Ennio Morricone, the Italian film composer whose career spanned 50 years, died Monday at the age of 91. And if you’ve ever pretended to shoot someone with your finger, there’s a good chance you’ve whistled his most famous tune.

Morricone—who died after being admitted to the hospital last week following a fall, his lawyer told the New York Times—had a prolific career that included countless film scores, pop tunes, sold-out concert tours, best-selling tribute albums, and just about every award imaginable. (His ever-elusive Oscar only came recently, though, for The Hateful Eight.) Few modern, classical composers, working in film or otherwise, enjoyed the sort of popularity he did. A Morricone score is shorthand for a full orchestra and a rich, sweeping sound, often incorporating unexpected instrumentation. None have ever come close to matching him.

Born in Rome in 1928, Morricone began his career as a trumpeter, arranger, and composer working for radio programs in the 1950s. His eclecticism showed itself early, working in pop, jazz, classical, and avant-garde forms. No surprise for the man who could write the gorgeous odes to Divinity heard in The Mission as well as the lush, feathery romps from La Cage Aux Folles.

The key year for Morricone was 1964. That was when he became a core member of a composer’s collective known as Il Gruppo (full name: Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza), whose jazz, funk, musique concrète experiments eventually led to recording The Feed-Back, a Rosetta Stone of odd beats and sound effects regularly sampled by hip-hop DJs. More importantly for Morricone’s fortunes, however, was his first collaboration with director Sergio Leone, on A Fistful of Dollars.

While not the first of the so-called Spaghetti Westerns, this low-budget masterpiece, shot in Spain to mimic the American desert, remains one of the great lightning-in-a-bottle moments of 20th-century cinema. Leone ripped off Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and set it in a nastier, more violent copy of Hollywood’s Wild West. After better-known actors turned down the main role, he gave a TV star, Clint Eastwood, his first leading part. Morricone used guitar, minimalist piano, whistles, whipcracks, and gibberish chants. It was completely unpredictable (and even anachronistic), but it just sounded right.

The Leone-Morricone-Eastwood Man With No Name collaboration continued with For a Few Dollars More, and concluded with one of the greatest tough-guy epics ever made: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

“Ahh-aaa-ahhh-aaa-ahhh / Waaah-waaa-waaaaah,” can, perhaps, be scientifically proven to be the coolest melodic line ever recorded, especially when coupled with echoey electric guitar, gunshots, whistles, and owl sounds—and particularly when set against Leone’s enormous close-ups of unshaven outlaws, juxtaposed with gorgeous natural vistas.

As the Spaghetti Westerns grew more popular, Morricone had a hit in Europe writing “Se Telefonando” for the Italian singer Mina. He would continue to work with pop acts throughout his life, including Françoise Hardy, Joan Baez, Pet Shop Boys, Zucchero, Paul Anka, Sting, k.d. lang, and Morrissey. But film music is where he made his most lasting impact.

He teamed with most of the great Italian directors of his day, including Bertolucci, Argento, Pasolini, Zeffirelli, Bava, and Pontecorvo, working in dramas, comedy, and highly stylized “giallo” horror films. Morricone and Leone collaborated again for Once Upon a Time in the West, and his “Man With a Harmonica” theme is used as psych-up music at Muse concerts, if that tells you anything about its crossover appeal. (Metallica does the same with his “Ecstasy of Gold”.) A Fistful of Dynamite (also known as Duck, You Sucker!) stars James Coburn as an Irish revolutionary out West; for the score, Morricone fearlessly combined Celtic instruments and lush, Brian Wilson–esque pop soundscapes with his typical Western arsenal. It’s an extremely experimental score that so easily could have overshadowed the film, and hints at some of the genre-mashing that was to come for Morricone.

Though he always stayed based in Italy, the composer soon began working in Hollywood productions. In 1982, he composed the eerie, synthesizer-heavy score to John Carpenter’s The Thing. In the mid-’80s, he hit an incredible stride, composing the melancholy theme for Leone’s final film, Once Upon a Time in America, in 1984, and the equal parts thrilling and sophisticated music for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables in 1987.

In between was Morricone’s masterpiece, and what some consider the finest soundtrack ever recorded. Roland Joffé’s exploration of faith, personal ethics, and very photogenic waterfalls, The Mission, is far more appreciated in Europe than in the United States. But anyone will tell you that Morricone’s score is a stunner. For this period drama, set in the Amazon, Morricone mixed chorals evocative of the Catholic church with indigenous instruments. Oh, and star Jeremy Irons also plays an oboe in “Gabriel’s Oboe,” a recurring theme for all that is gorgeous and devastating about the world. It has been known to make a film critic cry in just three notes.

Quentin Tarantino, a devotee of Spaghetti Westerns and giallo horror films, slipped some preexisting Morricone themes into his own films. Morricone recorded original music for a Tarantino film in 2015; his work for The Hateful Eight won him the Academy Award that he deserved for The Mission.

Hans Zimmer—a very different kind of film composer, but similarly prolific—once called Morricone “the singular talent of the 20th century, as far as film music is concerned. There is nobody else.” Surely, one can also make the case for John Williams. But if there were to be a shoot-out between the two, we know what tune we’d be humming.

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