In occasione della ristampa dei DVD di alcuni classici di Sergio Leone, pubblichiamo la versione inglese di un lungo saggio di Ernesto De Pascale per il volume "Al cuore, Ramon, al cuore" di Luca Beatrice

Theme for an Imaginary Western

The first sensation was of complete surrender. It almost seemed like the music knew a lot more than we did. It was wildly western, but so different from the American film model which were used to by John Ford. It was an illusion and it seemed to suggest to us disarmed spectators, to accept it as such if we didn’t want to end up the same way as one of those poor people that appeared on the screen.
The second sensation was of sadism. It seemed like almost all of the most sophisticated musical minds in Italy had gotten together to concoct the most gruesome sounds and the most offensive chords. Well then, was this or was this not the Old West? The Old West of Tex Willer and Capitan Miki, Salasso and Double Rum? What were they doing there cracking whips and playing gloomy melodies from Catania on guitars, trumpet solos that invited the death toll bells, distorted electric guitars and even Jew’s harps, not one bit sluggish, not anything like the black and white movies by Pietro Germi and Adulterio all’italiana?

We didn't know it, but we were witnessing the birth of the Spaghetti Western. Yes, an Italian style Western. Of paramount importance from this birth was the music, so original that no one would dare call it experimental.

Almost everyone, amongst us (the young audience) was unaware of all this. We didn’t know that not even the composers of these wonderful themes were conscious of their own ingenious musical “inventions”. It would be someone else's job many years later to explain to them the greatness of this image inspiring music.

The Italian movie industry flourished in Rome. It was there, that at the end of the 50s, the record company RCA opened up, known as Victor in the United States. In order to expand its empire, RCA expanded the Italian office, supplying it with a sparkling new branch located on the historic Via Tiburtina road, just a few meters from the “Grande Raccordo Anulare” or ring road which goes around Rome, which had just been completed. RCA was Elvis Presley’s label, who alone revolutionized the world music market. Later, another enormous step for RCA was with Harry Belafonte: a white, a black and then again Sam Cooke, a black that everyone liked, I mean everyone. There was money; Italy was in full economic boom, music attracted people, the movie industry was growing and television started to forcefully enter the Italian household. Strict lucrative agreements were made between the authors’ associations (SIAE) and the various structures mentioned. RCA opened its sails “American Style”; real studios- immense, (today used as storage) technicians in white shirts, production managers, label managers, office workers and so on, reaching a real sprawling system of distribution, all managed from Via S. Alessandro. It was just like the Americans. RCA hired its own arrangers; a profession that had been re-appointed in Italian music, but never taken into serious consideration.

The people of the time were a bit like jacks of all trades; they even knew how to be good talent scouts and they knew the right circles of musicians, for example the RAI’s light music orchestra or the most highly rated jazz artists. In the studio they knew how to work at a good pace, with an excellent understanding of the trade union norms of the time and they painstakingly respected the shifts. The best were actually able to rack up hours and hours of precious studio recording time (time = money) to experiment and venture into work that the central office would probably never have accepted from outsiders, they did let the better ones continue on. After all, original material, as the contracts stated, always had to be certified by the publishing house’s “central office”, which was RCA itself, or one of its numerous affiliates, so that nothing got lost or given away scot-free. Even those who knew about all these things didn’t risk a thing; after all, it was like a god send. To be an in-house arranger was, after all, many people’s dream, as a job it reflected Italy in evolution. One of these (there were few to be honest) was Ennio Morricone. Over the years there were many hypotheses made on the role of Italian music for Westerns, but one thing is certain; that the original type, the one “Made in the USA”, was transformed by that natural inherited propension for dramatics that is the essence of all Italian art. Thus this kind of music became a way for those composers that never forgot their musical ambitions, to become authors (and generate creative capacities in others, especially in those who otherwise would have never known how to express themselves), to the point of leaving doubt in the minds of those who write of their real ability, considering their subsequent choices.

