Billy's Music Without Borders: "Il Mio Morricone: A Tribute to a Friend" Marco Fumo — My friend Marco & his friend Ennio: Music is Love!

Il Mio Morricone: Tribute to a Friend

Marco Fumo, Solo Piano

My Friend Marco & His Friend Ennio: Music is Love!

Music is an experience, not a science.

—Ennio Morricone

Imagine you buy this bootleg album on advice from an insider friend, and it is said to be the solo piano played by a great pianist of a never before performed manuscript of an Ennio Morricone score! You pay plenty for this gem! It will be the most precious album in your rare collection. Add to that, this performance happened at Ennio Morricone's home at his own piano by Ennio's friend Marco Fumo — who was heretofore known best for Classic Ragtime and of course some of Ennio's "experimental" compositions. Ennio's wife Maria was there and she served sandwiches, and his son Andrea — later a composer himself — can be heard entering the room to listen before going back to his room to do his homework! What would that album be worth to you, Record Collector?

The scene has already moved me nearly to tears. Of course, there no such bootleg. This is much better. Mario Fumo was in fact the man on piano playing through Ennio Morricone's piano music for his great cinematic scores. The family was there. Andrea heard Mario and later would consult with him about the piano parts in his own scores. I cannot imagine a more holy place in music on those days than the Morricone family living room when Marco Fumo came to play through the score for Ennio. If you have heard the soundtrack for The Mission or Cinema Paradiso or the scores of other scores then you know! I wouldn't trade my seat in that living room for a front row ticket to any symphony in the world. To top it off, Mario and Ennio are friends, in fact Mario is a friend of the family. After the music, Marco was regularly asked to stay for dinner, at first because he didn't live in Rome, but later because that was just what they would do.

That is the movie I am writing about in this review. Not The Mission or Cinema Paradiso. This is NOT those movies at all. For a perfect description of Mario Fumo's music life, and each individual song on this precious album, Marco Fumo will have the last word. You see, I know Marco. Marco is a friend of mine. I wrote about him once more than a decade ago, and he sent me birthday posts on Facebook and he kept in touch with me for 10 years when I was not writing about music at all as a security guard in Cincinnati working night shift. As a music journalist, I know that the most important part of a musician is the ears and what separates the great from the good is the heart. And I know Marco, and he is a friend of mine, because he has a heart so big it honestly makes no sense to me at all. It is no surprise that I can hear it in his music.

This album has more heart than those perfectly wonderful orchestral recordings of these songs for the cinema that should already be in your record collection at home — and I do mean record albums on vinyl! For solo piano on this album to sometimes eclipse the definitive orchestral arrangements of these pieces is a musical miracle from the heart of a masterful interpretive pianist and a loving man. Marco is the only man on earth who could play the secret inner form of these soulful scores.

So what would you pay for that bootleg? All you are being asked to donate is your time. It is an awful business model, but you win and everybody is happy! We all know the music is there for the listening. "Il Mio Morricone: A Tribute To A Friend" is available for streaming or download, but you might want to go old school on this one. It has so much heart, I would fear your MP3, ALAC or FLAC player might just melt.

I asked my friend Marco to write a few words about his friend Ennio Morricone that had nothing to do with music. He sent me this:

During the period in which I studied to perform "Rag in frantumi," or other pieces, I went to Rome to Ennio's house to ask him for advice or simply to give him a feel for at what point I was in my work. Regularly. I was invited by the Master to stop by for dinner or lunch. (I lived in Pescara at the time, and I moved wherever I was needed, and I had no home in Rome.) And sometimes there was Andrea (one of the children, and a future composer), and always Maria, his beloved and inseparable wife.

We talked about everything, even football, and I remember one evening in particular that I happened to witness. We were together to watch a live football match on the TV. Ennio was a great fan of Roma. Woe to those who had touched the Roma! — then linked to the Viola families and subsequently "nemte Sensi," to Lidholm as coach, and Di Bartolomei and Falçao as players. Ennio followed the Roma when he could with great passion! Roma and their matches! He was an active and dedicated fan!

