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But the work that made him world famous, and that was best known to moviegoers, was his blend of music and sound effects for Sergio Leone’s so-called spaghetti westerns of the 1960s: a ticking pocket watch, a sign creaking in the wind, buzzing flies, a twanging Jew’s harp, haunting whistles, cracking whips, gunshots and a bizarre, wailing “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah,” played on a sweet potato-shaped wind instrument called an ocarina.

Mr. Morricone used a Jew’s harp and a synthesizer to create “a kind of music of the grotesque.”

There was something tough and austere about them, perhaps because of Prine’s voice – a rough, artless, nasal rasp that Dylan suggested sounded as if Prine had swallowed a jew’s harp.

It sounds something like a Jew’s harp, but much louder.

Morricone may have created much of the musical language surrounding westerns – from bullwhips cracking to the twang of the jew’s harp – but as he regularly points out, they make up less than 10% of his soundtrack work.