induced tinnitus, it makes us clench our jaw in pain. It goes on for twelve tense, eternal seconds before being shorn off by Mortimer’s fatal shot. Conclusion This chapter has only scratched the surface of Morricone’s huge film score output. His timbral lexicon was vast and diverse, owing to his three distinct trajectories in traditional, commercial, and experimental music. Throughout his career Morricone downplayed the importance of melody and wished his audience would, above all else, “assimilate and appreciate the instrumental solutions” he had devised in his soundworlds.78 My hope is that I have provided intriguing tools for future analysis that does just that. The concept of timbral progression I explored in my close reading of The Mission score has broad potential to show how timbre influences filmic narrative, and not just for Morricone’s scores; for example, I applied the same concept to Luke’s Theme from Williams’s Star Wars score. Wallmark’s observations on embodied timbral perception show similar potential, especially when analyzing music with little or no thematic content (see section 5 of this document). And Smalley’s space-form once again shows its power to describe the dramatic functions of musical texture. Finally, timbral analysis alone can yield interesting observations on the social aspects of cinema, like mine above on the Guaraní timbres from The Mission and the electric guitar timbres from the Leone Westerns.
78
Morricone, Anderson, and Miceli, Composing for the Cinema, 172.
109
