How The West Was Won: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, Soundtrack]

Alfred Newman | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (January 14, 1997)
• Original Release Date: February 20, 1963
• Number of Discs: 2
• Format: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, Soundtrack
• Label: Rhino
• ASIN: B0000033TD
• Also Available in: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #30,239 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

Disc: 1

1. Overture [Extended Version][Medley]

2. Main Title

3. This Is the West

4. The Erie Canal

5. Two Hearts on a Tree

6. First Meeting

7. First Kiss

8. River Pirates/Stalking and Killing [Extended Version][Medley]

9. Godspeed Eve/The Rapids

10. Burial (Bereavement/Rock of Ages/Fulfillment)

See all 24 tracks on this disc

Disc: 2

1. Entr'acte [Extended Version][Medley]

2. Mr. Lincoln

3. He's Linus' Boy

4. I'm Sad and I'm Lonely [outtake][Outtake]

5. When Johnny Comes Marching Home

6. Zeb's Return

7. The Pony Express

8. A Railroader's Bride I'll Be

9. No Goodbye [outtake][Outtake]

10. Zeb and Jethro

See all 27 tracks on this disc

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous, October 7, 1998

By 

Vincenzo Stonitelli (Martinsville, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How The West Was Won: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Audio CD)

Includes score (including several extended versions), source music, outtakes, demo.

The meat of this 2 CD set is the score itself, which is fabulous. I got this in April and have probably listened to it 50 times since then.

The accompanying brochure, which describes the history of the movie, the music, the composers(Alfred Newman with assistance from several prominent lyrists and arrangers), is also very informative.

While the movie itself is very entertaining, it is not great (but is significant - see Cinerama). If you want to see it in Cinerama, you'll have to go to Dayton.

Hopefully they'll remaster the video for DVD and include the entire screen. The widescreen video is from the 70 mm print made from the Cinerama prints, but actually does not include the entire screen width.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As magnificent a film score as any ever written!, October 18, 2004

By 

R. L. Pulliam "no lemming, I" (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How The West Was Won: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Audio CD)

As a longtime devotee of Alfred Newman's genius as a composer and conductor, I highly recommend to everyone Rhino's 2-CD album of the complete score to MGM's 1963 film, "How the West Was Won."

In a perfect world, it would not have taken 34 years (from 1963 release date of film to 1997 release date of 2-CD soundtrack) for this music to have been revealed in such awesome, stunning splendor. It's reasonable to reflect, however, that technology has evolved during those three decades to the point where such a recording is not only possible, but affordable.

Perhaps Voltaire's satiric maxim, "All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" (Dr. Pangloss -- "Candide"), can occasionally ring true.

For me, the revelations of the complete score are not the long-coveted magnificent cues (which remain breathtaking and heart-stopping) of the complete "Cheyennes/Indian Attack" and "Finale/Finale Ultimo," but such tracks as "Lincoln," "Zeb Returns" and the "Van Valen Auction" in which Newman develops his thematic underscore with basic simplicity, adding depth and beauty with various counterpoints to create a three-dimensional sound that never fails to engage the mind and the heart. This score is finally complete.

The phrasing in "Cheyennes" is, in a word, "phenomenal." An oft-cited anecdote by Ken Darby concerned Newman's pondering this sequence and wondering how in the world he was going to be able to come up with something fresh for an Indian attack. He then went home, sat down and wrote this series of cues that equalled, and exceeded (IMO), everything previously written in the genre.

There will, of course, be many out there who will fret and worry over which cues are actually original and which are based on folk themes. This album is evidence that it truly doesn't matter in the overall context of the score. Original Newman meshes with traditional themes so seamlessly that they become a new entity, so much so that Newman's work enters that timeless realm from which springs such tunes as "Shenandoah" and "Endless Prairie."

This recording reveals "How the West Was Won" as the filmmusic masterpiece most of us knew it to be upon first hearing it in 1963. Time has not diminished its splendor, and we shall never hear its like again.

Some quibbling notes:

The booklet is rather well-done, although I was amused to read the assertion that Newman was less well-known than Max Steiner or Miklos Rozsa. Steiner's name appeared on hundreds of films, but so did Newman's. Newman had won 9 Oscars when he died .... Steiner had won 3 and Rozsa had won 3. In the 1940s, Newman recorded music from "Song of Bernadette" and "Captain From Castile" -- two enormously popular, best-selling score recordings. I know Rozsa's "Spellbound" and Steiner's "Gone With the Wind" (in many variations) were very popular recordings, too. Few film composers ever had that privilege in the 40s. Newman also enjoyed an active recording life throughout the 50s with several very popular albums of music. Victor Young was probably better known than all three of them, but is virtually unknown today except by film score aficionadoes (and even then, Young is woefully underrepresented).

A mistake in the data is in the background on Darby. Darby won 3 Oscars. His 3rd was for "Camelot" with Newman.

And a slight quibble over choice of words -- in the discussion of the score's cues, the writer comments that "No Goodbye" concludes with an almost inarticulate male chorus singing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." I hope that he meant "barely audible." The chorus is highly articulate...very understandable (i.e., articulate)...but also hushed.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Greatest Film Scores Ever, August 3, 2002

By 

D. COLLIER "Top Guhzillion Reviewer" (Brownwood, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How The West Was Won: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Audio CD)

The main theme as well as the entire score for HOW THE WEST WAS WON is (in my opinion, of course) every bit as good if not better than any of the musical scores of movies which are so often thought to be the greatest ever such as LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, CHARIOTS OF FIRE, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, STAR WARS, THE GODFATHER, E.T., GONE WITH THE WIND, THE STING...etc, etc.

I'm not saying these aren't great, and I'm not saying HWWW is better than all of these. But it seems that whenever most people discuss great soundtracks, this one never comes up. Don't think that this is merely great Western music (although it is certainly that). This is a wonderful film score that boasts of a power and beauty all its own.

And at the same time, some that is not its own. For Alfred Newman, in a creative fit of musical genius, arranged one of the two main themes for this film to be the old gospel hymn "Bound For the Promised Land". This along with "Shenandoah" and several other great classic songs were thrown in to help set the mood of a pioneer's life on the American frontier.

Of special interest on this matter is the hauntingly beautiful "Greensleeves" tune: "A Home In the Meadow," which, at the end, is sung powerfully and beautifully by a choir. Almost as well done as that is the first track on SIDE 2. Here, it ends with the simultaneous combining of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" and "Bound For the Promised Land".

Much like John Williams's STAR WARS, Mr. Newman knows always when to pick up the pace, and when to let it inch its way along, always setting the perfect mood for each scene. Also like the soundtrack for STAR WARS, you can play this music (without playing the movie), and it still makes you feel like the story is being told to you through the music.

And when you get right down to it, that's what a great soundtrack ought to do.