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Because of the concise impact of his film music, Bernard Herrmann is sometimes presented as a revolutionary who broke all the rules in the book. A careful examination of his work, however, shows this is not true. As composer and film critic Michel Chion has pointed out, Herrmann followed the same methods as his predecessors, including use of the leitmotiv and composition techniques taken from the so-called classical tradition. What is unique in his music owes much more to his presence, the effectiveness of his writing, and the way his scores intervene as a story unfolds. For the most part, it avoids what is known as “underscoring”: following the film’s action, in sync with the image. Instead, Herrmann’s writing is original, personal, and inventive. It strikes listeners and leaves behind strong memories long after the film is over.
Herrmann worked with some of the greatest film directors of the twentieth century, beginning with his first score, which was for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, all the way to Brian De Palma’s Obsession and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.1 He demonstrated his broad aesthetic range over some thirty-five years, in around fifty scores. He worked with iconic directors such as Welles (two films), De Palma (two films), Joseph Mankiewicz (two films), and François Truffaut (two films), as well as Henry Hathaway, William Dieterle, Nicholas Ray, Raoul Walsh, and Robert Wise. He is best known — and rightly so — for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he worked on nine films over a period of eleven years, from The Trouble with Harry to Torn Curtain.
The force and concision that characterizes his music is a common thread in all his film scores, which can be grouped into three distinct periods. The first begins with Citizen Kane in 1941; the second is his “Hitchcock” period from 1955 to 1966; the third contains his work with young directors working to craft a new cinematic experience, between 1966 and 1975. For the broader public, the high points of Herrmann’s career are and will probably remain Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho, but it would be a mistake to see his Hitchcock period as forming the core of his musical identity or even as devoted exclusively to Hitchcock.2 Herrmann gave his best to many films that came before and after this period, as well as to classics-based fantasy and adventure films made by other directors between 1958 and 1963.3
With varying degrees of enjoyment, Herrmann explored almost every genre, from Westerns to war pictures to peplum. His most successful scores, though, are the ones that fit his own clear tastes for the shadowy Gothic novels of the Brontë sisters (Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre and his own — and only — opera, Wuthering Heights); the supernatural (The Devil and Daniel Webster); ghost films, a popular Hollywood genre at the time (the poetic The Ghost and Mrs. Muir); and, as mentioned, fantasy adventure stories, chief among them Jason and the Argonauts. These same interests drew him to science fiction (including The Day the Earth Stood Still, Fahrenheit 451, and the celebrated television series The Twilight Zone), as well as horror. The idea of the double — a romantic archetype — also inspired him: the woman played by two characters in Vertigo or the conjoined twins in Sisters (De Palma, 1973).
A fascination with obsession, which he shared with Hitchcock, played a major part in the imprint he left in our collective memory, as seen in Psycho, The Birds, and the work of De Palma and Scorsese. This theme was often associated with violence and multi-layered suspense, pushing into fear. In many ways, J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962) is emblematic of this fascination: an ex-convict threatens his former defense lawyer and his family in a story whose tension grows constantly until the final deadly confrontation. Herrmann’s score was so effective that when Scorsese remade the film in 1991, he decided to keep the score and had it adapted by Elmer Bernstein.
