Bernard Herrmann – A Great Film Composer with a Great Name
Can you imagine an Alfred Hitchcock film without the music?
By Alan Herrmann
MOVIE CRITIC
Picture this: A woman is driving a car on a highway somewhere in a flat, wide-open space. Her face shows little emotion except for the occasional furrowing of her brow when she checks her rear-view mirror.
It’s a short scene with no dialogue but seems longer; tedious, in fact. But in reality, this woman is in deep trouble and in this scene, we only know this because the music score is very intense and low pitched - bum, bum, bum-bum-bum, bum, bum – and our driver is Marion Crane, making off with $40,000.
Without the music, this scene would be very dull indeed. But this is, after all, an early scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the music – all strings and no horns, woodwinds, or percussion – is the work of Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock’s favorite film composer.
Herrmann was often overshadowed early in his film-score career by the likes of Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Ernst Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred Newman, and Miklos Rozsa. These were the Hollywood elite when it came to dramatic film music from the 1930s to the 1950s. All were classically trained and suited for the romantic, emotional films that required large orchestral pieces to define plots, characters, and settings.
These heavy hitters accumulated several academy award nominations and wins including, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, Giant, and Ben Hur.
Herrmann was also classically trained and composed several pieces outside the world of cinema, including his work on CBS Radio in the late 1930s where he first became acquainted with Orson Welles. He was a young maverick, like Welles, and was nominated for his score for Citizen Kane and The Devil and Daniel Webster the same year, 1941. He won the Oscar for the latter.
Herrmann insisted when he was hired to compose for a film that he should have full creative control of his composition, period. He knew what would work for the director and could be trusted to carry out this vision.
Although Herrmann would work with several directors over his career, he is best remembered for the scores he composed for Alfred Hitchcock. It was a relationship, albeit stormy at times, that would last for several years and would culminate in some of Hitchcock’s finest pictures, including The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much (including Herrmann’s cameo conducting an orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall), The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Marnie.
Herrmann would go on to create more film and television compositions, like The Twilight Zone, in various genres until his death in 1975 just after finishing the score for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, where his use of gloomy repetition and saxophone-infused jazz reflected the dark and dangerous world of 1970s New York City.
Here are some of my favorite cinema compositions by Bernard Herrmann:
Jane Eyre (1943) – Here Herrmann reunites with Orson Welles (as an actor, not director) who portrays Rochester, the tortured soul in search of love and redemption. Herrmann’s use of strings and woodwinds is dark and romantic, reflecting Charlotte Bronte’s downtrodden Jane as she faces her fears and anxiety, particularly when she first meets Rochester. More heavy sounding strings, woodwinds, and horns amplify Rochester’s boorish behavior and mysterious moods. Herrmann adapted some of the music for this film from an opera he wrote titled Wuthering Heights based on the novel by Emily Bronte, Charlotte’s sister.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) – Here Herrmann proves to be a true visionary in the world of cinematic music. For this classic Science Fiction thriller, Herrmann uses innovative music technology of the time – electronic strings, organs, and an eerie- sounding device known as a theremin — to express the feel of outer space intruding on normal, human existence. The scene where the spaceship opens up and Gort, the lumbering but menacing robot, disembarks still sends chills, mostly due to Herrmann’s fantastic and otherworldly score.
Beneath the 12 Mile Reef (1953) – Not quite the classic that The Day the Earth Stood Still became, Beneath the 12 Mile Reef is still an entertaining tale of Greek sponge divers off the coast of Florida. Shot in cinemascope with beautiful color photography, the film was enhanced by Herrmann’s mysterious, swirling, and hypnotic music that relied heavily on the use of several harps that gave it an ethereal quality. It was also one of the earlier films to use stereophonic sound.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) – Herrmann takes on another Science Fiction classic, this time adapted from a Jules Verne novel that deals with mysterious caverns, prehistoric creatures, and the lost city of Atlantis. The music is intensely dramatic – sometimes over the top – but not unwarranted. The searing strings, gloomy woodwinds, thundering percussion, blaring brass, and dreamlike harps are all here, but so are the odd ball, archaic instruments Herrmann liked to inject into his pieces from time to time. In this case the serpent, a snake-shaped woodwind-brass hybrid instrument dating back to the late 16th century with a very ominous sound, is used to represent a large reptilian creature coming to life.
North by Northwest (1959) – For Hitchcock’s cross-country suspense thriller, Herrmann used more-traditional instruments, but he relied heavily on a musical technique based on the fandango dance, where a rapid repetition of sound creates a feeling of taking flight, a sense of perpetual movement in order to survive. This theme is repeated throughout the film and is used most effectively in the opening titles and the climax scene on Mount Rushmore. Earlier on, in 1951, Herrmann used a very similar fandango sound for the chase scene in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground. There is an ongoing debate as to whether or not Herrmann’s score for North by Northwest and other films influenced the minimalist composer Phillip Glass who has used a similar technique in some of his compositions. Glass is a great composer, and his film work highly praised, but there is no shame in giving a nod to someone for influencing another’s creativity.
Herrmann was a great composer who could be stubborn, brash, and argumentative. But he will be remembered for masterfully introducing innovative techniques to film composing, like many of the less traditional masters who influenced him – Ives, Holst, Vaughn-Williams, Elgar, Bartok, and Shostakovich – to create some of the most beautiful film scores ever produced. In turn, Herrmann helped influence more recent film composers like John Williams, Howard Shore, Hans Zimmerman, and Danny Elfman who wanted to go against the popular trend of using pop songs interjected in films instead of carefully planned music scores that defined the characters.
Cheers to ‘Uncle Benny!’
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