The Big Country (1958)

While researching The Magnificent Seven, one score kept coming up again and again: The Big Country—the “grandaddy” of Western scores. It lingered with me, the kind of score you don’t quite forget. Before long, I knew I had to bring it back into circulation, as a kind of companion to the Bernstein score and Broughton’s Silverado.

So I set out to do just that. I tracked down Jerome Moross’s daughter Susanna Moross-Tarjan, who told me the original MGM materials were at Columbia. My first thought was simple: thank God the scores weren’t tossed out with the rest of the archive back in the ’60s!

I had many long, wonderful conversations with Susanna—about the score, her father, and what it was like, as a 15-year-old, to hear it performed at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio in 1958. You could almost hear the room through her stories.

From there, with help from Stee Wyrick, we began putting it back together. Piece by piece, cue by cue, we followed the handwritten manuscript and rebuilt the score so it can be admired and studied for years to come. Enjoy!

Jerome Moross’s score for The Big Country stands as one of the most iconic achievements in the history of the Hollywood Western. At a time when the genre was defined by the European tradition of Max Steiner and Dmitri Tiomkin, Moross broke new ground with a “Copland-esque,” Americana sound that draws in the audience, carried by one of the most unforgettable main themes ever written for the screen.

276 pages. 9 X 12 inches. Paperbound, printed in U.S.A.

$85.00

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