The opening track, On Earth as It Is in Heaven, lays out exactly what the musician was trying to do in terms of blending cultural styles and instrumentation: a heavenly choir is suddenly, unexpectedly joined by percussive drumming just underneath the orchestral maneuvers.

Ay-ya-yahhh. Wah-wah-wah.

Then a reverb-heavy guitar kicks in, along with a chorus of background voices and a martial beat, and you immediately feel like youre in the most feral outpost in the wild, wild West, staring down sweaty, stubbly men as the instrumental builds to an massive crescendo.

Its the sound of an entire world laid out in front of you, before youve even seen a frame of film.

The Italian composer, who died at age 91, may have been closely associated with the gloriously over-the-top subgenre, but his work runs the gamut from the oddball instrumentation of his early collaborations with Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci to the more lush orchestration of his work on period pieces, historical melodramas and more.

He was hoping Ennio would contribute some music pieces to a Western he was working on.

Even though Italian horse operas had been, per Morricone, in a state of crisis for a while, Leone wanted to turn this loose, gunfighter-centric remake of the Japanese film Yojimbo into something mystical and different.

From the moment you hear the first few bars of Fistful s opening theme, in which a gently strummed guitar is accompanied by the sound of whipcracks, rapid flute notes and what sounds like a church tower bell in the center of a rural Texas town circa the 1800s, you feel like Morricone nailed the different part.

And then the choral voices and whistling () kick in against the fat, twangy guitars, and boom: youre into the mystical.

The album would change the genre and top the sales charts for soundtracks in Italy.

The composer also somehow makes the score seem like its galloping faster than its predecessor, and the sound of a music box (evoking one characters childhood) and a tinkly player piano add a patina of nostalgia to what is, by the maestros own admission, a darker and more sorrowful score.

See: Il Vizio DUccidere.

Its also a beautiful balance of the spare and the majestic, a combination that suited the directors vision to a tee.

Leone and I were in tune, he admitted in the 2016 book Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, agreeing on all the nitty-gritty details prior to and not after shooting.

The question was: How He came up with the idea of transposing two hoarse male voices and using a wah-wah effect on themand the rest is film history.

The final entry of the Dollars trilogy gives each of its three protagonists a signature sound a good flute, a bad ocarina and some ugly vocals and layers in lots of horns that often suggest a Western calvary charging into battleor an army retreating.

And what else would you use as the musical signature for a character named Harmonica buta harmonica.

The soundtrack for Leones great post- Dollars trilogy Western is all over the place the track Bad Orchestra lives up to its name, and makes great use of a slide-whistle, a tuba and a banjo but Morricone understood that this brutal revenge tale starring Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda (as one nasty villain) was, at heart, a melancholic story of the fading West.

The fact that he wrote Jills America, one of the most moving pieces he ever composed for a film, and made it fit into a violent tale of retribution gives you a sense of how much depth he could add to what were still considered B movies, Hollywood stars be damned.

If you see The Thing, the ultimate theme is the result of our conversation: really simple, synth-driven, effective.

For fans used to the Italian composers reverb-y walls of sound and heavy guitarwoodwind scores, his ominous music is indeed simple and definitely effective.

And the while you can hear bit of Carpenter and some Bernard Hermann-like strings on his complete score, its very much a Morricone project.

In the end, he chose just one single piece of music, Morricone later said, after admitting hed given the somewhat uncommunicative filmmaker numerous cues to choose from.

He also drops some period-style music with elements of trad jazz and old-school funeral marches that suggests the boom before the inevitable bust.

And its Morricones music that holds Leones original vision of telling the story out of sequence together, weaving in and out of the characters memories.

Ennio Morricone Movies