Spaghetti western

One evening during the 1968 Almería shoot, Sergio Leone filmed the scene where Claudia Cardinale’s character finds her new family laid out dead on tables, and he played Ennio Morricone’s music on set while the cameras rolled. The score for Once Upon a Time in the West had been written, performed, and recorded before shooting began; the screenwriter Sergio Donati remembered the day: “It was in Almeria, it was sunset and everybody on the set was crying.”¹ Morricone believed Leone even “regulated the speed of the crane which follows Claudia Cardinale when she comes out of the station, in time with the musical crescendo.”² That inversion — the film performed to the music, the composer upstream of the camera — is the purest fact about spaghetti western, the style Ennio Morricone built for Leone’s Italian-made westerns between 1964 and the mid-1970s. It is the rare genre that is one man’s signature: whistling, cracking whips, five tuned jew’s harps, a wordless soprano, and a gathering of forces that breaks over the duel. Other composers adopted it and an American imitator outsold it; the music itself long outlived the films that occasioned it.

The hire

The partnership began as a reunion neither man knew he was having. When Leone, at his producers’ insistence, met Morricone about scoring A Fistful of Dollars in 1963, the two discovered they had been primary-school classmates in Rome’s Trastevere decades before.³ What sold Leone was nothing Morricone had scored: it was his arrangement of Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty” for the American folk singer Peter Tevis, whose whip-and-bells backing Morricone adapted almost whole into the film’s title theme, “Titoli.”⁴ Leone’s own taste ran to Hollywood: he wanted Dimitri Tiomkin’s “El Degüello” from Rio Bravo, and Morricone’s answer became a genre origin story, a threat made in a year he liked to note he was penniless: “If you use it, I quit.” Leone relented: “Ennio, I ain’t asking you to imitate it, just come up with somethin’ similar.” Morricone reworked a lullaby he had written for a television production of Eugene O’Neill and handed the trumpet part to Michele Lacerenza, directing him toward “a kind of military timbre, a little Mexican flavor.”⁵

The credits said none of this. A Fistful of Dollars billed its composer as “Dan Savio” — “I took a pseudonym,” Morricone explained, “because the producers wanted the film to appear to be an American production” — and he had already scored a western the year before, Duello nel Texas (1963), in a mostly traditional style under the same alias.⁶ Nor was he first: Francesco De Masi had started writing Italian western scores slightly earlier.⁷ The style had a prehistory and a supporting cast. The genre still bears one man’s name because of what Morricone did with the assignment next.

The sound

The budget wrote the orchestration. Leone’s producers could not pay for a full orchestra, so Morricone replaced instruments with whatever made a sound: human voices, whips, bells, anvils, gunshots, an amplified jew’s harp, recorded onto what he remembered as “a very modest three-track tape recorder” and spliced together by hand.⁸ The personnel were as particular as the instruments. Alessandro Alessandroni, a childhood friend of Morricone’s nicknamed “the Whistler,” supplied the whistle and ran the eight-voice choir I Cantori Moderni, whose grunted, guttural chants Morricone wanted for their “primitivism.”⁹ The electric lead fell to the classical guitarist Bruno Battisti D’Amario — “the musical theme is new,” Morricone said of the second film, “but I kept Alessandro’s whistle and D’Amario’s electric guitar for the leading parts.”¹⁰ Out of the choir came Edda Dell’Orso, a soprano with a three-octave range whose wordless voice became the style’s celestial register.¹¹ The harmonica belonged to Franco De Gemini, who rebuilt his Hohner Chromatic to get an individual sound, played on more than 800 film scores, and tutored Charles Bronson on set in how to hold the instrument his character plays.¹² Even the jew’s harp was engineered: because the marranzano produces only one pitch, Morricone had five of them tuned to different notes and tracked separately to spell Lee Van Cleef’s theme in For a Few Dollars More.¹³