When Welles asked Herrmann to write the music for Citizen Kane in 1941, the composer already had extensive experience in radio, where he had begun working in 1934 and where he and Welles would collaborate, for CBS, between 1938 and 1946. For Welles, this period was a literary one, during which he wrote numerous adaptations broadcast weekly on the popular Mercury Theatre on the Air.4 For Herrmann, the repetition of writing for each program allowed him to refine his music. “Orson is the only one with any musical, cultural background. All the other directors I worked with haven’t had the temerity to tell me anything about music,” he later recalled. “Hitchcock left it completely to me.”5
Many radio adaptations used themes — or even the same literary works — that would be taken up in cinema shortly thereafter. Before their movie adaptations, there were radio dramas made of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar — and of course the infamous radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which was performed so convincingly on 30 October 1938 that it provoked a memorable panic among listeners, who believed that there really was a Martian invasion happening in the little town of Grovers Mill that Halloween. Between the transplanting of Wells onto American soil and the use of faux news reporting,6 the experience had a tremendous impact on both Welles and Herrmann as they continued working together in Citizen Kane.7 The radio play of War of the Worlds turned Welles into a celebrity overnight, and only served to intensify Herrmann’s commitment to exploiting the impact of music. It was also during this time that Herrmann became familiar with literary works by authors such as Arthur Schnitzler, Charles Dickens, and Jules Verne, as well as the detective stories of Dashiell Hammett, which would provide fodder for so much of the film noir repertoire.
Herrmann’s work at that time, as an arranger, conductor, and sometime composer, taught him the ability to adapt quickly as he responded to Welles’s frequent tweaks, sometimes made just before live broadcasts.8 His method of composing with short and easily modifiable motifs in his later music comes from this time. He also drew on his experience in radio when composing for the many short television pieces he scored.
Like many other film composers, Herrmann left behind a body of writing for concert performance that, beyond the many suites taken from his film scores, have been sidelined or obscured by his work for film. Surprisingly, though he spent his life composing for cinema, radio, and television, Herrmann dreamed of an international career as an orchestra conductor. He did work extensively as a conductor — especially for the music of Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius, and many other British composers — but his composing kept him from pursuing conducting full-time. The only film in which he can be seen in this role — conducting not his own music but an Arthur Benjamin cantata9 — is, ironically, in Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.10
Notwithstanding, Herrmann was genuinely interested in cinema because of its ability to reach broad audiences, and because it used music as a form of artistic expression. Most often, following the general rule in the industry, directors called on Herrmann once they had completed their films. Herrmann did, however, participate at times in the moviemaking process itself, working alongside Welles (certain scenes of Citizen Kane were shot with music playing in parallel) or Dieterle in The Devil and Mr. Webster. He even wrote one score ahead of the making of the film: his piano concerto titled Concerto macabre, which was used and adapted for John Brahm’s Hangover Square, whose main character is an unhinged and murderous composer.11
While Herrmann’s body of concert work is not a major one in terms of the number of pieces it contains, it is notable because of the relationship — and even the porousness — that exists between his personal writing and his composition for radio and cinema: he frequently borrowed from one to feed the other.
This slippage between one type of music and the other is particularly noticeable in several passages of his opera Wuthering Heights: for example, the Act III aria “I Am Burning” was taken from the score for Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights functioned as a kind of reservoir of inspiration for other scores written around that time or later on, including Vertigo and North by Northwest. At the same time, it contains a synthesis of ideas Herrmann had developed in his film scores. He began work on the opera, which was the keystone of his concert writing, after writing an opera pastiche for Citizen Kane. He composed it in parallel with his other work, between 1943 and 1951. During this time, he transitioned from scoring Jane Eyre (based on Charlotte Brontë’s novel), directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Welles, to composing Wuthering Heights (after Emily Brontë’s novel). In both works, his interest in mystery is unmistakable: in Jane Eyre, through the presence of Rochester’s sequestered wife; and in Wuthering Heights, through the haunting voice of Catherine, whose return Heathcliff longs for over many years.
A different tone can be found in Herrmann’s work in the genre of fantasy adventure, for which Ray Harryhausen would produce his special effects in 1958 and 1963, all the way to Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts. For the score, Herrmann borrowed from the radio drama City of Brass (1934) and his own orchestral music Nocturne and Scherzo (1936), which he transformed into the “Scherzo macabre” for the skeleton fight. He also borrowed from Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) for the Golden Fleece theme and Mysterious Island (1961) for the theme of the Hydra.12 Another borrowing can be heard in The Trouble with Harry, which was inspired by his scores for television series,13 and of course the Sinfonietta for String Orchestra (1935), four of whose five movements Herrmann reworked for Psycho.
