Translator: Claude Sonnet 5 (released 6-30-2026). Prompts written by Hoc Tro.
Note: this is an often overlooked but fantastic skill from Claude AI. It can read a transcript in one language, then write a complete essay in another language.
I used to watch this video, not understanding a word the Maestro was saying, but now I could, thanks to Claude Sonnet 5 AI !
From here on out, it would be all generated by Claude.
Table of Contents
- Introduction — Morricone's Prepared Remarks
- I. Why Music and Film Are Sister Arts
- II. Montage, Synchronization Points, and the Discipline of Musical Form
- III. The Composer's Responsibility to a Mass Audience
- IV. Three Chapters Recapped — and the Confusion Around "Electronic" and "Contemporary" Music
- V. Source Music vs. the Score: Amapola and Yesterday in Once Upon a Time in America
- VI. Working with Directors: Sergio Leone, Pasolini, and the Question of Trust
- VII. On Repeating Oneself: Cinema Paradiso, The Untouchables, and Falling Out with Two Directors
- VIII. The Mission: The Ave Maria, the Te Deum, and the Real Score Behind Marco Polo
- IX. Silence as Violence: A Creaking Ladder, a Coffee Cup, and Once Upon a Time in the West
- X. Painting Has No Duration — Film Does
- XI. Tonal Dictatorship, Atonal Freedom, and Smuggling Serialism into a Tonal Score
- XII. Composing 1900 in the Dark
- XIII. What Real Electronic Music Actually Is
- XIV. Why Contemporary Composers Rarely Score Films — and the Immorality of Ghostwriting
- XV. An Uncompromising Failure, and Turning Down Old Gringo for Cinema Paradiso
- XVI. Writing a Score as if It Already Existed
- XVII. On Vangelis and the Ambiguity of a Suggestive Rhythm
- XVIII. Composing Before or After the Edit
- XIX. Program Music, Respighi, and Scoring the French Revolution
- XX. Theater, Film Projection, and a Final Recommendation
- Closing
Introduction — Morricone's Prepared Remarks
MORRICONE: (Applause) Good morning. I've prepared a few things — I've written some notes, and afterward I'll wait for your questions, because your curiosity probably deserves, and will get, a clearer answer than anything I can offer here in this very brief talk on music for cinema and musical language.
MORRICONE: To understand the sometimes miraculous mystery of applying music to a film, one has to understand the essential nature shared by these two arts. Far be it from me to think music is essential to the existence of cinema today — in fact, I think a truly rigorous cinema should avoid the use of other arts too, not just music. But that would take us far afield from what I want to discuss here today.
I. Why Music and Film Are Sister Arts
MORRICONE: The essential thing that cinema and music share is their common temporal nature: it would not be possible to watch and listen to a film, or to listen to a piece of music, without reckoning with something at once concrete and abstract — their duration. To put it in a formula, we might borrow the phrase "energy-space-time," with all the implications specific to these two arts of ours.
MORRICONE: With that said, applying music to a film always happens for empirical, intuitive reasons. It takes into account the film's montage — its dynamism and horizontality — and the physical depth of its images — their stillness and verticality. It's on these two planes, conceptually and technically, that the application of music takes place, and music will work all the more effortlessly and effectively the more the composer is able to conceptualize feelings and give feeling to concepts.
MORRICONE: If cinema, by its nature, is flat — falsely deep, as you can see by watching a landscape projected with no sound at all, where a meadow and a receding row of trees or a road simply gets lost — then only music, or rather the choice of music, has the task of giving that false depth truth, of restoring reality to it. Its effectiveness is tied inseparably to the composer's ability to make it expressive, not just physically but abstractly deep, by conceptualizing the feelings the film wants to convey — feelings to which the film owes not only its commercial reasons for existing but also the expressive purpose that justifies its creation.
MORRICONE: As for the film's physical horizontality — the dynamism of the editing and the sequencing of images — the value and function of the music rests entirely on rhythm. That doesn't mean a fast-cut sequence can't carry static music, or a physically deep sequence dynamic, rhythmic music. What I mean is that cinema receives from music a vitality that makes its own expressiveness explicit — a vitality that natural, essential temporality contributes to. Otherwise, none of this would depend on the quality of the music at all, on its technical or artistic value.
MORRICONE: These are reflections I've felt the need to make about applying pre-existing music to a film — music already established by history: Bach, Mozart, Mahler, to name a few of many examples. The consensus audiences have always granted certain composers of the past convinced me that the effectiveness of that music on film — its functionality as well as its expressiveness — isn't really the point, since music only has to express itself. It's tied strictly to form, which as a sonic object is what allows it to be experienced at all. Hence my claim: music commissioned for cinema has to be music in the formal, grammatical, syntactic sense — a language, even one very distant from other languages, that communicates with the listener. Music applied to images has to carry the same values as the music of the great composers I just mentioned. It goes without saying: for music to work on a film, it has to be music. The more it truly is music, the more it gives the film the expressive, profound meaning that justifies its own production.
II. Montage, Synchronization Points, and the Discipline of Musical Form
MORRICONE: What we call a "sync point" is an element of the editing, a visual component that can shape musical form decisively. At a sync point, the composer has to account for a change of image, or for an event — or several events, even psychological and therefore invisible ones — within a sequence, or a change of course in the director's intentions. You all know what a sync point is, right? Let me spell it out anyway, in case there's any doubt: sync points are the moments where director and composer agree that the music should vary from what came before, so a new musical event begins. Sometimes this matches a change of image; sometimes it matches an emotional or psychological shift in something that isn't seen but that the audience is still meant to understand.