In the beginning, driven by the possible low costs, (both Sardinia and parts of the region of Lazio could have been great film sets without the high expense) Italian producers joined forces with their Spanish colleagues (another good place for a film set) to try out the land of Westerns (the first two, in1962, were both co-productions). It was certain that between budget movie theaters, the parish movie theater and the barrack movie house, there was nothing to be frightened of. To play it safe, they thought that the comical parts would re-enforce this new genre; once again it was preferred to be on the safe side, using pseudonyms. There were those who said that they took stage names to keep an American appeal, but the truth is no-one wanted to disgrace themselves- and took precautions; using the latest trends, not going overboard and turning to stock footage from time to time. These techniques were not new; they were taken from the well-known film makers on the other side of the ocean.

When the Italian Western first came out the current influences were Apache degli Shadows, with the great vibrating Fender guitar of Brett Marvin and the one and only Telestar with the golden hands of the moody British producer Joe Meek. More than the fascination of these works from the United States, like Aaron Copland and Grofè, was the fascination of the roots of the “classic” American Western sound.

At RCA in Rome they didn’t let a foreign success get by if it had the characteristics of uniqueness that distinguished it from the rest. The excerpts that we mentioned earlier did not go by un-noticed by the young technicians in the Roman studios nor by the musicians and arrangers who moved between the studio walls for recordings and shifts during the biggest expansion of Italian pop music.

The Italian hits at the time were called “I Watussi” some examples were: Pinne, Fucile ed Occiali by Edoardo Vianello; Nico Fidenco sang Legata a un Grandello di Sabbia for those more on the romantic side and Gianni Morandi went wild with his song Go Kart Twist . Behind some of these hits there was only one man, the same arranger: his name was Ennio Morricone.

