After a period with a big band in the late 1940s and early 50s, Frontiere moved to Los Angeles, where he enrolled at UCLA. He eventually became musical Director at 20th Century Fox. He scored several films under the tutelage of Alfred and Lionel Newman, while also recording jazz music.
Frontiere became head of the music department at Paramount Pictures in the early 1970s, where he again worked on television and film scores, while concurrently orchestrating popular music albums for, among others, Chicago. Examples of Frontiere's sweeping, cinematic orchestrations appear in the opening and closing songs of the 1977 album Nether Lands by Dan Fogelberg. He won a Golden Globe for the score to the 1980 film The Stunt Man. He also composed a jingle for the studio's television division.
After scoring for TV shows, he went on to compose the music for the Clint Eastwood film Hang 'Em High. The title theme for that movie became a top-10 hit for the group Booker T. & the M.G.'s. He also composed the Soundtrack to the 1971 motorcycle documentary On Any Sunday, which featured Steve McQueen and was directed by Bruce Brown.
In 1986, Frontiere was incarcerated for nine months in a federal penitentiary after scalping tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl, which he obtained through his then-wife, Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere. He was estimated to have scalped as many as 16,000 tickets, making a half million dollars in profit that he failed to report to the Internal Revenue Service. Frontiere pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year and one day in prison, three years probation, and fined $15,000 for failing to report income from the sale of the tickets and for lying to the IRS. Georgia Frontiere filed for divorce shortly after Dominic's release from prison.
Frontiere died in Tesuque, New Mexico on 21 December 2017, at the age of 86.