MORRICONE: A sync point handled superficially fractures the musical form, breaking it up illogically — the way misplacing the punctuation on a page of prose would. The danger is fragmenting the film, making it incoherent right at the moment when unity and the smooth circularity of the cuts is what's needed. A film's sync points should be honored with an almost casual touch — or better, a deliberate, calculated appearance of casualness — carrying the musical and visual discourse forward without breaking it. Mistakes here, and the wrong choices that follow, have produced scores that don't serve the film well — especially when the sync points pile up, and the music ends up out of breath, chopped into pieces, unable to express anything useful for the images.
MORRICONE: When I talk about "form," I don't just mean the classic, established sonata form — I mean any form or non-form. "Form," here, should be understood as a coherent musical event: organized sound, with all its micro- and macro-components, correctly notated and performed, as a purely sonic object.
III. The Composer's Responsibility to a Mass Audience
MORRICONE: We all know a fact conditions a film's very existence: how costly it sometimes is to make, and how it's experienced collectively in movie theaters. The more successful a film is, the more money it returns to whoever risked spending — sometimes enormous — capital to finance it. That capital flowing back to whoever advanced it keeps the production cycle going, financing other films. And it's into this production logic that the composer's responsibility gets grafted: the responsibility for how he writes his music, regardless of his own absolute aesthetic or technical convictions.
MORRICONE: To serve a film's commercial and production logic, the composer historically has to express himself in a language an average listener can understand, staying far from banality. This is where his responsibility begins — toward the director, the producer, the audience, but above all toward himself, his professional dignity, and his own conscience as an artist. He's the one who has to resolve, privately, the dilemmas of his own creativity, its ambiguities and compromises. There are countless pressures pushing toward banal, meaningless music of the lowest kind; countless music publishers, record executives, certain producers, but also certain directors and editors, who will try to push him toward the easiest path — toward what's already been heard, already validated by success, and therefore already old.
MORRICONE: How should a composer defend himself, his professionalism, his art, and the film he's been hired to interpret? How does he morally redeem his own work? What kind of musical language results from all these pressures, between the composer and the conditioning of mass media? I'll leave that open — I'll take your questions now, and I hope to give clear, thorough answers.
IV. Three Chapters Recapped — and the Confusion Around "Electronic" and "Contemporary" Music
MORRICONE: I don't know if I've been clear in this brief introduction — I touched on a few chapters to stimulate your questions. First was the possibility that music and cinema are, in a sense, sister arts, in that both only acquire expressive value through time. We couldn't imagine a film sequence lasting a few seconds, or a piece of music lasting a few seconds — though there are striking exceptions, in advertising, or in music: Webern wrote extremely short bagatelles — seven of them lasting three and a half minutes altogether, some barely fifteen or twenty seconds. So it's not out of the question that music can concentrate a musical idea into a few seconds. But as a rule, both music and film need time — even brief time, but time — to express themselves. You couldn't say the same of a car, for example.
MORRICONE: So the first chapter was about that. The second was about form determined by sync points, and above all by the cuts of the editing, which condition musical form — and this is the serious problem facing anyone who writes music for film: the film needs music that corrects, in a sense, what's peculiar to the film itself — its cutting. If the music itself fragments at every cut, we'll certainly end up with a fragmentary work, and both the music and the film will suffer for it. So the composer's duty is to stay pliant against the cuts — though I've done the opposite myself in certain deliberate cases, matching a hard cut with a complete change in the music.
MORRICONE: The other short chapter was on how a musical language for cinema can be shaped by what the audience, the producer, the director, the record industry expect — by what people believe is valuable when it isn't at all; by what many believe is "electronic music" when it's nothing of the sort; by what people think is "contemporary music" when that isn't contemporary music either. These are historical misunderstandings repeated every day — and perhaps you yourselves are victims of them too: how many of you say "electronic music" or "modern music" when you really mean rock music? All of this was invented, to some degree, for economic and commercial reasons — and so the composer who writes for cinema has to reckon with these facts, even when he doesn't agree with them. So, to answer the question I posed at the start: I'll explain how you can make conditioned film music like this without spitting in your own reflection in the mirror — while keeping the professional and artistic dignity that a composer, an artist, must always hold onto.
V. Source Music vs. the Score: Amapola and Yesterday in Once Upon a Time in America
A STUDENT: I'd like to know something about how you actually work, with reference to some films we've watched recently — for example, Once Upon a Time in America, which you discussed with Sergio Leone. It's one of the examples you mentioned: there are pieces in that soundtrack that aren't entirely composed by you — "Amapola," for instance, which recurs frequently. Was that piece chosen before you started composing, or after — did you write music around it, or was it chosen once the score already existed? And separately: there's a famous, long-running advertisement built around one of your pieces — a mineral water ad, if I remember right, using the oboe theme from The Mission. What's your relationship with advertising? And when a director asks you for, say, "a moonlight feeling" or "a cavalry-charge feeling," how do you respond — do you refuse, unfairly?
MORRICONE: "Amapola" had to be in the screenplay from the start — it wasn't something I could choose, because it had already been chosen, after careful research, by the screenwriters, precisely because it had to belong to that specific era the film depicts. In fact every musical quotation in that film was chosen with real rigor. Remember the scene change when De Niro returns to the station — "Yesterday" marks a passage of time there, and only that piece of music does. So I couldn't choose it — I could have, if I'd been asked to, but instead I orchestrated it: I orchestrated "Amapola," I orchestrated "Yesterday," and everything else that was used. But none of that, for me, is really the score of the film — I'd call it "source" music: the little house band playing in a nightclub, the kind of music that exists because we live surrounded by music — music hasn't been banned yet. Writing that doesn't concern me the way the characters' actual emotional and dramatic relationships concern me. I take care never to let a casual, realistic source cue — a radio, a jukebox — get confused with the music that belongs to the characters themselves.
