How an Italian composer captured the American frontier
by Sean Lonergan
Two grizzled gunslingers face off in the middle of an old, western town. Or maybe in front of a church. A saloon? The camera cuts from each’s face to the other and back again as they stare daggers. One holds a crinkled cigar in his mouth, or he might have a poncho with some vaguely Mexican pattern. His clothes are muddy and ragged, and he wears a light shade of brown—because he is a good guy. His adversary wears all black. The brim of his hat sits flatter, and he wears a neatly trimmed moustache—because he is a bad guy.
You can tweak elements of this setup—maybe even add a third cowboy if you’re quite creative—but it all works the same in the end. This is the duel, and it’s a cliché that appears in every spaghetti western you’ll ever find. We might roll our eyes, but when a trope is reused again and again across an entire genre, it can hint at the filmmaker’s intentions by showing us which elements they thought were indispensable. Spaghetti western music can be looked at in this same way, and picking it apart helps us understand the one of the genre’s most influential composers and see the American spirit as he saw it. Not to mention, it reveals what exactly Dick Dale could possibly have to do with Clint Eastwood.
A now famous subgerne of Western films produced in Europe starting in the mid-1960s with the Italian director Sergio Leone, the so-called Spaghetti western so tied to a specific setting that just setting one outside the new American west is a huge deviation, even a gimmick unto itself. It makes sense then, that the scores of these films were designed with a central goal of evoking this setting. Instruments are used which would have actually been heard on the frontier. This includes fiddles, harmonicas, tambourines and hand drums, small horns, and others. What they all share is that they were small, easy to carry, and able to be brought along while traveling. This made them common on the frontier, and it’s why they were common in the scores of western films. This all makes sense—until you come across the electric guitar. Their use in the scores of the Spaghetti Western completely shatter the logic behind the rest of the instrumentation. The first electric guitars were heavy and cumbersome and required some sort of power supply—not to mention, they weren’t invented until well into the twentieth century, long after the American frontier had been tamed and the cowboys had gone. This begs the question of why? What justified the out-of-place guitars? This seems bizarre, but bizarre choices like this often conceal the interesting motivations behind them, the kind which can tell us something new about a genre.
Just like the genre as a whole, the guitars were subject to their own tropes, with several constant elements. The main theme from Leone’s 1966 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly typifies this distinctive sound. An isolated guitar plays a melody based around the minor pentatonic scale. The picked notes are twangy. The tone is slightly distorted and drenched in heavy reverb. Strangely enough, all of this is exactly the characteristic sound of the surf rock guitar. Take, for example, the Surfaris’ “Wipeout.” The same twang, the same emphasis on a picked melody, based around the same scale, and most of all, the same heavily-reverbed guitar tone. For anyone familiar with guitars, this shared tone is unmistakable. The guitar found in western scores shares so much in common with the surf rock-style guitar that a coincidence seems unlikely. To understand why though, brings us to the legendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone.
Morricone scored more than 400 films, but he not only shaped the sound of the Spaghetti Western but in doing so perhaps wrote some of his most memorable film scores. Spaghetti westerns were depictions of America from outside America, born from cultural myth instead of ancestral memory. They were so campy and overdone because they were a romantic imagining of America. The spaghetti westerns were like tributes to the American soul, and for Morricone and other film composers, this soul was all about broaching new frontiers in their own domain—music.. Even in the sixties while these films were made, this spirit was still going strong. Whether through the new musical counterculture which erupted at Woodstock, or the landing of the first man on the moon, 1960s America was captivated by the idea of crossing boldly into new frontiers. This must have gripped Morricone and his peers.
With American popular music at the forefront of musical innovation, Morricone drew from surf rock as an influence. The style was cutting-edge, and even before the British rock which later overtook it, surf rock represented the boundary-pushing new frontier of sound. It was a part of the first wave of music to rely so heavily on electric guitar based songs. Earlier rock musicians like Chuck Berry had already made electric guitar-centric music, but surf rock musicians pushed this further still. These songs were faster and flashier than anything else which came before. This all made surf rock the perfect symbol of the American identity which Morricone wanted to capture in his scores.
Suddenly the electric guitar in a Western seems seems less ludicrous. Morricone channeled surf rock sound as an allusion to the spirit of the West. The guitar fits right alongside the other instruments of the frontier–just as the tambourines and harmonicas summon the physical setting of frontier, the guitar captures its spirit which Morricone believed was so central to the American character. He could have stuck strictly to historical realism, but instead, the guitar was important to his vision of what a western film was supposed to express.
Morricone’s vision continues even today. American director Quentin Tarantino was greatly influenced by the Italians’ westerns. His use of Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” in Pulp Fiction made it the single most iconic piece of surf rock, yet Tarantino sees the spaghetti western vision underneath. He said in an interview, “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. To me, it always sounded like rock’n’roll spaghetti western music: Morricone music with a guitar-driven beat. I’ve always said that Pulp Fiction was a modern-day spaghetti western.” You’d struggle to make the direct lineage any clearer. The surf rock identity is so baked into the spaghetti western that for someone like Tarantino, who was exposed through the westerns first, the surf rock even seems to be taking from the westerns.
When he was being considered as the composer for A Fistful of Dollars, Morricone was accused of writing derivative music. He responded by saying that emulation was precisely the assignment. His mode of composition was self-aware, and he understood the theme that the spaghetti westerns were meant to capture. This made Morricone’s music authentic, even in a genre filled with camp and cliché. Morricone passed away in the summer of 2020. We can never ask him to explain why he put electric guitars into movies about cowboys. A pioneer in his own right though, Morricone’s legacy outlasts him through those who follow his trail.