Narrative and musical strategies in the Spanish western of the 1960s: two films by Ramón Torrado with music by Daniel Montorio

Abstract

In 1964, the composer Daniel Montorio (1904-1982) wrote the music for two westerns directed by Ramón Torrado (1905-1990): Relevo para un pistolero and Los cuatreros. At that time, Spanish westerns —whether or not they were co-productions— were massproduced, the film industry had a consolidated infrastructure, and narratives were influenced by North American cinema. Torrado and Montorio were veteran professionals and they made two successful films, following the classic patterns of the genre, before the innovations of visuals, sound and narrative in the spaghetti western that would prevail after the Leone and Morricone Dollar Trilogy. Following studies on the presence of pastoral topic in film music (N. Lerner, 2001; M. Beckerman and W. H. Rosar, 2009), the semiotic analysis of P. Tagg and B. Clarida for The Virginian (2003), the works of K. Kalinak on the music of the American western (2007, 2012) and the study of mythopoetic of music in genre cinema (T. Scheurer, 2005), this article analyzes the music of these films as a discursive practice, from a semiotic perspective. The objective is to analyze the functions of music in filmic narratives, and to assess the presence of musical topics conosolidated in the North American western (M. Whitmer, 2012 and 2018; R. J. Stilwell, 2016) in Montorio’s film music, confirming that both diegetic songs and extradiegetic music were effective tools in the definition of Spanish popular and commercial “genre cinema” during the sixties.