—Marco Fumo

This album is a soundtrack to the memories of Marco Fumo and his friend Ennio Morricone. There is real love in all the love songs, and when there is triumph in this music, you might hear Ennio screaming "Gooooooaaaaaaallllllll" for the Roma, who had no better fan than the composer of the world's greatest soundtracks. There is deep and abiding sentiment on this album, but not a hint of sentimentality. Marco wouldn't do that. Ennio wouldn't have accepted it. The feelings on this record are real.

Now, I have talked to enough musicians to know better than to ask Marco what he was thinking when he played this music. As pianist Laszlo Gardony recently corrected me: "No. I was one with each note. I was each note." Those sorts of answers are fairly universal. But when Marco takes the time to listen to this album, I imagine he isn't thinking about the cinema. This entire album, for Mario, is the soundtrack of a lifetime working with his friend Ennio, and the lovely Maria, his wife, and the lunches and dinners, and the football matches in the living room after the music with the great Master, Ennio Morricone!

Billy: I didn’t want to write this review before, because I can only write it once. I don’t want it to be over. This album makes me feel reverent and I contemplate all the losses of my own life as well as you and Ennio.

The story I want to tell in the review is not the story of music written for the soundtracks of movies. I know that is why Ennio Morricone wrote that music, and it is the best the cinema has to offer. But this album is not that to me at all. This album is the soundtrack to the movie of your memories of your own life and the life of your friend Ennio Morricone. I know that it is a tribute to Ennio, but you are also very near retirement and the feeling of finality and deep sentiment (not sentimentality) is pervasive in this music. I will imagine whatever that music makes me feel, as I believe you feel the memories of Ennio and also your own life when you listen to this music.
I know music well enough to know that you were not imagining anything when you played this music, but rather you were the music completely. You were the notes (as my friend jazz pianist Laszlo Gardony told me recently). I don’t want to lose you, so I didn’t want to write this review. I still have “Reflections” to look forward to. I can write about your other albums, and there are many. And our friendship will continue.

Marco: What you want and how you want, there is no problem to use everything that is written on the liner notes. Do what you feel and how you feel it, feel free to use what you want as you want and when you want. I've already been retired for quite a while, I'm 76 years old.........

Billy: When I finish writing about your albums, maybe you do some watercolors or some macrame or something, so I can never run out of something of Marco Fumo to write about. I always want to have some Marco to look forward to.

Marco: Thanks, but i don't able......

Billy: Ah well. I had to ask.

What does Billy hear when this music is playing? I hear my good friend Mario, on my patio, in the beautiful air of a sun-drenched day. The wind blows the palms, and birds try to mimick the piano, because the song they hear is so natural and beautiful the birds believe there must be a bird making that song. And the dogs stop barking. And I feel a tear start to form for everyone I have lost, and for all those that I will lose, and even when I will lose Marco one day, and when I will lose myself. This music is love for those who have passed, and love for those who are living. And love for us who know that passing is part of our living and it always has been so. This music is emotion.

This music is love.

By Special Permission: The Complete Liner Notes to

"Il Mio Morricone: A Tribute to a Friend"

Written by Marco Fumo

The complete liner notes from the album "Il Mio Morricone: A Tribute to a Friend" were transcribed by permission and are printed immediately below. These notes were written by Marco Fumo himself, and they tell the story of Marco's work and friendship with Ennio Morricone, as well as a short version of Marco's biography in music. It is a privilege to print them here by permission:

THE COMPLETE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LINER NOTES

WRITTEN BY MARCO FUMO

It all began at the end of 1980, when I decided to change direction in my career as a musician and pianist and make a choice that would turn out to be fundamental to my future. Ragtime had been back in vogue as a musical and piano genre for a few years, as a result of some pieces featured both in the soundtracks of successful films (see The Sting) and in the theme songs of popular television broadcasts. I had chosen to devote myself to that repertoire as it sounded so particular and so close to jazz music, which had always attracted me, although I lacked the technical and stylistic knowledge that would enable me to play it.

Ragtime had contributed to the birth of jazz, but it was a genre of written, not improvised music, which made it more suited to my skill set. I also came up with the idea of trying to reproduce what was happening in Europe when ragtime entered the musical scene in the continent, at the beginning of the 20th Century: it happened that a good number of the avant-garde musicians of the time took an interest in the phenomenon and wrote pieces inspired by this music so rich in rhythm and vitality.