In the meantime, in these rooms they were creating a more concrete circle of local musicians, many of which would have strongly contributed to the development of the musical genre linked to the Italian Western. Meanwhile, following in the footsteps of vocal groups like the Swingle Singers, the Four Freshmen and the Hi Lo, Italian groups were emerging. Alessandro Alessandroni was already the leader of the group The Four Caravels, a group that cut a few singles without much success. Urged by his director friend, Sergio Leone and by the senior executive of RCA, Guido Cincirelli, he contacted Morricone, and explained his simple project: substitute some of the traditional parts- like the strings- with a vocal ensemble, amplifying the resounding idea of a “World” (Westerns would say the composer, Alessandroni, was on target), exaggerating in some cases the concept of “complete solitude”, one of those experimental inventions that very efficiently represented the cinema genre. Alessandroni, enthusiastic about the project, put the Cantori Moderni together, another little, but big musical tassel of the Spaghetti Western. Morricone, mindful of his own past at the side of Luchino Visconti and Giorgio Strehler, used difficult terminology, which Alessandro was however able to understand, also being infatuated by the theatre even if he had never worked with heroic names that would have supported the Roman composer initially. In the meantime, he began to establish a work team around himself: Ennio is a well known name, not only in pop music, but also in television and in the theatre- in (Enrico ’61, Rascelinaria)- and in 1962 he had already composed the music for Il Federale by Luciano Salce.
His future seemed so bright.
Many Italian western films were not masterpieces. Once a mechanism was discovered, the musical parts were tieringly repetitious, just like the stories in the films. The spark was however epic. The musical score was personalized ,- every character had his own theme: unusual sounds took the place of conventional instruments ( the music box in Per Qualche Dollaro in Più), the melodies that announced characters were almost like the characters themselves in the flesh, well-known tributes like the circus music in La Collina degli Stivali, the use of whistling as a leading instrument (don’t forget that until the mid 80s in Italy you could become “non transcribing melodist” by passing an exam just by whistling and therefore become a registered member of SIAE), the human chorus as the voice of that “world” in Morricone’s mind.
The new musical uses were groundbreaking. A good director could write entire sequences just by listening to a musical theme. (Tarantino probably did this for several scenes in Pulp Fiction). They created patterns that today are difficult to imagine likewise, such as gunfights accompanied by an unforgettable trumpet solo that stands by itself, or slow motion scenes accentuated by the harmonica of Franco de Gemini.
All this was highly theatrical. At the height of the Italian Western, the orchestration was in charge of the film and the actions themselves, distilling in it a never ending dance of death with the characters ready to play the role that the musical writer assigned to each one of them. The directors understood this “superior classification”; at the height of the climax they played with the editing; alternating actions in progress with flashbacks and moments of face to face confrontation of the participants of the action (the dance of death). The conventionality of the new musical uses had a clearly Italian flavour: the whistle, the guitar and the harpsichord are symbols just like the poncho, the cigar, the sombrero, a close up ground shot of a pair of boots, dust, and a hat slanted over a pair of eyes and many others. Amplified by sound that fills the theatre, take the Jew’s harp for example; a poor instrument, becomes the signal of transformation of the story itself, a new page is turned, -the equivalent of a change in the lighting on a theatrical stage, - giving, where necessary, the sense of Black Comedy that was liked very much by those who in the following years took the themes of the Spaghetti Western up again. From those of psychedelic creations like Zachariah, to those with punk origins like Walker.
To make one of these musical masterpieces for an Italian Western or even any of those less rated works that justified the name of the genre, was not so simple, especially when the producers didn’t establish a precise budget. Here is a description of a recording session at the time told by one of the musicians (the interviewee is anonymous). “ The shifts lasted three hours: the morning shift started at 10. First call was at 9:30. After 15 minutes the conductor’s assistant gave out the music sheets. We had another 15 minutes to read and ask any questions, then at 10 sharp we went into the studio, usually studio A, the big one, the one that Bernstein used, to take our seats and check the technical equipment. At 10:15 the conductor arrived and started the recording. Whoever was responsible for the first error was substituted ; the recordings, including those made in later times, those of multitrack recordings, were followed by the entire ensemble, and even for a tiny error we had to start over again going back many musical bars. The assistant had a decisive role- sometimes he made producer’s decisions. It wasn’t by chance that some of them later became important directors and composers themselves… In all of my working years I have never been able to exchange more than two words with him, it was disgusting, always caught up in his things; what I do remember well is that we often played very long musical scores , without ever seeing any scenes, without knowing what film we were working for, and more than a few times I was surprised when watching a movie to discover that they used various different recording sessions, I don’t know, one from the year before and one from a few months ago. I was shocked most of all by the thought of all that work cutting and pasting that went on in post production”. “By my estimate”- continued our interviewee- “hundreds of hours of unpublished work exists, because those experiments that had made the Italian Western great were only the tip of the iceberg of what we recorded. There must be somewhere, in some archives, absolutely beautiful original stuff, with very strange instruments. Every once in a while a new instrument came on the market, I remember there was always some orchestrater that wanted to put it in the score. Then maybe the director would take it out, while the score was accepted. From this point of view I must say that the role of the director, with the passing of time changed. Little by little films became more numerous (there was not only the Italian Western, but also the great adventure of the comedy and then the detective movies and grotesque and so forth…) if the composer was also the director, more and more often he would leave the job of orchestrating to his men. Only later, travelling the world and meeting musicians did I learn that such practice had been the order of the day since the 50s and it was from there that they were imported….”
Bruno Nicolai, like Ennio Morricone, was a student of Goffredo Petrassi at the Roman music academy “Accademia musicale romana di Santa Cecilia”. Since he had developed interest through the theater for cinema and for new musical forms, Nicolai represented the deepest meaning of the musical style of the Italian Western put on the big screen all over the world. Alan Warner, from United Artists, once said this about the music in the film Indio Black by Gianfranco Pordini (1970): “It was written by Bruno Nicolai, but it could have been written by Morricone… either way, it’s clear that is wasn’t written by Percy Faith”. The transfer was perfect. Nicolai, ”…a friend” of maestro Morricone, assimilated the modus operandi so well from his ex-colleague from music academy that it was impossible to speak of score carbon copies. Italian Western music had become a genre of music to all effect.

The technical perfection of the two and their interaction came out fully in the 1969 film Il Mercenario by Sergio Corbucci. For this film Morricone and Nicolai sign the score four-handed, and it is really impossible to distinguish musical characteristics from each other; some people have dared to hazard a comment on the style of one or the other, but what remains is one of the most perfect musical syntheses of the Spaghetti Western.

