Daily Inspiration Quote by Ennio Morricone

Morricone’s compliment lands like a scalpel: “a very good arrangement” is praise, but it’s praise with a receipt attached. By immediately adding “but it used existing pieces,” he draws a bright line between craft and authorship, the kind of line only a composer who spent a lifetime fighting to be heard as more than a hired hand would bother to defend.

The context matters. Morricone wrote music that became inseparable from the films it scored, yet film composers are routinely treated as functional, replaceable labor. His work also got endlessly repurposed, reorchestrated, sampled, and lionized by musicians outside the cinema world. So when he appraises Herbie Hancock - a giant in his own right - Morricone isn’t punching down. He’s asserting hierarchy inside the collaborative blur: arranging is interpretation; composing is invention.

The subtext is a quiet grievance about originality in an industry built on reuse. “Existing pieces” carries the faint chill of legal language, as if the real argument is about credit: who gets the aura of genius, who gets the footnote. Morricone’s sentence also reveals his ethics. He can admire the taste, the harmonic intelligence, the feel of Hancock’s treatment while refusing to let that admiration be misread as equivalence.

It’s a line that defends the dignity of the score as authored work, not just stylish wallpaper - and it does so with the driest weapon Morricone had: precision.