vulture:

…to say that Morricone is a great soundtrack composer — or even the greatest of all soundtrack composers — doesn’t quite do him justice. His influence is monumental across musical genres, and his innovations have been adopted even by avant-garde musicians. In fact, many people who’ve never seen a single film scored by the prolific Morricone can probably still easily identify many of his musical themes. Don’t believe me? Whistle a few tunes from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or A Fistful of Dollars sometime, and you might find that even people who’ve never seen a frame of a spaghetti Western will know what you’re referencing.

Morricone, who recently passed away, wasn’t just a composer of scores for spaghetti Westerns. You’ll recognize many of these cues from a wide variety of films.