Ennio Morricone composed over 400 film and television scores and more than 100 classical works, and he did it without ever moving to Hollywood. Born in Rome in 1928 to a trumpeter father, he entered the Santa Cecilia Conservatory at twelve and finished a four-year harmony program in six months. This episode follows him from walking out of a broadcasting job at RAI on his first day, because employees could not air their own music, to arranging pop hits at RCA where he smuggled conservatory harmony into three-minute songs like Mina’s Se telefonando.

We examine his 1964 reunion with former classmate Sergio Leone on A Fistful of Dollars, where a roughly $200,000 budget ruled out a Hollywood orchestra and pushed him toward whips, gunshots, anvils, whistling, and a Fender electric guitar. We cover his experimental noise collective Il Gruppo and its 1970 album The Feedback, his horror work with Dario Argento and on John Carpenter’s The Thing, his 63-year marriage to Maria Travia, his drawn chess match against Boris Spassky, his long partnership with Giuseppe Tornatore, and his first competitive Oscar in 2016 at age 87.

• How eight key changes in one pop song build tension before the chorus release
• Why Leone played Morricone’s themes on set and extended scenes so the music would not end
• The pseudonym Dan Savio and the worry about an Italian take on the American West
• How years of free improvisation prepared him to score atonal dread
• His influence on Hans Zimmer, Danger Mouse, Muse, and Metallica