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 i ...