RYM’s definition catches the shape of the thing: a piece “builds from a slow resonance to a wall of sound climax to evoke the tension of stand offs, duels, and other typical tropes of Westerns.”¹⁴ The cues came from surf rock and from Mexico. The surf-guitar kinship is real — the same twang, the same reverb, the same picked melody — and Quentin Tarantino later drew the line himself: “Morricone and Leone affected my films in every way, shape and form. First off, the surf music, Dick Dale, ‘Misirlou’. I never understood what surf music had to do with surfing.”¹⁵ The Mexican strain ran through the trumpet writing from the first film onward. What the style pointedly did not borrow was the actual music of the American West: the singing cowboys and Western swing the country family raised. “I am not a specialist in American folk music,” Morricone said, “so what sense was there in my treating the characters like Americans?”¹⁶

Music before the camera

By The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Morricone was writing before Leone had shot a frame, and Leone was bringing the recordings to set and timing camera movements to their tempo; by Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) the method was total — the score Leone played across the Almería set existed complete before production began, each principal carrying a theme.¹⁷ The main-title howl of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was two overlaid male voices: “I thought that I might come close to the effect by overlaying two hoarse male voices, one singing the vowel ‘A,’ the other singing ‘E’ in a pronounced way, somewhere in between sforzando and falsetto.”¹⁸ The film re-voices the “main theme” per character (flute for Blondie, ocarina for Angel Eyes, voices for Tuco) and ends in the style’s two consummations: “The Ecstasy of Gold,” Dell’Orso soaring over Tuco’s run through the cemetery, and “The Trio,” the three-way standoff scored as ritual.¹⁹ For Once Upon a Time in the West, Morricone said his intent was to “wound the audience’s ears like a blade,” and he built “Man with a Harmonica” from almost nothing: “For Harmonica, I used just three notes of the instrument, for a public which is used to simple form of music.”²⁰

The copyists and the industry

The films around Leone’s were an industry — over six hundred European westerns between 1960 and 1978, nearly five hundred of them Italian — and the sound Morricone invented became their house style.²¹ Three adopters did the most to spread it: Bruno Nicolai, Luis Enríquez Bacalov, and Hugo Montenegro.²² Nicolai was the closest to the source: Morricone’s conservatory friend and, in his own words, “a great musician and friend… who conducted almost every score of mine from that point on until 1974,” until the partnership broke over credit.²³ Bacalov wrote the other founding theme, Django (1966), its title song a swaggering pop-vocal western, and decades later took a competitive Oscar for Il Postino while Morricone was still waiting for his.²⁴ Riz Ortolani, already a Grammy winner for “More,” brought the manner to Day of Anger; De Masi kept a parallel western catalog running.²⁵

The strangest tribute came from America. In 1968 the RCA bandleader Hugo Montenegro took an easy-listening replica of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme, cut with Los Angeles session players, to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 in the UK for four weeks — a chart life Morricone’s original recording never had.²⁶ Morricone’s own soundtrack album did its business more slowly, spending over a year on the Billboard chart and reaching No. 4.²⁷

The end of the cycle

The collapse was steep: spaghetti westerns were a third of Italian film production in 1968, a tenth by 1969, and by the end of the 1970s production had all but stopped.²⁸ Morricone scored the cycle’s late comedies — My Name Is Nobody (1973) and A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (1975), which Leone co-wrote and produced — and the classic cycle closed.²⁹ He spent the rest of his life insisting on the proportion: by his own calculation the westerns were about eight percent of a catalog of more than four hundred scores, and of the founding score itself he was blunt: “despite the consensus that it received, I still think that that music was among the worst I have ever composed for a movie.”³⁰