These examples reveal a near-continuous practice of borrowing in Herrmann’s writing — and to what degree his style was formed even in his earliest works. Above all, they demonstrate that there are no fundamental differences between his concert works and his compositions for screen or radio. Unlike other film composers whose concert works are markedly different from their cinematic works, the compositional tools Herrmann used allowed him to navigate between the two fields. Any original music he produced might be worked into film scores.14 This resulted in music that was more complex and more dissonant than the conventional scores the film world was accustomed to hearing.
More rarely, Herrmann’s music made reference to other composers. For example, the love scene in Vertigo quotes the “Liebestod” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, modeling impossible love with ascendant melodic marches and Wagnerian turn figures.15 Other quotations were less obvious; for example, his simple nod to Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte in music for a French director (François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451: “The Road”).
Early in his career, Herrmann was taken with Hector Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation and Modern Orchestration, which led him to attach great importance to instrumental color. In an industry where compositions tended to be passed off to Hollywood orchestrators upon completion, Herrmann insisted on — and sometimes had to fight for — control over the arrangement and orchestration of his scores.
Beyond the highly personal nature of his orchestrations, instrumental color is a central element of his language — indeed, it is completely indissociable from it. Herrmann did not necessarily use large symphonic ensembles in his arrangements; more often, he chose groups for their specific properties: four flutes, piccolo, alto flute, bass flute, eight horns, and strings for Cape Fear, strings only for Psycho, and strings with two harps, glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone, and marimba in Fahrenheit 451. He used more unusual instruments in other scores, selecting peculiar sounds for The Day the Earth Stood Still (two theremins, tenor and alto,16 plus two Hammond organs, two pianos, two harps, two vibraphones, ten brass instruments, and electric string trios) or rare instruments such as the viola d’amore in On Dangerous Ground and the serpent in The White Witch Doctor. Herrmann did also use the classical symphony orchestra, diversifying it and bolstering the woodwind section considerably: fourteen woodwinds and eleven brass are used in Vertigo and North by Northwest, for example. He also adapted the traditional orchestra to his subject, as in Jason and the Argonauts, which uses twenty-two woodwinds, twenty-four brass, four harps, theremin, and viola d’amore.
Herrmann’s color choices tend to highlight woodwinds and to favor deep registers. Bass clarinet, English horn, contrabassoon, and bass trombone appear often. This characteristic sound stands out in the prelude of Citizen Kane, scored for three alto flutes in G, two clarinets, three bass clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, two trombones, timpani, tam-tam, two vibraphones, bass drum, and double bass. Another example is Taxi Driver, for two bass clarinets, two contrabass clarinets, alto saxophone, two bassoons, two contrabassoons, four horns, four trumpets, four trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion, four vibraphones, two harps, piano, and strings, with lower-range instruments dominating.
Herrmann’s harmonic vocabulary was essentially tonal, often bitonal, and never atonal, although he did make ready use of dissonance. Overall, his vocabulary is built on thirds: often plain thirds, a distant echo of the ascent in the Act III prelude of Tristan und Isolde. This helps to create false relationships that spark tension in the delicate balance between stasis and waiting, a tension heard in The Man Who Knew Too Much (the parents’ arrival at Ambrose Chapel, where the child is imprisoned), in Vertigo (tailing Madeleine as she contemplates the portrait in the museum), in Jason and the Argonauts (Hercules in the treasure room), and in Psycho (the first exposition scene after the theme, “The City”).
To introduce instability, thirds are combined more and more frequently with augmented fifths. Herrmann does this discreetly and humorously in the prelude of The Trouble with Harry (with allusions to Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Symphony in Three Movements) and then with dramatic openness in the prelude of Vertigo, where a three-note chord becomes a seventh (E-flat–G-flat–B-flat–D), which Royal Brown would call the “Hitchcock chord.”17 It recurs frequently in Herrmann’s writing: for example, it is the opening chord in the Psycho prelude.
