Renowned, Oscar-winning film composer Ennio Morricone passed away on July 6, 2020 in Rome. He died after complications from a fall he took last week that broke his femur. He was 91 years old.

Morricone scored over 500 films, bringing haunting, dramatic music to many powerful films. He could command attention by focusing on one instrument like the trumpet and the oboe, or he’d use sounds like whistles and a coyote’s howl to provide atmospheric tension.

He scored Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns building tension through the intense scenes and produced the music for Days of Heaven, The Mission, Cinema Paradiso, and The Hateful Eight. He won an Oscar for The Hateful Eight in 2015, an honorary Oscar in ’07, and was nominated for five more throughout his career.

Nicknamed “The Maestro,” Morricone was born in Rome on November 10, 1928. His father Mario was his first music teacher who taught him to play several instruments. He enrolled in a music program at age 12 and continued to study in music schools.

Morricone’s most famous works provided the soundtracks for Leone’s action-filled Westerns including A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Duck, You Sucker. He partnered with Leone one last time for Once Upon a Time in America in ’84.

His work was featured in prominent films like The Battle of Algiers, 1900, Exorcist II: The Heretic, La Cage aux Folles, The Thing, Rampage, The Untouchables, Hamlet, In the Line of Fire, Wolf, and Bulworth.

Morricone’s final completed work was the short On the Road in 2020.