The afterlife

The music escaped the films almost immediately, and never went back. Since July 1983, Metallica have walked onstage to the original recording of “The Ecstasy of Gold” (their manager Jon Zazula’s idea), and James Hetfield described the effect plainly: “From the first time we used it, something happened. It just set us up for the night, and got the fans excited.”³¹ The Ramones opened their live album Loco Live with the Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme and left the stage of their final concert, August 6, 1996, to “The Ecstasy of Gold” from tape.³² Jay-Z built “Blueprint 2” on a sample of the same cue.³³ Tarantino threaded the original recordings through Kill Bill — Bacalov’s “The Grand Duel,” Ortolani’s “I giorni dell’ira,” and “L’arena” from Morricone and Nicolai’s Il mercenario — and through Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, a use Morricone first called incoherent, swearing he “wouldn’t like to work with him again, on anything.” He then scored Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) and won the Academy Award for it in February 2016: his first competitive Oscar, at eighty-seven the oldest such winner in the ceremony’s history to that point.³⁴

The style itself now has a second performing tradition. In 2011, Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi released Rome, recorded in a Roman studio on vintage equipment with the surviving session players of the 1960s — Alessandroni’s reunited Cantori Moderni, Dell’Orso’s soprano — under vocals by Jack White and Norah Jones.³⁵ Revival bands fill out RYM’s genre chart around Montenegro: Federale, Calibro 35, Guano Padano, groups writing spaghetti-western music for films that do not exist.³⁶ When Morricone died on July 6, 2020, at ninety-one, he left a farewell letter that his lawyer read to reporters, opening, in its widely carried translation, “I, Ennio Morricone, have died”; Hans Zimmer’s verdict ran the other way: “Ennio was an icon and icons just don’t go away.”³⁷

Is it a genre?

Honestly counted, spaghetti western is a signature that other people learned to forge. Its defining body of work is one composer’s, for one director’s films, inside roughly a decade. Its founder considered it a sliver of his output, and De Masi’s earlier westerns show the category existed before the style that defines it did. The name is borrowed too: “spaghetti western” names the films first, the Italian-made westerns, and only by extension the scoring style they shared — the same border Cinematic classical walks between a sound and the job that occasions it. What earns it a genre’s standing anyway is everything the signature did once it left its author’s hands — a school of Roman imitators, an American cover at No. 2 on the Hot 100, a metal band’s nightly overture, a sampled beat, and a revival circuit still writing duels for imaginary films half a century after the real ones stopped shooting.

Key artists

Ennio Morricone — The author of the style: the Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West are its constitution, and everything in the genre is either by him or answering him.
Bruno Nicolai — Morricone’s conductor on the founding scores and a prolific composer in his own right; the two split over credit in 1974. His library labels fed the wider Italian soundtrack economy.²³
Luis Enríquez Bacalov — Wrote Django (1966), the genre’s second-most-borrowed theme; his 1996 Oscar for Il Postino made him the circle’s first competitive Academy Award winner.²⁴
Riz Ortolani — The genre-hopping professional (mondo, giallo, horror) whose Day of Anger score Tarantino later pulled into Kill Bill and Django Unchained.²⁵

Foundational records

Ennio Morricone, Per un pugno di dollari (1964) — The founding score: the Tevis arrangement turned title theme, Lacerenza’s trumpet finale, the whole instrumentarium arriving at once
Ennio Morricone, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966) — The canon’s center: the two-voice howl, “The Ecstasy of Gold,” “The Trio”; the genre’s top-rated original score on RYM
Luis Enríquez Bacalov, Django (1966) — The style without Morricone: the proof the signature could be forged by another hand
Ennio Morricone, C’era una volta il West (1968) — The fully pre-recorded score the film was performed to; “Man with a Harmonica” and Jill’s theme are the style’s operatic extreme
Hugo Montenegro, Music From “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” & “A Fistful of Dollars” & “For a Few Dollars More” (1968) — The American easy-listening replica whose single outcharted Morricone’s original theme

rhapsode

Explorer

Spaghetti western

The hire

The sound

Music before the camera

The copyists and the industry

The end of the cycle

The afterlife

Is it a genre?

Key artists

Foundational records

See also

rhapsode

Explorer

Spaghetti western

The hire

The sound

Music before the camera

The copyists and the industry

The end of the cycle

The afterlife

Is it a genre?

Key artists

Foundational records

See also

Footnotes