This vocabulary, combined with carefully chosen instrumental colors, defines Herrmann’s approach in that he delays, or even avoids, harmonic resolution. Suspense arises as much from the specific chords chosen as it does from the way they are used to delay a conclusion. This creates a sustained feeling of anticipation, enhancing the film’s narrative fluidity.
One of the most frequently noted features of Herrmann’s music is his use of small melodic cells, often as simple as two notes — typically a descending second. This technique is indeed another consistent hallmark of his work, from the “mother’s motif” in Citizen Kane to the alto saxophone’s theme of solitude in Taxi Driver. The power of Herrmann’s music lies in his ability to write short motifs — just one or two measures long — that remain etched in the listener’s memory. As a result, his scores are less “tuneful” than most film music. Rather than unfolding melodically over time, they rely on short, repeatable fragments that can be reshaped or abruptly cut, depending on the needs of the story. Again, this approach has its roots in his radio work where, between 1938 and 1940, he watched Welles make his weekly adaptations for the Mercury Theatre on the Air (twenty-two shows) and the Campbell Playhouse (fifty-six shows), condensing plays and books so they could fit into hour-long broadcasts.
Although Herrmann generally avoided writing traditional themes,18 his music is nevertheless highly recognizable, thanks to the juxtaposition of these short motifs, whose abundant repetition makes them all the more memorable to audiences. The way he introduces the main five-note motifs in the prologue of Citizen Kane, or how he hammers the four-note horn motifs from the opening moments of The Trouble with Harry, Cape Fear, and Sisters, illustrates how he evoked insistent obsession. A subtler example can be heard in Vertigo, in the swirling repetition of a short motif in an unstable descending and ascending mirror pattern; this opposition produces a dizzying effect and reveals the obsession of the main character (played by James Stewart) in his unrelenting pursuit of a woman who will elude him twice.
These brief motifs, revealed at the beginning of each movie in anticipation of its key dramatic moments, affect unexpected emotional force when combined to evoke violence or obsession. For example, Brown has shown how the sequence G–E-flat / F-sharp–D, repeated in an ostinato at the beginning of Sisters, finds its full significance in the bloody murder scene. This motif owes a clear debt to the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
The diegetic or non-diegetic function of music in a film — that is, on-screen music (musique d’écran) or off-screen score (musique de fosse, according to Chion’s terminology19) — establishes a hierarchy between music that appears within the visual frame and music that is heard only on the film’s soundtrack. This distinction is particularly evident in Herrmann’s dramaturgy, which often hinges on the tension between these two functions. In the films he scored, music is generally used in the on-screen story as a backdrop, to set a scene. Examples include the music in Susan Alexander’s night club scene or the Nat King Cole song “It Can’t Be Love” in the picnic scene in Citizen Kane. Similarly, the music playing in the bar in North by Northwest before the kidnapping of Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) contrasts with Herrmann’s music.
Another level of interplay between the diegetic and non-diegetic can be found in Vertigo in the opposition Herrmann sets up between the classical music that Midge (Barbara Del Geddes) plays — a Bach record that Scottie (James Stewart) quickly stops early in the film, and later, a Mozart record he passively ignores while recovering in the hospital — and the Wagnerian model (described earlier in this essay) that Herrmann uses to build up to the love scene with Madeleine (Kim Novak). Herrmann weaves successive hints of the model into the score before revealing it fully in the moment of their embrace. In doing so, he establishes a clear musical contrast between the comfortable, sensible Midge and the amorous, ecstatic infatuation inspired by Madeleine.
