Conclusion

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.