Frontier Music

Western Films as America’s origin story, and why they sound the way they do.

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The Western is a historical genre that generally takes place between 1850 and 1900, somewhere in North America west of the Mississippi River. Neither of these parameters are impenetrable — borders rarely are — but that general time and place gives us somewhere to start.

…the way we, as a country, approach the West says a lot about our view of ourselves.  It seems to have become our origin myth, although what happened to everything before the Civil War?  I can’t answer why we have Western music and Western writers but no such category for the century before, or the one before that.

- Carter Burwell via Email

To score the frontier, this wide open place, you use those so called intervals of 4ths and 5ths. And big long leaps in the melodic lines… jumps and leaps to suggest the vast openess of the western space. And these Harmonies, these modal harmonies… that kinda becomes part of the nomenclature: this is what constitutes what sounds western.

- Kathryn Kalinak

…through our history there is so much we don’t know, so much we misinterpret. So many things our children and grandchilderen will look at and think “they got that really wrong.” — Just as we look at our ancestors and say they got it wrong. I think it’s sort of a metophorical representation, the Wildlands, of the darkness, of the unknown. Which is beautiful because there’s still stuff to discover. But there can be a whole lot of ugliness in our ignorance…

-Rion Amilcar Scott

Guests

Kathryn Kalinak • How the West Was Sung • Music in the Western • Richard Hageman

Rion Amilcar Scott • Insurrections • The World Does Not Require You

Jeff Grace • The Artist’s Wife • Meek’s Cutoff • In a Valley of Violence

Gary Farmer • Dead Man • Powwow Highway • Smoke Signals • First Cow • Winter in the Blood • Gary Farmer and the Troublemakers

pick your corporate poison:

Spotify • Playlist of Western Film Scores

Youtube • Playlist of Western Film Scores

 

If the western is our origin story, we must deconstruct it. Every story we tell about this country is built on this foundation, and if we are to understand who we are and where we’re going we must first fully understand how we got here.

List of films watched for this episode:

  • A Fistful of Dollars

  • Yojimbo

  • A Few Dollars More

  • The Good the Bad the Ugly

  • Once Upon a time in the West

  • Rio Bravo

  • The Searchers

  • Magnificent Seven

  • Seven Samurai

  • Butch Cassidy + the Sundance kid

  • El Topo

  • True Grit (2010)

  • The Big Country

  • The Shootist

  • Silverado

  • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

  • Meek’s Cutoff

  • Ravenous

  • There will be Blood

  • The Revenant

  • The Hateful Eight

  • In a Valley of Violence

  • Joe Kidd (1972)

  • Stage Coach (1939)

  • Django

  • 3 burials of Melquiades Estrada

  • Winning of the West

  • The Bronze Buckaroo

  • The Lone Ranger (2013) (oof)

  • Virginia City

  • Tombstone

  • Dead Man

  • High Noon

  • No Country for Old Men

  • Morricone Doc BBC

  • Death Rides a horse

  • First Cow

  • Rango

  • My Darling Clementine

  • Lone Star

  • A Man Called Horse

  • Powwow Highway

  • Smoke Signals

  • Billy Blazes Esq

  • Johnny Guitar

Further Reading:

Native Film Talk - An excellent podcast + more source material for this episode.

Kathryn Kalinak - How the West Was Sung • Music in the Western

Janet Walker - Westerns: Films Through History

Richard Slotkin - The Fatal Environment , Gunfighter Nation, Regeneration Through Violence

Sarah Winnemucca - Life Among the Piutes

Rion Amilcar Scott - The World Does Not Require You

Topics, Tags and Mentions: Westerns, Western films, Carter Burwell, Richard Slotkin, Ennio Morricone, Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone, John Ford, John Wayne, Smoke Signals, Dead Man, Stagecoach, The Big Country, Frontier, Frontier Thesis, Gary Farmer, Rion Amilcar Scott, Jeff Grace, Kelly Reichardt, Kathryn Kalinak, Dead Man, The World Does Not Require You, Meek's Cutoff, In a Valley of Violence, How the West was Sung, Music in the Western, The Revenant, There Will Be Blood, El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jim Jarmusch, Neil Young, Magnificent Seven, Seven Samurai, Elmer Bernstein, A Fistful of Dollars, Rio Bravo, John Wayne, John Ford, A Few Dollars More, The Good the bad the ugly, Richard Hageman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Diegetic Music, Western guitar, western sound, Gary Farmer interview, Jeff Grace Interview, Rion Amilcar Scott interview, Kathryn Kalinak Interview the american west, movie podcast.