MORRICONE: As for a director asking for "a moonlight feeling" — these days, at my age, I've been turning that kind of request down for years. I'd worry that reusing an easy, generic emotional trope risks becoming pure "easy listening" — profitable, sure, the way some of the old orchestrators (George Melachrino, Mantovani, and others you're too young to know) built entire careers on it, and with a certain professional dignity, relative to worse, purely commercial pop music. I tried something similar, deliberately, in a couple of places in Once Upon a Time in America — the little period-style string orchestra playing "Amapola" at a restaurant is meant to sound exactly like what an ensemble in a venue like that could actually play, nothing more. Elsewhere in the same film I let myself go further — over an old-fashioned gramophone recording, I layered a second, more sophisticated score that Leone hadn't explicitly asked for, because a director without musical training can't ask for something he doesn't know is possible.
VI. Working with Directors: Sergio Leone, Pasolini, and the Question of Trust
MORRICONE: There are many kinds of directors. Some say: "I want this, this, this, and this" — at my age now, for some years, I've turned those down, because if a director doesn't trust the composer he himself called in to score his film, and won't let him think, propose, and instead wants to dictate to him, then it seems to me the only honest answer is: either I work this way, or I don't work at all. I've walked away from directors for exactly this reason — some of them years ago; I won't name names, though I could.
MORRICONE: Others go to the opposite extreme — and here I have to tell you about Pasolini. Pasolini came to me for Salò, and brought a typed list of pieces he wanted to use — pre-existing pieces, not something to compose. I told him: "You've called the wrong person — I write music, I don't adapt other people's music onto a film." And he — the only director who's ever done this, it's worth saying — told me: "Then do whatever you want." It was extraordinary: I did exactly what I wanted.
MORRICONE: But when a composer does whatever he wants because the director pushes him to — and there are others who just say "do whatever, I don't know what to tell you" — the composer carries a heavier responsibility. I never go into a recording session without the director's consent for the musical ideas I want to pursue. I'd never do that, because I can't force a director to accept something he wouldn't want. So before I even record — before I even compose — I ask for his consent, I discuss my ideas with him. I might change my mind in some cases; I can take a director's suggestions, I don't rule that out. But I insist that, when I'm called in front of a film, I get to have the right reactions myself, without anyone telling me what to do. I might come up with a good idea and describe it after days of reflection, or all at once — I've rarely, but sometimes, jotted down notes, not musical ones, while watching a film in the dark. I always insist on that blank-page freedom. If what I propose isn't shared by the director, I'm ready to open a dialogue and find a common idea — one that isn't purely mine, and that the director shouldn't accept purely passively either. Only that way can I go spend millions on a recording session; otherwise I can't.
MORRICONE: I've already described the two opposite poles: one is the director who dictates everything and the composer just executes — that's not for me; the other says "do whatever you want" — that's Pasolini. Sergio Leone, actually, represented both types at once: he wanted a specific musical approach from me, and after I refused, he told me to do what I wanted — an ambiguous position, if there ever was one.
VII. On Repeating Oneself: Cinema Paradiso, The Untouchables, and Falling Out with Two Directors
A STUDENT: I was curious about something — watching Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, I was struck by how certain aspects of the music resembled things you'd already composed before. I'm thinking of The Untouchables — the notes aren't identical, correct me if I'm wrong, but they begin the same way. What I'd already heard in The Untouchables, I heard again in Cinema Paradiso, in a piece I can't name exactly. Do you ever feel influenced by your own earlier music — reusing an idea you've already had once, for different, maybe dramatic, reasons, even without the same motive behind it?
MORRICONE: That's an excellent observation. It's entirely possible I unintentionally repeated something I'd already done — it's very possible, because an author has the right to repeat himself. It would be wrong only if he did it deliberately, selling the same thing twice to two different buyers. But as long as the author is being honest, believes he's expressing himself as well as he can in that moment, I don't see why someone with a real artistic personality has to reinvent music that may already have been invented centuries ago. A composer's own stylistic fingerprints, like any artist's, are bound to keep surfacing — I couldn't deny that about myself if I tried. After so many years of work, I find myself considering something fairly private: that despite having made so many different films, there's a musical throughline running through all of them — one that I recognize, and that even people without much musical background recognize too. So yes, this happens, without a doubt.
MORRICONE: And it happens in more deliberate ways too — as with Gillo Pontecorvo. When I made Burn! with him, he'd fallen in love with a piece I'd written for another film, and I fought hard not to redo it. I fought with the director I'd originally written it for too, who was attached to it — we didn't fight exactly, but Pontecorvo forced my hand in the end. What I wrote for him wasn't identical, but it closely resembled a very specific structure of that earlier piece — he wanted something like it, felt it worked too well: he'd tried it himself, without telling me, lifting it onto another editing reel and running it against his own film — he'd gotten used to it, and wanted it, period. That's a case, I'll admit, of my being — unfortunately — dishonest in service of Pontecorvo's film, and partly disloyal to the other director. But what could I do? Pontecorvo and I have always been close friends — we've made few films together, because he makes few films, but we're close — and I couldn't leave him stranded. So I did something I shouldn't have, but in the film, it genuinely worked: the scene where Dolores returns triumphant with the whole population on the beach — anyone who remembers the film remembers that cue. It runs two, two and a half minutes, and it's quite close, structurally, to the earlier film I mentioned, which came out in theaters around the same time.
MORRICONE: The other case was The Cannibals, with Liliana Cavani — the piece there was fairly similar again, to the one I'd made for Pontecorvo. We didn't argue about it — I told her, "talk to Gillo." After that film I never worked with Liliana again, even though she's a major director. That's one of the cases where I simply wasn't asked back — not because I refused outright, but because, after that episode, I was never called again. As with a number of other cases, for that matter.