It was in Citizen Kane that Herrmann mastered the art of exploiting music’s many dimensions, establishing a dynamic relationship between the screen and the score. This ranged from borrowing existing music — as in “The March of Time” sequence, where twenty-four musical excerpts flash by in a ten-minute montage — to writing original compositions from which he then “borrowed,” such as the mock nineteenth-century opera Salammbô, composed for the film. His colossal work for Citizen Kane involved, in part, weaving preexisting melodies into a cohesive musical architecture.20 Beyond including songs for the Inquirer staff party or Susan’s excruciating attempts to sing Rossini, Herrmann created elaborate montages of sound to support the film’s layered narrative, which is filled with flashbacks and shifts in time. The breakfast table scene between Kane and his first wife is virtuosic in terms of imagery, but also in terms of the Herrmann’s music Herrmann, which uses a theme and five variations to compress years of marital decline into a single, seamless vignette in just over two minutes.
Herrmann’s use of leitmotiv is also highlighted in Citizen Kane. From the outset, he introduces two main motifs, the “power” theme and the “Rosebud” theme, in an effort to create what Jean-Pierre Berthomé and François Thomas decribe as “monochromy, an impression of magma steadily flowing out of the depths of the earth, analogous to the ‘prehistoric’ world of Kane’s domain, through which we move to approach the window of the dying man.”21 The relationship between the two motifs remains ambiguous until later in the film. This ambiguity is central to the score’s power: as the same authors note,
Herrmann assigns a motif that is vigorously characterized, immediately recognizable, to a notion that is not; and he gives a difficult-to-identify character to a motif that signifies something unequivocal. Herrmann hides one motif behind the other, drawing attention to the ‘power’ theme the better to mask the ‘Rosebud’ theme.
Herrmann never replicated this success, which was the result of a rare creative synergy between composer and director.
It was in his collaborations with Hitchcock that Herrmann would develop this counterpoint between screen and score. One exception, however, is The Man Who Knew Too Much, where the on-screen music plays a more important role than the off-screen score — largely because Benjamin’s Storm Clouds Cantata drives the climax of the film’s action. The cantata, along with other music not written by Herrmann, plays a crucial role in the storytelling and must be present from early in the film. The cymbalist’s strategic part crashes out ahead of time as a kind of early warning, and certain songs are similarly foreshadowed — most memorably “Qué será será,” which is introduced at the beginning as the mother sings it to her son.22 Although music is structurally essential to the film, Hitchcock’s didactic use of repetition reduces Herrmann’s role. His work is confined to composing transitional cues and tourist-style versions of Moroccan music.
Herrmann’s music — he quipped that “Hitchcock only finishes a picture 60%. I have to finish it for him”23 — reveals just how complementary the two artists were. Hitchcock, known for his meticulous planning, storyboarded every camera angle with precision; Herrmann, by contrast, brought impulsive energy and expanded dramatic effects. While the violence of his subjects justified the violence of his music, it was Herrmann’s choice of where the music intervened that made him such an original composer.
An example is found in Psycho. From its very first bars, the prelude introduces an unusually heightened tension. Herrmann then intensifies this strain during a moment that, on the surface, does not seem to warrant it: Marion Crane, exhausted from driving all night, is woken up in her car by a patrol officer, who ultimately sends her on her way. Yet as she pulls back onto the road, the prelude’s violent theme returns, synchronized with a montage showing the road ahead, Marion behind the wheel, and the police car looming in her rearview mirror. The music continues until she arrives at the Bates Motel. Rather than reflecting the scene’s action, the music anticipates the drama that will soon play out, pulling the audience’s attention toward Marion’s ominous fate.24 As for the infamous shower scene — originally conceived by Hitchcock as having no score — it was Herrmann who proposed the now-iconic shrieking strings: jagged, stabbing glissandos that evoke both the violence of the knife and the screeches of birds, subtly echoing Norman Bates’s unsettling hobby of taxidermy (track no. 17, “The Murder”). The same slashing musical motif returns later in the film to accompany the murder of Detective Arbogast.