I decided to ask several contemporary musicians to write ragtime-inspired pieces and began to collect, study, play, record and include in my repertoire, so as to create a very inspiring concert program, ranging from historic ragtime, through Parisian avant-gardes of the early 20th Century, up to contemporary Italian composers. The idea was successful and Piano in Rag was released, a record which marked my first step in this direction.

In that very fervent and productive period, among other things, I began a collaboration with the Florentine musicologist Sergio Miceli. We invented a program called “From the entertainment of art to the art of entertainment,” a multimedia program consisting of a text written and ready by Miceli, accompanied by artistic photos chosen by Miceli, accompanied by artistic photos chosen by Miceli and projected onto a screen, while I was playing a repertoire which also included songs related to cinema in various ways.

At the time, Miceli was just beginning to work with Ennio Morricone on the book that would later become a cornerstone of a brand-new approach to the analysis and study of film music: Composing for the Cinema: The Theory and Praxis of Music in Film. Miceli and Ennio met very often and had entered into a relationship of trust. Thinking back over my contemporary ragtime project, I thought I could ask Morricone if he was interested in writing a piece inspired by ragtime. I asked Sergio to use his good offices to put me in touch with the Maestro; Sergio told me that Morricone was very busy and that I could only involve him in the project by writing to him and sending him a copy of Piano in Rag. Then, I could only patiently wait for something to happen, if ever…

It was January 1986: at the end of the month I received a letter from Ennio in which, after thanking me and paying me many compliments on my record, he gladly accepted to write the piece I asked for. This was the beginning of Rag in frantumi, written in no time (at the end of February I already had a copy of the script), which Morricone, out of kindness, dedicated to me.

From that moment on we began to meet more and more often: as I studied, I would let him listen to the results and ask him for suggestions and advice. During these meetings he told me that he got the thematic idea for Rag in frantumi by inverting the three notes that formed the basic theme of Glenn Miller’s In the Mood. It so happened that the first performance of Rag in frantumi took place in L’Aquila on 17th December 1986, during the multimedia program that Sergio Miceli and I were touring with! Later on Ennio asked me if I would also like to play his transcriptions of movie themes: I gladly accepted, since I really enjoy playing different musical Ingres and styles! He also asked me if I would like to play his other compositions of contemporary music for piano, and of course I accepted.

I almost became like part of the family: I did not live in Rome, so Ennio and his kind and caring wife Maria would always invite me to stay for lunch. I remember that Andrea, their third son, was often there too: he was the only one of Ennio’s four children who would later become a musician, a conscious and firm decision that Ennio was not initially happy with. However, he admitted that he was moved when he listened to one of Andrea’s first works!

This, in a nutshell, is how it all happened between Ennio and me: a relationship that has always been fair and intellectually stimulating, based on friendship, respect and affection, and which has continued over the years precisely for these reasons.

Let us now consider the contents of the album. The Four Preludes (Cane Bianco; Star System; Metti Ana sera a cena; Indagine) and the Four Studies (Il deserts die tartare, Le due station della vita; Gott mit Ins; Il potter deli Angeli), along with Cinema Paradiso, were an obvious choice, as they have always been in my repertoire and I h ave often played them in front of Ennio. Of course, Rag in frantumi was an obvious choice too. Since the album is a long tribute, I decided to also include Love Theme, which Andrea wrote for Cinema Paradiso. In my relationship with Ennio, there has always been a place for Andrea: every now and then he would ask me questions as a curious composer about the piano and pianism in general

One night in 1994, Ennio and Giuseppe Tornature came to a concert of mine in Rome and afterwards we sent out for dinner. The director told us the entire plot of The Legend of 1900 before its release date: I was supposed to have a role in the making of the film, but then nothing came of it. So, Playing Love from the film 1900 is also featured on the album. Finally, to balance out the contents of the record, I added one more beautiful theme from the movie Love Affair.

The pieces are in chronological order, regardless of the collections in which they were first released, in favor of a variety of atmosphere and story.

I would like to dedicate this tribute to Ennio, a careful, helpful, affectionate musician and man, to whom I feel greatly indebted. This is what I feel and what I can do, from the bottom of my heart.

— Marco Fumo