VIII. The Mission: The Ave Maria, the Te Deum, and the Real Score Behind Marco Polo
A STUDENT: I want to bring up that masterpiece, The Mission, which I love enormously. I'd like to know about the genesis of some of its pieces — I was struck especially by the final chorus, by the Ave Maria you composed, and by the Te Deum. How did those come about?
MORRICONE: The Ave Maria and the Te Deum are both very brief pieces — the Ave Maria is barely a minute long, the Te Deum runs a little past two minutes. Those are, in a sense, "covers" — pieces of music I handled with a lot of care, even though I don't consider them essential to the film in the strict sense. They work beautifully because they're sung by the characters themselves — they're a realistic, diegetic source: they don't come from behind the screen, they come from inside it. So they carry a different kind of importance than what I called "casual" music earlier — the Guaraní Ave Maria, or the Te Deum, could have been written by any composer, not necessarily me, because they're objective, historical pieces. I worked from a specific premise: this was music brought by the Jesuit missionaries from Europe — processional chants, because they couldn't very well teach the natives Gregorian chant; they could have tried, but instead, rightly, they taught them the processional songs sung behind religious processions. That's the origin of that Guaraní Ave Maria and the Te Deum. But that isn't The Mission's actual film score — the score is something else entirely, with a different kind of knowledge behind it.
MORRICONE: Take my research for Marco Polo as another example — music meant to evoke the East, for a story set in the East. Almost every film I've scored has, at some point, called for "Chinese" music — but writing genuinely Chinese music isn't really my business. I've written "Chinese" music that works fine for the whole world — as with Montaldo's Marco Polo — but wouldn't work in China itself. It's the same as if I tried writing Arabic music: it's not possible, we don't have the instruments or the players for it in Italy, and I don't know how to write it, because it's a tradition that isn't mine, that doesn't concern me. If you want genuinely Arabic music in a film, you have to get it on location, from a composer of that tradition.
MORRICONE: So, with that premise laid out for Montaldo, I did the opposite: I studied the history of the period's background music, certain old Chinese compositional practices, and I even realized some of them, even without the right instruments or performers — but culturally, what I produced could work anywhere in the world, just not in China. The real challenge of Marco Polo wasn't that "Chinese" surface at all — it was finding reasons to stay tethered to a historical period that was, musically speaking, quite austere, while still making myself understood by a modern listener, without ending up with something that felt like a museum piece. The problem was that modulation, in the sense of moving from one key to another, didn't yet exist in that period — so I wrote several pieces that stay motionless, built on just one or two chords for the entire piece, varying only the theme, its orchestration, adding choruses, but with total harmonic stillness, because the historical period didn't allow for modulating passages. Curiously, this connects to something a lot of rock musicians do too, staying on that same harmonic simplicity — though they do it because they're not equipped to complicate the harmony, while I arrived at similar simplifications for entirely different reasons: historical coherence.
MORRICONE: Where I did modulate — in the second half of the main theme heard at the start, in the titles, and elsewhere in the film, in the viola line — that's really a modal passage rather than a true modulation, since modulation in the proper sense didn't exist yet: it moves toward very distant tones, the way Gregorian chant moves from one mode to another. Through passages like these I managed to travel quite far — carrying a melody that starts in D minor all the way to a very distant key — while still keeping the historical coherence I wanted, without simply writing "ancient" music outright. Everything else — every trick of the orchestrator's trade, in the good sense of the word — I allowed myself freely; I stayed tethered to history only through those specific harmonic details. That, and not the "Chinese" surface color, is the real music of Marco Polo.
IX. Silence as Violence: A Creaking Ladder, a Coffee Cup, and Once Upon a Time in the West
A STUDENT: I'd like to know about your collaboration with directors when it comes to absolute silence — scenes where there's no music at all. Do you decide that, or does the director? In Once Upon a Time in America, for instance, there's a scene where Noodles returns, and the other character, seated on his throne, stirs his coffee with a little spoon in complete silence — it's a very effective, almost violent silence. What's your relationship with the sound engineer, with sound in general?
MORRICONE: I always say what I think — but yes, it's true that some of those choices, in some cases, were Leone's own, over the twenty-some years we worked together. Let me tell you a story. Years ago I used to give concerts with an improvisation ensemble, Nuova Consonanza. Once we went to Florence — this was twenty, twenty-two years ago — to give a concert; we performed the second half. The first half is what I want to tell you about, because it was an extraordinarily important experience for me.
MORRICONE: The audience was still filing in, not even knowing what to expect, when a performer walked onto a small, low stage, took off his coat, hung it on a coat rack, while people were still finding their seats. Then he climbed up onto a kind of raised walkway that ran around the whole perimeter of the stage, using a ladder that had been carried in from one spot to another. Leaning out from this wooden platform, while the audience was still coming in, he began, very slightly, to twist this wooden ladder — you could barely see the movement at all; you only knew he was twisting it because it let out these very faint creaks. The audience kept arriving. This went on, with small variations, for forty minutes, until everyone was seated and waiting for something to happen — not after ten minutes, not after twenty, but eventually people understood something significant was happening. It was comic, honestly, telling it now, and it was comic in the moment too — but for me it was tremendously important. He kept twisting that ladder for forty, forty-five minutes, then finally let go, climbed down, put his coat back on, and left. That was the end of the first half.