Brown aptly describes this creative distribution of labor, noting the contrast between Hitchcock’s carefully controlled narrative and the “irrational” dimension added by Herrmann’s music.25 This contrast extended beyond their professional roles to their personal identities: a British Catholic director and a New York Jewish composer — the unflappable cool of the former set against the impassioned expressiveness of the latter. Herrmann, in each case, announced the film’s subject with his theme music from the outset. As with Vertigo and Psycho, the “Overture” in North by Northwest is “a kaleidoscopic orchestral fandango designed to kick-off the exciting rout which follows.”26 It uses a virtuosic array of ostinatos to launch the viewer into the action. Here, Herrmann emphasizes the film’s romantic comedy and happy ending over its spy story, in a score that literally invades the narrative in many parts of the film.
This — the dramatic intensity and the assertive presence of the music in this “60/40” partnership — may well be one of the unstated reasons that Hitchcock declined Herrmann’s score for Torn Curtain, although the rejection has been attributed to Universal’s production team, who wanted more up-to-date music. This led to a break between the two men and caused Herrmann significant personal distress. Subsequently, he composed scores for films of varying quality, the most impressive of which came from a new generation of directors.
Herrmann frequently took on the responsibility of sound design, beyond just the musical score. In The Devil and Daniel Webster, for instance, the first time the main character encounters Mr. Scratch (the devil), the audience hears the crackling of a high-tension wire. This sound appears again with the arrival of his evil accomplice. Under Scratch’s fingers, the fiddle-playing at the first dance becomes diabolical, an effect Herrmann achieved by layering tracks with different playing styles (arco, pizzicato, harmonics, double stops, etc.).27 For the second dance scene, Herrmann uses techniques analogous to visual filters, distorting the music to render the hellish spectacle even more surreal. The score surges violently as the character Miser Stevens loses consciousness.
Similarly, in Hangover Square, the protagonist’s mental health problems are underscored by unsettling electronics, while the alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still is accompanied by the eerie tones of the theremin. As stereophonic sound emerged, Herrmann experimented with audio manipulation: reversing sounds, blending electronics with strings (as in the Psycho shower scene), and introducing dense, jumbled sounds such as those in the murder sequence in Sisters.28
Herrmann’s greatest achievement in this domain was his work on The Birds. Instead of a traditional score, Hitchcock requested “bird noises, worked out like a real musical score.” Herrmann, who is credited as the film’s sound designer, turned to electronics created by Remi Gassmann in collaboration with Oskar Sala, using the Trautonium — one of the pioneering electronic instruments developed by Friedrich Trautwein in the 1930s. Herrmann’s experimentation — from the sonic dramaturgy of Citizen Kane to the audio design of The Birds — was unequalled in its time.
Often imitated — including by some of the composers who scored Hitchcock’s later films — Bernard Herrmann’s voice cannot be described as that of a romantic using modern techniques. Rather, it is defined by his deep understanding of what music could bring to cinema, and more importantly, by his understanding of cinema itself.
1. He was nominated for Best Music for these three films, but won only once, for The Devil and Daniel Webster (Dieterle, 1941). ↩
2. While Herrmann was probably the most inventive composer to work on Hitchcock’s films, he only collaborated with the director on nine of his sixty-six movies. ↩
3. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, inspired by the Thousand and One Nights; Journey to the Center of the Earth, based on the story by Jules Verne; The Three Worlds of Gulliver, based on Jonathan Swift’s novel; the Mysterious Island, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s story; and Jason and the Argonauts. ↩
4. Many Mercury Theatre actors were involved in Citizen Kane in 1941, including Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, George Coulouris, and Erskine Sanford. ↩
5. Herrmann quoted in Guy Tesseire, “Un coup de cymbale peut quelquefois (en guise de requiem pour Bernard Herrmann et quelques autres),” Positif, n° 187, November 1976, p. 44. (English quote in “Bernard Herrmann,” in Irwin Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975.) ↩
