"I come from a background of experimental music which mingled real sounds together with musical sounds"
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Morricone is quietly rejecting the idea that film music should behave like a well-mannered orchestra, sealed off from the mess of the world. “Experimental music” is the credential, but the real flex is in the phrase “mingled real sounds together with musical sounds,” which collapses a hierarchy most listeners don’t realize they’ve absorbed: that a note is art and a noise is just life getting in the way.
The intent isn’t academic provocation for its own sake. It’s a practical aesthetic that explains why his scores feel bodily and cinematic rather than merely decorative. A whip crack, a typewriter clatter, a breath, a gun cock, a jew’s harp twang, a chorus used like a texture instead of a hymn - these aren’t gimmicks. They’re ways of making sound carry narrative information. “Real sounds” smuggle in place, labor, threat, and ritual. They turn the soundtrack into a second camera.
The subtext is also autobiographical: Morricone came up adjacent to the postwar Italian avant-garde, where tape music and musique concrete treated everyday audio as compositional material. When he brings that mindset into spaghetti westerns or political thrillers, he’s importing high-modernist permission into pop culture, then making it sing. It’s why his work can feel both strange and instantly hummable: melody holds your hand while texture unsettles you.
Context matters here: cinema was becoming louder, more industrial, more mediated. Morricone isn’t lamenting that shift; he’s weaponizing it, insisting the modern world’s sonic debris belongs in the music - because it already lives in the story.
The intent isn’t academic provocation for its own sake. It’s a practical aesthetic that explains why his scores feel bodily and cinematic rather than merely decorative. A whip crack, a typewriter clatter, a breath, a gun cock, a jew’s harp twang, a chorus used like a texture instead of a hymn - these aren’t gimmicks. They’re ways of making sound carry narrative information. “Real sounds” smuggle in place, labor, threat, and ritual. They turn the soundtrack into a second camera.
The subtext is also autobiographical: Morricone came up adjacent to the postwar Italian avant-garde, where tape music and musique concrete treated everyday audio as compositional material. When he brings that mindset into spaghetti westerns or political thrillers, he’s importing high-modernist permission into pop culture, then making it sing. It’s why his work can feel both strange and instantly hummable: melody holds your hand while texture unsettles you.
Context matters here: cinema was becoming louder, more industrial, more mediated. Morricone isn’t lamenting that shift; he’s weaponizing it, insisting the modern world’s sonic debris belongs in the music - because it already lives in the story.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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