MORRICONE: After reflecting on it for a while, I told this story to Leone: the point of that little performance was that any sound at all — any sound of everyday life, from the crudest to the subtlest — isolated from the context that produces it and set inside silence, takes on a meaning that transcends its realistic function and takes on another meaning we can't even name — we can't predict, empirically, what magical or dramatic potential any sound at all might carry once isolated and placed inside absolute silence.
MORRICONE: Telling Leone this story fascinated him enormously, and out of it came — anyone who's seen the film will remember — the first twenty minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West, built from a sequence of these realistic sounds. Not exactly those same sounds, and helped along by the image too, so it's not identical — but he was encouraged by that story, and being a pragmatist, he went and did it. The coffee cup is the same idea: that little cup makes you understand the nervousness, the tension in that moment. In cases like that, the composer absolutely cannot compete with something that already carries its own, self-sufficient meaning — music there would be, in a sense, an imposition, a clarification where no clarification is needed. Music has no absolute obligation to intervene. Ideally, you'd want a film rigorous enough that it wouldn't need music at all — that it would already carry, in its own construction, the sonic and expressive results it needs.
X. Painting Has No Duration — Film Does
A STUDENT: I want to tie this back to something you raised earlier — the relationship between film and music, and more specifically cinematic and musical duration, which doesn't exist in painting the same way. First: in what sense shouldn't a film rely on music as an additional expressive device — and what, then, is the one device a film should rely on, if not the sum of everything it's made of? And on painting: Professor Rondolino, who once came to speak to us about short films and animation, made a comparison to painting regarding duration of viewing versus the cinematic image. I'm a little confused about how the duration implicit in viewing a painting — the time it takes to take in all the elements of a composition — compares to the duration implicit in the movement of images unfolding across a film's sequences. How do you reconcile two things that seem incompatible?
MORRICONE: So, in your view, painting has no duration of its own? It doesn't — you can take in a painting in a single glance, in one second, and be struck by it: I think of certain paintings I've bought that struck me immediately, in an instant — I fell in love with them at once, no time needed, not as a first impact. But if the painting really is a work of art you love and want to keep looking at, then yes, it asks for time too — you could stand in front of it for six hours. But that's not an intrinsic property of the painting stealing your time; that's you, standing there in admiration. If instead you linger on a single image in a film you like, you can't — the film keeps moving regardless, and so the film escapes you. Which, paradoxically, confirms exactly what I said before.
A STUDENT: Could you explain a bit more what you mean by using tonal and atonal music together for the same result — as if they were two distinct systems of musical creation, but able to coexist?
(This question carries directly into the next section.)
XI. Tonal Dictatorship, Atonal Freedom, and Smuggling Serialism into a Tonal Score
MORRICONE: Tonal music is the kind that's been established for centuries, the kind whose handful of notes fix themselves onto our ear, onto our brain — it's practically a dictatorship, in that sense. If you're in the key of C major, D is less important, G will be the prime minister, and F, the subdominant, will be the queen — there's a clear, precise hierarchy. That's tonal music, explained in slightly sociological terms. Atonal music, by contrast, doesn't take the seven notes of the traditional scale but all twelve pitches of the Western tempered system — other, non-European systems have far more notes than that, but ours has twelve. The revolution began with Schoenberg, and even earlier, with the dissolution already audible in late Wagner. These twelve tones carry equal importance among themselves: C matters exactly as much as C-sharp, F as much as G. The reason ordinary listeners without specific musical training find a contemporary piece difficult is that it lacks that hierarchy, that red thread of C-G-F holding things together — so they get lost in an enormous desert of twelve equal tones. They get lost mainly because that recognizable shape, that red thread, that little red dot that's always present in tonal music, is missing. In atonal, contemporary music — with its full serialization not just of the twelve tones but of every other musical parameter too: pitch, dynamics, rhythm, everything — the listener loses that sense of clarity they've felt for years, for centuries, which has become almost constitutional for all of us. So people feel lost in front of atonal music — but they should get used to it more, should listen to a piece of contemporary music as often as they listen to pop songs, and they'd start discovering aspects of it that are genuinely very interesting.
A STUDENT: That's clearer now — I thought I understood you to say you can exploit both of these systems at once, in the same solution. Is that possible?
MORRICONE: I wouldn't want to put too much weight on tonality by itself — I touched on this earlier, around Marco Polo — but you could also frame it this way: I was talking about the pressures a composer faces writing for cinema. There's no doubt those pressures exist — having to answer to the audience, the producer, the director, the music publisher, the record label is certainly a form of being conditioned. Though, honestly, I've often been proud of certain constraints — even when they're annoying, overcoming them, fighting against them, has felt, in the cases where I succeeded, like accomplishing something musically important — even if none of that is meant to interest the audience; it's private, personal. So these pressures can be overcome by a composer in various ways, and he has to find his own path. I said earlier that, having to write "dictatorial," tonal music by necessity — because audiences need to hear something clear and precise, a message that isn't hard to take in, that doesn't make the film difficult to understand, since overly complicated music would just distract — applying contemporary parameters on top of tonal music was, for me, a discovery. I didn't arrive at it all at once; it came gradually. The full serialization of every musical parameter, the way it's practiced in contemporary composition, I've applied often, very often, in film music — and now I'm starting to bring it, a little timidly, into the music I write outside of cinema too, for concerts and other occasions.
MORRICONE: When I applied this, for instance, to "Amapola" — a piece harmonically as simple as possible, built on two very simple chords — layering a technique consolidated by tonality together with the full serialization associated with the Darmstadt school, I was making a point about a lack of harmonic footing: this music, even while remaining tonal, stays suspended. In twelve-tone music that suspension comes from the system's own nature, since the twelve tones share no tonal kinship and are therefore inherently suspended. I, instead, made a piece feel suspended while its metric and rhythmic functions stayed absolutely necessary — as in "Amapola," and in other pieces. It's a kind of mania of mine: adapting, and in some way redeeming my own work, my own art, after having been constrained by it. When I say "tonal" and "atonal," I mean, in shorthand, the whole range of contemporary musical experience.
