Slashing the Tape. Cuts and Edits in Morricone’s Music for Who Saw Her Die?

The steady collaboration with director Aldo Lado provided Ennio Morricone with several opportunities to score the distressing moods and psychological tension that are typical of the Italian giallo genre. This paper provides an analysis of Morricone’s score and its use in Lado’s second film, Who Saw Her Die? (Chi l’ha vista morire?, 1972). The film’s focus on the format and semantic contrast between sounds and images relies heavily on Morricone’s music for children’s choir, conveying both the carefree world of childhood and the madness of a homicidal maniac. Moreover, several scenes in the film seem to suggest that what we see may be entirely deceptive and that the key to the mystery is carried by music. An in-depth analysis of the main musical themes reveals a compositional process involving post-recording tape cuts and a radical sound montage that simultaneously overlaps two pieces of music, with song lyrics and musical sounds moving from the extradiegetic to the internal narrative level.