Nature & Animals Quote by Ennio Morricone

Morricone is casually describing a small revolution: the moment a movie score stopped merely underlining emotion and started behaving like a character with its own nervous system. Calling the coyote cry "the main theme" isn’t a cute trivia fact about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; it’s a declaration that the Western’s heroic musical vocabulary had become suspicious. Instead of brass fanfares that tell you who to admire, he hands the audience an animal signal - raw, spatial, and a little uncanny. The frontier is no longer a stage for clean myth; it’s a habitat, and the humans inside it are just another species competing for territory.

The psychological claim is doing real work here. A "realistic" sound becomes an idea in the listener’s head: alertness, hunger, threat, loneliness. You don’t have to know what a coyote means to feel what it does. Morricone exploits that pre-linguistic reaction, then repeats and stylizes it until it functions like a melody. That’s the trick: he takes something you’d expect to hear off-screen and turns it into a motif you can’t escape, collapsing environment and interiority.

In the context of Sergio Leone’s operatic close-ups and moral murk, the animal call fits perfectly. It mocks the genre’s old certainties while giving the film a hook so distinctive it’s practically a logo. Morricone isn’t scoring cowboys; he’s scoring a landscape that has swallowed them.