XII. Composing 1900 in the Dark
A STUDENT: I have the microphone back — I'm from the photography program, so this interests me especially: you mentioned paintings you've bought — what are your tastes in painting, which painters do you like, and has it ever happened that you conceived a piece of music starting from an image, from a painting?
MORRICONE: Yes — the image is fundamental. Often, when I say I was struck by certain images, certain films, it's because at that moment there wasn't even dialogue yet, and the images alone gave me the stimulus. Some very important material for Bertolucci's 1900 I wrote in the dark — I already had notes, musical ideas, and when I played the themes for Bernardo, he was thrilled, evidently. In fact I didn't work much on the actual orchestration for 1900 — that came later — but on finding the themes I worked very fast, almost all of it, while watching the footage, already half-expecting what might come to me. I'd brought blank sheets of paper with me, and over time I developed a way of writing music even without a musical staff — if you'd like, I can show you at the end.
XIII. What Real Electronic Music Actually Is
A STUDENT: I'm curious about your relationship — or lack of one — with electronics, with synthesizers, with all of that.
MORRICONE: First we need to agree on what "electronic" actually means. In recent years I've been fairly scandalized by how loosely this term gets used. Electronic music isn't what everyone — probably you included — thinks it is. To be clear: music that reproduces tempered sounds, the tempered pitches of the traditional scale, is certainly not electronic music. Music that imitates timbres that already exist, that could be played on traditional instruments, is not electronic music either. Real electronic music is music that uses, in varying proportions, the only four fundamental waveforms — the sine wave, the sawtooth, the square wave, and the triangle wave — plus white noise. From these elements, generated by electrical generators built specifically for the purpose, and from combining these waveforms in different proportions, you get all the timbres you already know from traditional instruments — but above all, you get timbres you can't even imagine. The composer-engineer, or engineer-composer, who sits down in front of a machine like that can invent something new at every moment, and can patiently search out sounds that are otherwise nonexistent and unrepeatable. That's electronic music. You don't hear it around much — it's not the music of rock, it's not synthesized bass lines.
XIV. Why Contemporary Composers Rarely Score Films — and the Immorality of Ghostwriting
A STUDENT: In an interview, I believe with [Salvatore] Sciarrino, he said contemporary composers aren't called on enough to score films. You're also a contemporary composer, and maybe producers trust you more because they know your music won't complicate things — whereas Sciarrino and others might. Does Sciarrino have a point to complain about?
MORRICONE: He's right to complain. I've always fought — I can swear to it here — to help contemporary composers get into cinema, and I mean real research composers, not people writing little tunes. There's a real problem, though: a composer going to the movies with ordinary audiences can't put them through something experimental. That's essential — if Sciarrino wrote film music the way he writes his concert pieces, no one would put it in the film, and that's not an insult to him — it's because part of the drama, and even the pleasure, of being a film composer lies in finding the balance between two opposing forces, as I said at the start: the professional, artistic dignity of a composer living with today's pressures, and the film's absolute need for an audience, because cinema without an audience doesn't exist. If a composer like Sciarrino recognizes that necessity — whether after a score gets rejected once, or by thinking it through in advance and finding the kind of compromise I mentioned earlier, between tonal and atonal — he could do this job beautifully; he has all the technical tools, he and many others like him.
MORRICONE: But there's a lack of trust — people would rather bring in a singer-songwriter who doesn't know how to write music, doesn't actually write it himself, but hums melodies that a trained composer then writes down, arranges, and hands to an orchestra — sometimes even conducts, as I've done myself in my time — while the singer-songwriter signs his own name to the film's music credit. That's an immoral act, and I hope future directors don't repeat it — hiring someone who doesn't know music to put his name on a film's score. I hope the future directors sitting here avoid that insult to music and to real composers, and think instead of the people who spent years and years studying to become musicians before they could even write a note. Think carefully, in the future, before calling in amateurs — many of whom are friends of mine, but everyone should do their own job. Even I, if you sat me down in a recording booth and asked me to sing, could manage a little something — but I don't do it, because everyone has their trade.
XV. An Uncompromising Failure, and Turning Down Old Gringo for Cinema Paradiso
MORRICONE: Before we forget — one film gave me real material to think about, and I mention it constantly: Un Uomo a Metà ("A Man in Half"). It was made by a director who had roughly 120 million lire in his pocket and put every bit of it into that one film — a passionate film, cold in how it was shot, but warm underneath; you'll see very careful, sought-after cinematography, every image considered. It was a film felt deeply by its director, savaged by an incredibly cruel critical reception at Venice, and it barely made it into theaters. That director went on to work only occasionally afterward, in educational television, and never made another feature — undone, I think, by that whole experience, and by the improvised way other people handled a work he'd thought about and wanted to make for years, almost like a testament. That director let me — because the sophistication of the images demanded it — write music I consider genuinely contemporary, in the sense I mean by that word: finally, music applied to cinema with the dignity of a composer working in his own time. That's what led me to keep recommending it — that, and the sheer beauty of the film, which really is beautiful.
A STUDENT: I wanted to ask something — to compose, do you prefer working from the screenplay, or from the finished, edited film?
