Ennio Morricone, who died in Rome on July 6, aged ninety-one, will justly be remembered for his groundbreaking scores for films by Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Brian De Palma, and countless others. The “Maestro,” as he was so often called, had been a writer of pop songs in the 1960s for chart-topping singers such as Mina, Rita Pavone, and Gianni Morandi, and his melodic writing is among the most distinctive in cinematic history.

From the immediately recognizable coyote howl of his theme for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly to the stately romanticism of the track “Chi Mai” (originally written for Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s film Magdalena, later reaching number two in the UK charts following its inclusion in the BBC’s Life and Times of David Lloyd George), Morricone’s tunes have consistently succeeded both in immediately summoning up a whole world and permanently lodging themselves in the listener’s memory.

What is less often remarked upon is the important part played by the composer in Italy’s mid-century avant-gardes. The child prodigy who whizzed through the Rome conservatory’s four-year harmony course in six months, aged twelve, would later participate in the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in south-west Germany, and took cues from Viennese dodecaphony — not just in concert works like the tense, febrile Musica Per 11 Violini, but even in pop songs like “Se Telefonando.” It was at Darmstadt, as he told the Spectator’s Richard Bratby in 2018, that Morricone “really understood what it was to write contemporary music.”