For Fans of Ennio Morricone

There is a specific emotional state that Morricone triggers and no one else quite replicates: a kind of bittersweet grandeur, the feeling that something immense and irretrievable is passing. He achieves it through contrast, the delicate and the vast side by side, a child's music box phrase beneath a building orchestral catastrophe. Cinema Paradiso's love theme is the purest example: it should be sentimental and it absolutely is, yet it cuts deeper than almost anything else on screen because the orchestration refuses to resolve cleanly. Morricone knew that beauty is most devastating when it is almost out of reach.

When Quentin Tarantino coaxed an elderly Morricone back for The Hateful Eight, he got something no living composer could have matched: a score of genuine menace and classical purity simultaneously. Morricone recycled unused cues from John Carpenter's The Thing and added new material that predicts the film's carnage before anyone has fired a shot. It won him his first competitive Oscar at 87. The point is not the award. The point is that a composer in his ninth decade wrote music of sustained dread that younger composers simply do not know how to build. The craft never degraded.

The Spaghetti Western gave Morricone a landscape as emotionally blank as a composer could wish for. The genre's moral ambiguity, nobody is clean, good and evil swap coats, matched his instinct for music that refuses to tell you how to feel. His Westerns do not use triumphant brass for the hero and dark strings for the villain. The same brooding melody covers both, and that is the whole argument: fate is indifferent and beautiful and you are going to die in it. No other genre could have incubated that idea so efficiently.