Giorgio Moroder

Giorgio Moroder began his professional path with youthful experiments in bubblegum and glam sounds, yet he earned lasting recognition for helping construct the core framework of disco. During the 1970s he joined forces with Donna Summer and Pete Bellotte to shape a seductive, imaginative strain of the genre, first realized on the 1975 album Love to Love You Baby whose lengthy title song became a global phenomenon, followed by further successes such as the 1977 single “I Feel Love” and the 1978 track “Last Dance.” Once the disco period waned, Moroder adapted his forward-looking aesthetic to memorable motion-picture scores, including the Academy Award-winning Midnight Express from 1978 as well as the 1984 films Flashdance and Metropolis. His renewed engagement with dance music during the 2010s, most notably through contributions to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in 2013 and his own 2015 album Déjà Vu, brought his approach before fresh audiences while affirming his foundational role in the field.

Born in Ortisei, Italy, on April 26, 1940, Moroder entered the music industry as a teenager by performing across Europe as a guitarist in a covers ensemble. After settling in Berlin to pursue songwriting, he issued several singles under the name Giorgio in the mid- to late 1960s. He next moved to Munich, where he opened the Musicland studio and cut the 1969 bubblegum-flavored single “Looky Looky,” which received a gold disc the following October. His debut LP, Son of My Father, appeared in early 1972; that same year Chicory Tip scored a number-one U.K. hit with the title track. Around this period Moroder met aspiring artist Pete Bellotte, and the two established a production alliance that, together with vocalist Donna Summer, would rank among the dominant influences on 1970s dance music, beginning with the 1974 release Lady of the Night. Summer’s Love to Love You Baby arrived the next year; its nearly seventeen-minute title track achieved international success, its glistening texture and erotic tone widely imitated in subsequent recordings.

At the height of their mid-1970s activity, Moroder, Bellotte, and Summer maintained an unusually rapid output, issuing new albums roughly twice annually. Thematic projects such as 1976’s A Love Trilogy and Four Seasons of Love reached a culmination in 1977’s I Remember Yesterday, a chronological survey that concluded with the hit “I Feel Love.” The track’s driving bass line and sleek, synthesized surface placed it among the defining singles of the disco age and elevated Summer’s stature as the leading dance-floor figure.

Moroder first ventured into film composition in 1978, securing an Academy Award for Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. Summer’s double album Bad Girls followed in 1979, achieving major commercial success and yielding the chart-topping singles “Hot Stuff” and the title song. During the same stretch Moroder issued solo works such as the 1979 album E=MC2, the first recorded live-to-digital, and performed with the disco outfit Munich Machine. After the final studio collaboration, Summer’s 1980 LP The Wanderer, the Moroder/Bellotte/Summer partnership dissolved as the disco era drew to an end.

Throughout the early 1980s Moroder concentrated chiefly on cinematic soundtracks. In 1980 he composed and produced the scores for Foxes, which contained Donna Summer’s hit “On the Radio” alongside Cher’s “Bad Love,” and for American Gigolo, featuring Blondie’s “Call Me.” Two years later the Cat People soundtrack appeared. In 1983 he oversaw the Scarface album, which included Debbie Harry’s “Rush Rush,” while that year’s Flashdance brought him a second Oscar for Irene Cara’s “Flashdance...What a Feeling.” In 1984 Moroder drew criticism from film traditionalists for applying a modern electro-pop score to the restored edition of Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis; the accompanying soundtrack featured contributions from Adam Ant, Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, and Pat Benatar, and Moroder also adjusted the film’s projection speed to 24 frames per second. That same year he partnered with the Human League’s Philip Oakey on the album Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder.

Following additional soundtrack work that yielded another Oscar for Best Original Song with Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” from the 1986 hit Top Gun and the theme for 1987’s Over the Top, Moroder shifted focus toward rock by producing Flaunt It, the debut album from the British sensation Sigue Sigue Sputnik. He also explored non-musical ventures, including the 1988 Cizeta Moroder V16T supercar developed with engineer Claudio Zampolli and designer Marcello Gandini. During the 1990s he concentrated on remixes, reworking Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and material by Heaven 17 among others. His 1998 remix of the 1992 Donna Summer collaboration “Carry On” earned Moroder and Summer a Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording. He maintained his film-scoring activity with the music for Leni Riefenstahl’s final project, the 2002 marine documentary Impressionen Unter Wasser. In 2004 he was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame, and in 2005 Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi bestowed upon him the title of Commendatore. He received the Great Order of Merit of the South Tyrol in 2010.

Moroder reentered dance music during the 2010s, appearing on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in 2013 and making his United States DJ debut that year at the Red Bull Music Academy in New York City. The next year he issued the single “Giorgio’s Theme” through Adult Swim and supplied remixes for Coldplay’s “Midnight” and Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga’s “I Can't Give You Anything But Love.” In 2015 he released the dance-pop album Déjà Vu, featuring collaborations with Kylie Minogue, Sia, Britney Spears, Mikky Ekko, and Charli XCX. The track “Right Here, Right Now” with Minogue reached the top of the U.S. Dance Club Songs chart that April, marking Moroder’s first number-one single in fifteen years. He toured with the Australian artist that year and contributed to her EP Kylie + Garibay, issued in September. In 2016 he partnered with composer Raney Shockne on music for the video game Tron RUN/r and produced the song “One More Day” for the K-pop group Sistar. In 2019 Moroder launched a tour encompassing both his classic catalog and newer material and remixes.