Spaghetti Western

Spaghetti western is the film music written for the Italian westerns produced between 1964 and the late 1970s, defined above all by *Ennio Morricone*'s scores for *Sergio Leone*. Working with small budgets, Morricone built a new film-music vocabulary from electric guitar, whistling, whip cracks, bells, harmonica and wordless soprano over orchestra, replacing the symphonic Americana of Hollywood westerns with a sparse, ironic and operatic sound. Composers including *Bruno Nicolai*, *Luis Bacalov*, *Riz Ortolani* and *Francesco De Masi* extended the idiom across hundreds of films, and its recordings remain the genre's core documents.