day. Every day I wake up and if I don’t compose a couple of pieces I wonder why. For the biggest amount of experience I have on my shoulders I have lots of years of study every day, all the time and I would say also my own.
I’m Andrea Morricone, everyone thinks of me as the son of Ennio, but there is so much diversity between me and him. People should be way more aware of that. You know, the fame of my father because of the movies of the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, everybody knows him because the movies that he also scored were so amazing because of the directors — Sergio Leone, Gillo Pontecorvo, Elio Petri — all of these amazing directors. The point is that people are now stuck to that situation in a way. They still don’t seem to need anything new. Or they’re not curious about anything newer, which instead I want to bring in this concert, because in this concert there will be the first part which is going to be a very unique style of rock, but it’s not rock because it’s arranged for orchestra with strings. I don’t know, it’s classical rock. Then there is Miri Ben-Ari with the violin, these pieces could be avant-garde but they’re always tonal and melodic. Then there is the last section which is dedicated to my scores for movies but there’s not only the themes, there is the very strong concept of the arrangements. I would like to tell you that I am a very free person, and I put together a concert for the second part where I was choosing the music just because I like it. Because it’s beautiful. The best music I had. Actually I would like to maybe finish this wonderful interview, if you agree, telling you the big quality of the music, the big aspect of it, the main difference of it, is if it is good music, we’re talking about good music, or we’re talking about not good music. There are only two ways to be. Whether good or no good, period. This is the only rule that matters. Do you see what I mean?