How Ennio Morricone won the West

The legendary Italian composer reinvented the region without ever having been there

Clint Eastwood.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock, MGM)

There is perhaps no single sound more immediately evocative of the American West than the lone ocarina wail from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, affectionately transcribed as "ah-ee-ah-ee-ah."

But remarkably, its creator, the Italian composer Ennio Morricone — who died Monday in Rome, following a femur fracture at the age of 91 — didn't visit the American West until 2007, over 40 years after writing the score that would practically come to define it. How, exactly, did a person, who famously never learned English, much less spent any time among the red mesas of Monument Valley or in the dusty borderlands of Arizona, so evocatively capture the lonesome, wild, and gritty spirit unique to the southwestern United States? Morricone's scores would ultimately even supersede the versions of the Southwest depicted by the directors he worked with; over his career, he chiseled out a fresh, if rough-and-tumble, soundscape for the Western movie, supplanting the traditional soaring scores that had defined the genre with (as he'd later put it to Wired) "music made up of the sound of reality."

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.