6. In 1936 and 1937, Herrmann was the musical director of “The March of Time,” a CBS radio program based on current events. The nine-minute “newsreel” sequence in Citizen Kane after the opening credits is a brilliant illustration of this. ↩
7. “Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio,” Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles) would later observe to a journalist in the newsreel sequence in Citizen Kane. ↩
8. Similarly, Herrmann often had to adapt to Hitchcock’s working method, in which the director would first create a detailed sound script outlining the entire soundtrack. The role and placement of the music would only be discussed afterward. See Donald Spoto, La face cachée d’un génie: La vraie vie d’Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, Albin Michel, 1989, p. 481. ↩
9. The Storm Clouds Cantata had already been used in the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Benjamin arranged it slightly for Hitchcock’s 1956 remake, and it was then reorchestrated by Herrmann. ↩
10. The intentionally solemn, even pompous music of the opening theme, plays as the camera shows the brass and percussion section, then closes on a closeup of the cymbalist. This music was composed and conducted by Herrmann, although he does not appear onscreen. Hitchcock was drawing the audience’s attention to the cymbalist, and liked the idea that, “without knowing it, he is the true killer” (translated from the French in Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Hitchcock-Truffaut (entretiens), Paris, Gallimard, 1993, p. 195). ↩
11. On the creation of Concerto macabre and its role in the film’s storytelling, see Lloyd Whitesell, “Concerto macabre,” The Musical Quarterly 88, no. 2 (2005), p. 167-203. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4123221 ↩
12. Jason borrows short passages from Five Fingers (1952) and The Kentuckian (1952). ↩
13. The music is borrowed from short fragments of scores composed for four 1953 episodes of the CBS broadcast Crime Classics. ↩
14. This is also true of the handful of Herrmann’s chamber music scores, including the quintet for clarinet and strings Souvenirs de voyage (1969), passages of which he would reuse in The Battle of Neretva (1969) and Endless Night (1972). ↩
15. For the varying degrees to which Herrmann’s music absorbed Wagner’s style, see John Antony, “‘The Moment That I Dreaded and Hoped for’: Ambivalence and Order in Bernard Herrmann’s Score for Vertigo,” The Musical Quarterly 85, no. 3 (2001), p. 516-544. ↩
16. The theremin was invented in the 1920s and used in film as early as 1935 (The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale). It had its heyday in American cinema starting in 1945 when Miklós Rózsa used it in the scores of Spellbound (Hitchcock) and The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder). It was also used by Roy Webb in The Spiral Starcase (Robert Siodmak) and again by Rózsa in The Red House (Delmer Daves, 1947). ↩
17. Royal S. Brown, “Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the Music of the Irrational,” Cinema Journal 21, no. 2 (1982), p. 14-49. https://doi.org/10.2307/1225034 ↩
18. Notably, Herrmann refused to write songs that, as the “classical” composer character in Hangover Square put it, “went out of style.” The one exception is the leitmotiv song “Jennie’s Song,” which was Herrmann’s sole contribution to The Portrait of Jennie (Dieterle, 1948). The rest of the film’s music is drawn from works by Debussy and arranged by Dimitri Tiomkin. ↩
19. Michel Chion, La musique au cinéma, Paris, Fayard, 1995. ↩
20. See Jean-Pierre Berthomé and François Thomas in their indispensable study, Citizen Kane, Paris, Flammarion, 1992, p. 190. ↩
21. Ibid., p. 207 and 211. ↩
22. Composed by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. ↩
23. Herrmann, quoted in Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Understones: Reading Film Music, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, p. 148. ↩
24. Herrmann, speaking in *Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann,” a documentary by Joshua Waletzky released in 1999. ↩
25. Brown, Overtones and Understones, op. cit. (note 22). ↩
26. Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002 [1991], p. 228. ↩
27. The origin of this striking effect is modeled on what Welles did when he recorded the word “Rosebud” multiple times, as spoken by the dying Kane. ↩
28. See Philippe Langlois, “Le Jour où la terre s'arrêta: Bernard Herrmann et l'innovation sonore,” http://lecranmusical.blogspot.fr/2008/10/bernard-herrmann-et-linnovation-sonore.html ↩
Do you notice a mistake?