The double-bass player Giovanni Tommaso recalls: “…at the time I was one of the most asked for shift workers at RCA. I had been with them practically from the start. First with the Quartetto di Luca, with which we cut a few records and had a bit of success, then as a “steady” musician. Recording with Morricone was everyone’s dream, and I considered myself lucky; then from that point on, other than the double bass, I dedicated myself to the electric guitar and I was even more requested. At the time, with all the successes that RCA had, you could easily live just by doing the studio sessions. We, after all, were ahead of everyone in Italy; an atmosphere of success could be felt, the top. It was understood that behind it all there was a whole world of publishing work going on, a flurry, in moving along with the cinema, with RAI and with the rest of the world. If an Italian song made it abroad, it could have only happen through RCA. As I was saying that when I played the bass guitar I did even more shifts. I remember for example that the music for Ma Che Colpa Abbiamo Noi by Rokes was done entirely by shift workers, and this thrilled us, because it backed up the thesis according to which Mr. Tambourine Man by the Byrds was played by the most famous Wrecking Crew in the world, the one in Los Angeles. Morricone started to call me in to play the electric bass guitar, and with me at the electrical instrument, his sessions needed a double-bass (sometimes two). The outcome was incredible, because with the body of the acoustic instrument and the tip of the electric one, we finally began to hear the movements of our instruments in the films too.”
Little by little many began to migrate over to the Italian Western. Like the famous vultures, the new composers played a part in this kind of symbolism (I remember that not long ago a famous editor of the time confessed to me to have made so many copies of “the vultures” that he couldn’t remember what film it originally came from anymore). Since they were almost always also the directors themselves, they broke new ground in the genre.

Not including Gianni Ferrio, (who spent his life in the cinema and was a true solo ace at Spaghetti Western scores,) the others are all here, from the first take in 1962 to the last in 1985 with Tex e Il Signore degli Abissi by Duccio Tessari. Thirty-five years of Italian music, of networking, of meetings at the RCA bar, of texts signed by more than one hand, of musical scores that “reappeared here and there, and anyway impossible to distinguish with so few beats…”, of cold cappuccinos and of dozens and dozens of musicians that remained in the shadows. Let’s try and remember a few: Umiliani and Piccioni, two great score people, with good knowledge of jazz and who aspired to be more than just soundtrack men. From Ortolani to Reverberi, the orchestrator of several of the best sheets of music by Lucio Battisti, from Nico Fidenco to Berto Pisano, already with Buscaglione’s The Asternovas in the late 50s to Louis Bacalov, one of those greats with a lot of experience in that art that brought him to the Oscar’s. Then came Franco Reitano (Mino’s brother?), Vince Tempra, now one of the most sought after Sanremo orchestrators, a bit of a keeper of these strange jobs of today. Finally, we have Fred Bongusto, with the score from the film Uno Dopo l’Altro and the youngest of all, Augosto Martelli, Mina’s boyfriend, Francis Lai. There was Maurice Jarre; Jean Michael Jarre’s father, Sergio Bardotti- between one trip to Brazil and another, and- even if late on the scene, Pino Donaggio. But most of all there were the De Angeles brothers; Guido and Maurizio, with Continuavano a Chiamarlo Trinità, an indestructible couple that marked the advent of the next decade in 1970. And just think that their biggest hit, Dune Buggy, was from the film score Altrimenti ci Arrabbiamo, which was given to the two writers by accident. The score wouldn’t have been entrusted to them at all if it hadn’t been for the temporary absence of someone at the RCA studio: it was in fact the middle of summer.

In some cases- the best- a success. Certainly, then, from the moment of actual distribution to the public, but if it had that characteristic of synthesis, of urgency, of emotional tension, of immediate understanding, if it had precision right from the first time it was listened to. These mechanisms- and we have sited only the most direct- were those that “separated” the best Italian musical theme songs for westerns from the rest.