MORRICONE: The relationship between cinema and music is always strange, mysterious — I've come to realize that whether a score feels "right" for a film depends on things beyond either the director's or the composer's control. A director has to trust a composer, has to believe he can do the job well, without any absolute guarantee the composer can offer beyond the guarantee of his name, of what he's done up to that point. And that's not really a guarantee at all — I've long argued that if you called ten different composers to score the same film, all ten could turn in music that's right and excellent. So what's the "right" music for a film? I don't know — it's an adventure. What a director needs, I think, is to build real rapport with a composer he trusts, whose technique he knows, maybe from work written outside of cinema too — and then commission that reflection from him. The composer, in turn, has to account for that reflection to the director, and discuss it — the discussion comes after the reflection, after the composer's proposals.
MORRICONE: As for whether I prefer working from a screenplay: there are screenplays I genuinely can't follow — I'll admit it, after a few pages I lose the thread completely, and I hand them to my wife, who can follow anything; that's probably a failing of mine. Other screenplays I understand perfectly. When I turned down Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, a few months earlier — between February and March — I told [Franco] Cristaldi I couldn't do it, I was already committed elsewhere. He insisted on sending me the screenplay anyway; I told him not to bother. He sent it regardless. When I read it, I reached the end completely undone by that final scene — extraordinary, from an extraordinary director, an idea that grows organically out of the film itself rather than being dropped in cheaply to move an audience. When that happens to me, I react: I called Cristaldi immediately, told him I was in, and dropped other films to do it — including a major American picture that would have paid far more: [Luis] Puenzo's film, Old Gringo. I gave that up to work on this one instead, because at a certain point that final scene — that's a case where I worked from the screenplay. In other cases I work from the director's own telling of the story — with Leone, for instance, who never lets me read a screenplay at all: he narrates the shots to me, describes the close-up, tells me everything, and only shows me the finished film once it's ready. I know him well enough by now.
A STUDENT: Sorry, I missed which scene of Cinema Paradiso you meant.
MORRICONE: The final one — where the projectionist's reel of every censored kiss he'd spliced out over the years, meant to be returned, is instead kept and left as a bequest to his friend.
XVI. Writing a Score as if It Already Existed
A STUDENT: What do you think of using classical music in film soundtracks?
MORRICONE: I think very highly of it — so much so that, after a lot of reflection, I found a way to apply my own music to a film as if it were pre-existing. You know that music, through its own strange, mysterious magic, can be applied to images — even music never written for those specific images — and produce an extraordinary result. Your own question shows this: applying old, pre-existing, classical music by the great masters of the past to a film works beautifully. It works because that music has coherent formal relationships of its own, clear internal cuts, because it is, simply, music that is itself. I think music that is fully itself is the music that works best in cinema — and that realization changed the way I write for it, in two ways. First: I now write my own music as though it already existed independently of the film — I write it after reading the screenplay, after seeing the film, so the film has influenced me completely, but when I actually write the music, I write it the way you'd talk to an analyst: nobody's ordered this music from me, it's simply what needs to come out, and it has to be a coherent, technically sound piece in its own right, not only an expressive gesture. I realized this precisely from wondering why pre-existing classical music works so often on film: if music not written for the film at all can work that well, why shouldn't music I write specifically for it work even better — since, unlike Mozart, I've actually seen the film and talked to the director, so I'm more accountable to it than he ever was. That pushed me to think about music in a new way: as if I had to forget the film altogether, while unconsciously keeping it present inside me, but leaving myself free to write an autonomous piece.
MORRICONE: This often means I write far more music for a film than I actually end up using. A confidence, to give you an example: the piece that plays over The Mission's closing credits never actually appears inside the film itself — only over the credits. I'd written it without even knowing it would be needed there; it was requested at the last minute, and I already had the score ready, because I'd written it to express something, to work through what I felt I needed to give the film, whether or not it ended up used. Often I find pieces I wrote for a film go unused because the film doesn't need them — but they still served their purpose, for me, as a way of working things out.
XVII. On Vangelis and the Ambiguity of a Suggestive Rhythm
A STUDENT: Do you know Vangelis's work? What do you think of it?
MORRICONE: He writes very pleasant, very good music. But tying this back to what I said earlier — there are many different ways to create emotion through music. I can create emotion with a scale, say; or with a certain rhythm, and it lands powerfully depending on the scene. But at that point it seems to me the composer — and I don't mean Vangelis specifically — is leaning on the explicitness of the image itself, contributing something that's really passive rather than active: because something as simple as a suggestive rhythm can, depending purely on context, be a heart pounding with anxiety, or a drum signal from somewhere in Africa, or any number of other things — precisely because it's so ambiguous, it's easy for the same music to produce the same sensations in a completely different film. That strikes me as a fairly degrading way of making cinema, even though Vangelis himself is a good composer, a good musician. But the way he uses the tools available to him — synthesizers — reproducing tonal music entirely in his studio, without an orchestra even when he could afford one, as a deliberate choice rather than for financial reasons, makes him, I think, a little more culpable than composers who do the same thing purely to save money.
XVIII. Composing Before or After the Edit
A STUDENT: Do you write the music before or after the editing?
MORRICONE: It depends on the film. Sometimes before, sometimes after — I prefer before, ideally before the editing itself, sometimes even before filming, partly because the editor can use the music to cut against, and the edit almost always turns out better when the music already exists. For one thing, the director loves it that way, because any brand-new piece of music he hasn't lived with yet is hard for him to fully accept — whereas if he has time with it, he can grow to love it. If the music arrives at the last minute, as usually happens, the director might like it in general but never come to value it on a poetic level. So my best results have always come when I wrote the music first, and the director's and editor's cut adapts itself to the music rather than the other way around — you see, I keep coming back to the word "pre-existing," which ties into the earlier question. The best marriage between music and film, I think, is never music that simply gets applied on its own, like a servant — always a servant — but real collaboration between two artistic entities, even though music is certainly subordinate to the film as a whole. That collaboration can only come through compromise, the way it does between two people living together. And when I do write after the fact, I do follow the cuts, accompany them, when I'm shown the finished edit — though sometimes I'm not even shown it, because they'd rather surprise me with the final cut all at once, to see whether my eyes widen or not. If they do, all is well; if not, we start over.
