"(Ennio) Morricone brought the electric guitar to the western. The great thing, though, about the electric guitar in the western is that of course there were no electric guitars, so it’s completely anachronistic – but somehow Ennio did it so committedly that nobody ever questioned it. It was only much later people started to say, “How come there’s an electric guitar in there?” He needed that sound to show the grit and the machismo of those characters. There really is no other sound that can do it as well as an electric guitar, so, like the movies themselves, he took the zeitgeist of the late ’60s and put it into the 19th century.

"In A Fistful of Dynamite (aka Duck, You Sucker, aka Once Upon a Time in the Revolution, 1971) there’s a track called “The March of the Beggars”. It’s absolutely a lesson in great orchestration and what you can do if you have really committed players. First of all, those notes wouldn’t have been written if Ennio hadn’t known that the collaboration between him and his musicians was going to be extraordinary, because none of the parts in there are for timid players. It starts off with a burp on a bassoon – it’s right in your face, it’s the rudest noise you’ve ever heard – and it’s not until the very end that the whole thing becomes more symphonic. Instead of using reverb he’s bringing in a church organ, and so it’s the sound of an organ in a church that provides the reverb. It’s a piece of music that just develops from a single instrument to everything...."

- Ennio Morricone – my inspiration, by Hans Zimmer, Gramophone