It is very easy to say today that someone was better than someone else or that someone’s talent was not even comparable to someone else’s……Here we are interested in underlining that no matter how strong each single composers creative mood potential, there was always weakness with its rapport with the script every time that a Spaghetti Western came in contact with a song segment. The reasons of which are many: first of all the choice of language was almost always English, as not to break that fine thread of continuity linking the genre to the classic American version, more for a seal of approval than anything else. If we wanted to, we could transpose the inventions of the line of Italian music in the form of songs; rarely can you find the fluidity that a song needs. If as such we add the ignorance of the knowledge of the language by most of the public of the time, we soon see a scene with a very clear phenomenon. A phenomenon that in itself could have had great potential, because it showed the intuition of who invented the movie theatre to be the great means of promotion it was capable of ( as in the last few years has been newly demonstrated). Certainly for many artists, at some point in their careers, during the 60s, it became a habit to insert a piece of music from a western into their repertoire following the American model (for example Bonanza, Rawhide, Rin Tin Tin or The Man from Laramie). Frequently the singles that came to be put in commerce showed the promotional poster for the film itself and on the back cover, for good taste, the artist dressed as his favourite cowboy! For Roy Colt and Winchester Jack by Mario Bava (1970), the titles were actually entrusted to a beat group of the time. In these examples of rural operations, not easily defined as “target marketing”; even the most established composers and musical exponents of the Spaghetti Western became responsible. The scripts for the music by Gianni Ferrio in the film Vivi o Preferibilmente Morti are nothing other than embarrassing description of the feature film story. For Duello nel Texas, by Richard Blasco (1964) and Le Pistole non Discutono by Mario Caiano (1969) Ennio Morricone did the music. They have wonderful orchestrations but highly questionable songs from scripts. Especially the last one; there is little one can do with “a solo” whistled by Alessandro Alessandroni faced with the banality of the script written by Peter Tevis (Who was hiding behind this pseudonym?)

At first glance; or rather, first listen- to the English native speaking public, we make in short, the impression of score writers from the third world. Once again, we managed to give the impression of craftsmen, capable of grandiose exploitation, thanks to a few people’s teachings, always ready to judge ourselves by the mediocrity of those who didn’t know to look past the end of their own noses.

Sergio Leone, from outside the fray as always, knew how to recompense Ennio Morricone like no other director could do with the many other established composers. He said about Ennio Morricone “… never in the Western has greater variety ever been heard in theme songs and rhythms, with absolutely no pragmatic monotone accompaniments. There is no musical intervention that doesn’t have its own precise meaning in the story line and the events…Where, from my point of view, Ennio Morricone has out done himself is in C’era una Volta il West, in which the lyrical deepness of the theme songs, the rise and fall of comedy and tragedy call for the reconsideration of film music and a reclassification of these songs as one of the biggest challenges that a great composer can face…”.
Pietro Bianchi, during the nights at the nightclub I Grandi Western Italiani added this about the maestro: “…Morricone is a phenomenon like Sergio Leone. Music for movies blooms with abundance and spontaneity. Always relative to the story, alive, up beat, exploding with vigorous life, spontaneous and rural, Morricone’s musical contribution to the Italian Western is unmistakable…”

Besides his “rural” character as in Bianchi’s critique, both Bianchi and Sergio Leone knew how to read the scores by the Roman maestro. You could sum up in the motto “Always change”, never repeat yourself, reaffirm yourself with something that is always new, personal, never musically represented in that genre of someone before you. Like this Ennio Morricone won his own bet, waiting for everyone to listen to his scores and copy them, ever ready to flare up again with something unusual as in Giù la Testa!

The Showdown

All this God given creativity and musical originality disappeared in a few years like the pop of a soap bubble. The number of movies produced in one year clearly illustrates this: over 70 in 1968 to only 24 in 1973. First the composers and then the directors took up different roads; many of them continued in the movie business, but it got harder and harder to find stimulating work like the Spaghetti Western. They created musician’s cooperatives; Umiliani, Piccioni and Morricone founded the Forum studio, distancing themselves from the natural habitat of the grand “mother”, studio A at RCA, the physical place that played an important role in the conception of the sound. Morricone got together with the group Nuove Consonanze Musicale, experimenting with very interesting roads that had nothing to do whatsoever with the world of music, even if the album made possible by them for The Cramps (1975) could have been the sound track for a film that no one would ever produce. Some picked the security of the musical road of TV orchestra, and are still part of the big jumble of public and private television.

The Italian Western reached a showdown: a showdown that international criticism had already predicted when Maestro Ennio recorded the sound track that accompanied the great film of 1968 C’era una Volta il West. Someone said that it was difficult to do better and that only he, the master, could have done it, cutting out a whole troop of composers and directors, which was the only option possible for many small and medium budget films. Among the “new” composers we fondly remember, Michele Lacerenza, trumpet soloist in Per un Pugno di Dollari, who composed the music in L’ira di Dio, of which the musical climax was distributed as a single under the title Concerto per un Killer by CAM, a new abode for hundreds of productions, a brand that revolutionized the conception of sound track production in Italy.