XIX. Program Music, Respighi, and Scoring the French Revolution
A STUDENT: I wanted to bring back a question my colleague asked, which you were a bit evasive about: have you ever done the reverse process — written the music first and then imagined images from it? I'm thinking of an animated short we watched, by [Bruno] Bozzetto, built around Ravel's Boléro. Starting from the music, do you ever imagine images — think, "this theme calls for a crowd," or "a close-up"? Have you tried putting yourself in the director's shoes that way?
MORRICONE: Yes, sometimes I do — it's a bit complicated to explain. I might have to, for a French Revolution documentary I'm scoring for French television: I'm undecided whether to write a forty-five-minute piece, a kind of symphony — a rare, tempting opportunity for a composer — and let the director and editor apply it to the images afterward, so the music would come first, shaped purely by the events of the history, rather than the usual way around. I haven't decided. But in general, I can tell you that music shouldn't be born from that kind of direct pictorial prompting at all. It always makes me smile a little, even though I deeply respect the composer, a great orchestrator: Respighi's Pines of Rome — dawn at Villa Giulia, "The Pines of the Appian Way," "the Romans arrive," or The Fountains of Rome, "afternoon," "early morning" — understanding music that way, tied to a written program, doesn't appeal to me at all. That kind of music degrades itself, inviting the audience to pay attention less to the sound itself than to the program the composer or director has laid out in advance. For cinema, I don't even like thinking in terms of specific images before writing the music. If I'm thinking about the story of the French Revolution, I sit down to write a piece about the French Revolution — I don't think of a specific image, I think about the work as a whole; I write a symphony about the Revolution, full stop. There's still the problem of "tailoring" the images to pre-existing music — but that effort belongs to whoever animates the images to it, not to me. If a director later tells me, "it would be good if you put an idea like this here," he gives me that direction afterward, not beforehand — and he can absolutely do that. We all know the story of the French Revolution, how it unfolded, the deaths, the guillotines — I certainly represent that historical reality. But when I write, I'm not thinking of Marie Antoinette being led to the guillotine — I don't think about that; I think about the whole of that period, that moment, the flight from Paris — I think about the entire history, not a single image. The image strikes me once I actually see it; in general I try to avoid imagining one beforehand, partly because I'd probably imagine the wrong one — which is also, maybe, why I don't love reading screenplays: a film made by ten different directors from the exact same screenplay would come out as ten completely different films, so I have real trouble finding a musical line just from reading one.
XX. Theater, Film Projection, and a Final Recommendation
A STUDENT: Another question, unrelated to film scoring: what do you think of the experiment they did with William Tell at La Scala, using film projection alongside the music?
MORRICONE: That's not new. [Luca] Ronconi did something I think is entirely right for the theater: using cinematic projection within a stage production. I saw something similar many years ago, at the Palazzo dei Congressi — an opera based on a text by Peter Weiss, about Nazi crimes — I believe it was called L'Istruttoria ("The Investigation"), with beautiful music, I believe by Luigi Nono, where he used film projection: there wasn't really a live actor on stage in the ordinary sense, but a way of projecting the actor, filmed in various ways; in other cases they also used pre-recorded footage set by the director in advance. So what Ronconi did with the full, four-hour production of William Tell seems to me exactly right. It's been criticized by many, but [Riccardo] Muti rightly answered that in a traditional score — the way you can't simply graft new material into a Rossini opera at a traditionalist house like La Scala — the occasional graft of today's language doesn't bother him at all, and evidently it doesn't bother Muti either. I'd go further myself, sometimes — there are things in the tradition of certain librettos I'd happily rework. I liked the idea, though I never saw the actual staging, of a production of La Bohème done in Macerata, I believe by Ken Russell, where the character dies of a drug overdose instead of illness. I liked that as an idea, even without seeing how it was realized — though of course the music risks sounding a little out of place against a change like that; at that point you'd probably need to rewrite the music too.
A STUDENT: One last thing — could you name a contemporary Italian composer you rate highly?
MORRICONE: I can tell you that Nicola Piovani is one of those who works more seriously than a great many others — not that I don't know other composers doing honest, dignified work, I could name plenty. But — thank you.
Closing
(Applause and the session concludes.)
Transcript source: "Ennio Morricone al CSC – Musica per il Cinema," from the archive of the CSC (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia) / Cineteca Nazionale, Rome. The recording documents a masterclass and audience Q&A given by Ennio Morricone; the exact date is not stated in the source, though internal references (to Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, released 1988, and its screenplay having been read "a few months" before the recording) place it around 1989–1990. This English version is a translation and light cleanup of a raw, heavily garbled Italian YouTube auto-caption transcript: run-on fragments were reorganized into coherent paragraphs, duplicated timestamp text was removed, and a small number of proper nouns mangled by automatic transcription were corrected from unambiguous context (for example, "shander" to Schoenberg, "weber" to Webern, "cristaldo" to Franco Cristaldi, "halmstad" to the Darmstadt school, "old rinco" to Old Gringo). Individual student questioners are not named in the source and are credited generically as "A STUDENT." A short, highly technical passage on the exact instrumentation and harmonic mechanics behind a scoring choice for Once Upon a Time in America was rendered at a higher level of generality where the source transcript was too corrupted to responsibly reconstruct the precise technical claim. No content was invented; where the transcript could not be confidently deciphered, meaning was generalized rather than guessed at in detail.