CONTENTS

List of Musical Examples

Note on Sources

Translator’s Note

Preface

Introduction: Where These Conversations Come from

CHAPTER 1. A Pact Made with Mephisto: Over a Game of Chess

CHAPTER 2. A Composer Lent to Cinema

On Arranging

The Beginnings in Cinema

Paying My Dues

Luciano Salce

Sergio Leone and The Dollar Trilogy

A Fistful of Dollars: Myth and Reality

For a Few Dollars More

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Hawks and the Sparrows and a Strange Poem

Teorema and an Unrealized Story

Surrendering to Pasolini

Collaborations, Experiments, and Professional Consolidation

Pontecorvo, De Seta, Bellocchio

Bolognini, Montaldo

Wertmüller, Bertolucci

Consensus or Consumption? 1968 and Once Upon a Time in the West

Duck, You Sucker

Elio Petri

Sergio the Producer

Once Upon a Time in America

The “Leningrad Project” and Leone’s Death

CHAPTER 3. Music and Images

Reflections and Memories of a Film Music Composer

No Theme? More Fun!

Giuseppe Tornatore

Singers and Songs in Film: On Music’s Adaptability

Quentin Tarantino

Temporality and the “EST” Principle

Backward Path to the Beginnings in Hollywood

The Academy Honorary Award

The Beginnings in US Cinema

A House in the United States?

US Composers

Terrence Malick

The Interpreter Didn’t Help with John Carpenter

Creativity and Constraints: The Double Aesthetics

On Theater, the Musical, and Television

The Betrothed

Moses, the Lawgiver

Marco Polo

Secret of the Sahara

The Octopus

Pains and Experiments

Roberto Faenza

Nino Rota

Difficult Relationships

Joanou, Stone, and the Overtones

Warren Beatty

Pride and Repentance

Fights and Arguments

Beyond Cinema, Beyond Music

CHAPTER4. Mystery and Craftsmanship

The Mystery of Creation

What Is Music?

Birth, Death, and Resurrection of Music

In Search of Myself: How to Listen to Contemporary Music

My Way

A Dilated Present

Studying Music Today?

A Sophisticated Balance between the Predictable and the Unforeseeable

Digressions

Cinema’s Transformations

Timbre, Sound, and Performers

On Teaching

High Productivity? A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body

CHAPTER 5. An Absolute Music?

The Roots

A Short Introduction to the “Absolute”

Darmstadt: A Summer of Experiments

Gruppo d’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza

A Response to the Conflict of Times: Toward “Dynamic Immobility”

Suoni per Dino

Vidi Aquam. Id Est Benacum

Musical Creationism versus Musical Evolutionism

Gestazione

Beliefs: The Origins of Life and the Universe

Mystical Production

Missa Papae Francisci

The Ideal of Unity: Blend and Hope

The Mission

Voci dal silenzio and La voce dei sommersi

Cantata per l’Europa and a Poem for Maria

Exchanges, Form, and Linguistic Combinations

UT

The Four Concertos: Form and Non-form

The Future of Music: Noise and Silence

CHAPTER 6. Looking Ahead: A Silent Nod toward the Future

Chronological List of the Absolute Music

Chronological List of the Applied Music

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index