This slow decline was in part due to the Italian Western’s success in adjusting itself to the bad habits of the Italians, following fashions and trends. It is not to be thought that by chance the ethics lost were brought back through the work of the Leone-Morricone team and in a few other rolls of film.

The Italian Western of “quantity” had become uncouth, weird, and rowdy and made to satisfy the masses; even if looking for new implications of emotional and psychological characters, most of the time it twisted around itself, squeezing the music to abrupt digression and mutating the geniality of the initial period to something repeated.

The public liked the characters like Thomas Milian in Tepepa by Giulio Petroni (1969) more than ever and Maestro Ennio was in charge of the music like always - the press proclaimed him as a “friend of the Rolling Stones” (it was true). For ... Lo Chiamavano Trinità (1970) the musician Franco Micalizzi, actually called in Lally Stott to collaborate, he made a soundtrack with a local beat and Italianized the English. He was already leader of the Mowtowns, of which he composed the lead titles.

We are, in other words, in another Italy, with another cinema knocking at the door, as much as the productions left to tone down the genre without too much regret. Like the Italian Comedy, it would never die; it would remain there frozen until better events. The difference however from other types of music genres that spread in the 60s for example beat, is that no one evoked the return of those music genres that accompanied Italian Westerns that were so original, nor did they organize tributes. They were much more grateful- a decade later after the golden period of the Spaghetti Western- those young movie junkies from England and overseas, from the Clash to Wall of Woodoo by Stan Ridgeway, that recognized the originality of the Italian Western that we talk about today. The Italian record industry, with its own songs, was not to be found unprepared: by the late 70s the soundtracks of the most important Italian Westerns were re-released on the biggest budget Italian market label, the label Lina Tre. The general public in those years was too busy migrating from movie seats to living room sofas, to try out the birth of private television, to be able to understand the musical potential that the record company owners were enthusiastically trying to revive.

Only later, with the advent of samples and of film loops did a lot of people realized that those precious fragments, which could have been from another planet, were integral parts of our subconscious sound tracks, a tangible sign that the Italian Western was not frozen solid and had not left us yet. The Italian Western showdown on the other hand left us hardened movie buffs (unlike the producers), with a bitter taste in our mouths. Waiting, in the late 70s and early 80s, for the darkest hours of the night to unearth less broadcasted movies from the most disturbing private television stations of the time. Not the less stupefied, they left the new generation of musical fans, who put on who goes there by the indications from the other side of the alps , they discovered the beauty of Nino Rossi’s trumpet,- the one in Il Silenzio -in Yankee by Tinto Brass (1966) and other little jewels.

As an appendix to this essay, here is declaration by Sergio Leone “…If it is true that I created a new type of Western, inventing picaresque characters in heroic situations and new characters, it was Ennio Morricone’s music that let them speak”.

That long list of composers that contributed to making the genre strong, to create the bases on which the best couple in Italian Westerns stood, was left- and remains left- forgotten by everyone. Someone said that it was due to RCA, that its “thresher” like mechanism brought out only the best things and never permitted themselves to back a product if it first didn’t show that it had two good legs to stand on (and good shoes) for the long march ahead. If it were like this, to console those people: for light music and other (overall other) things went even worse. Someone still thinks that it is important to make the recording studios work at full speed; it is of little importance if afterwards the music gets glued down at the starting gate.

Many composers remained outside the door waiting for their chance, and for this reason too they changed the methods and the organization of work in the production of sound tracks in Italy: because that chance, even if it demonstrated a composers competence and ability to produce quality, would never make it. Some are still waiting there. Some blew it all to hell.

As for me, after the last train robberies, I decided to give up the Old West. I just kept a pair of good old Winchesters and a few Colts, with a lot of ammo. I’m going to stay here, perched on my little hill, well hidden. I have a lot of things to do, I listen to music, and a catchy tune runs through my head and then a whistle. But I am always on the look-out, because if they were to pass by this way I would be ready to open fire.

Ernesto De Pascale