Way West [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]

Bronislaw Kaper's music for The Way West (1967) was just about the last classic Western movie score ever written that was done in a broad, epic style without any sense of irony until John Barry's music for Dances with Wolves appeared two decades later. But Kaper's music comes from an even older tradition, dating to Dimitri Tiomkin's score for Red River (1948) and, in its use of choral music and folk melodies, to a theatrical tradition decades older than that, and the influence of such figures as Aaron Copland and Roy Harris. The Polish-born Kaper had scored a handful of Westerns in the previous decade and, perhaps recognizing the nature of time, mortality, and public taste, understood that The Way West might well be his last chance to deal with the American West in musical terms. The film was also, at least in its conception, one of the larger cinematic canvases of its kind that anyone was ever likely to see again. As it turned out, the screenplay, co-authored by former blacklistee Ben