Bernard
Herrmann
Programme
1 - radio script final draft
Score
[A]
A 1. CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON – Main title (joined
with)
A 2. REVENGE OF THE CREATURE – Main title (*) 0.30
Commentary [B] With Score A playing underneath (with fade
to silence)
Bold. Brash. Gaudy. Gross. The hysterical sound
of B-Grade monster movie music. Like a carnival calliope
pumping out a cartoon version of Webern violence, this type
of music represents the primary experience many people have
of ‘atonal’ music. Certainly Hollywood’s
monster movies in the 50s produced the type of scores that
had many a lover of 20th Century music wincing. Yet many
film composers of this period were European emigres who
had a serious appreciation of the avant-garde. Classically
trained, their skills and interests were compromised by
one of the few avenues they had to pay the bills: Hollywood.
While the music these composers made for the movies is often
dismissed as a kitsch bastardisation of the European avant-garde
tradition, a strange conundrum was created. Many a European
avant-garde composer virtually starved due to their work
finding little embrace in the high-art musical circles of
post-war America. Yet Hollywood welcomed the effect and
style of such composers, even though it was under Hollywood’s
restrictive conditions. Today’s horror films still
ring with this archetypal European dissonance. The sound
of the atonal orchestra blares loudly in current big budget
film music, while it remains comparatively mute in the programmes
of many orchestras around the world.
While in a way this might be a credit to the American studio
system, it also suggests Hollywood can only accept atonality
through tacky pseudo-avant-garde orchestrations. One notable
exception to this is Bernard Herrmann, composer of Alfred
Hitchcock’s PSYCHO.
Score [C]
C 1. PSYCHO – part A 2.02
C 2. PSYCHO – parts B + C (*) 2.25
Commentary [D] With Score C.2 positioned underneath
Stylistically, Bernard Herrmann's score to Alfred Hitchcock’s
1960 film PSYCHO reflects the carney brashness of his Hollywood
contemporaries. But Herrmann moves past their musical clichés.
He explores the sonic properties and psychological qualities
of the sound of film music.
Horror movie music equates spookiness with the Other, and
Herrmann makes the moral association of atonality with deviation.
Now this is a link no serious atonal composer made, of course.
But with this approach, more then any other film composer,
Herrmann painted a musical portrait of the most aberrant
and modern of psychoses: the serial killer.
In keeping with serial psychosis, PSYCHO's story is emptied
of the meaningful plot motivations expected of conventional
drama. The main actress is killed off halfway through the
film; the killer does not realize his chance victim has
a wad of money; the detective accidentally uncovers a separate
story and is dispatched for reasons of which he himself
is unaware. These incidents form the chance intersection
of motivation and circumstance ensnare Psycho’s perverse
and amoral plot lines. Such an inverted and anti-classical
story structure cries out for non-melodic uprooted dissonance
like the kind explored by Arnold Schoenberg. And Herrmann
provides it with logical precision.
Score [E]
E 1. PSYCHO – parts D + E + F 3.46
E 2. PSYCHO – parts G + H (*) 2.44
Commentary [F] With Score E.2 playing underneath
A key element of Herrmann’s approach is to
incessantly and hysterically modulate keys. It’s a
variation of Schoenberg's serialism. But where Schoenberg,
systematically organizes his variable motifs into a paradigm
of atonal order, Herrmann retains harmonic integrity of
his melodies yet they lead us nowhere. While this may be
hard to imagine working in music alone, its effect in a
film score is one of powerful psychological resonance. Extremely
simplistic shards of melody are looped and repeated incessantly.
The repetition aggravates; the modulation suggests aimlessness
and the orchestral density oppresses.
Herrman’s score wilfully leads us in no clear direction.
Like the characters in Hitchcock’s perverse drama,
we areset loose to roam a maze of indifferent possibilities.
And atonality is the musical key to the architecture of
that maze.
Especially in the first half of the film, Herrmann’s
restless score suggest two things. Firstly, you never know
what chance events are about to befall you. Secondly, this
fear of the unknown renders your own existence frail and
insecure. Tonality is employed specifically to show how
futile it is, embedded within the predominantly atonal score.
Far from the fearful alarm bells sounded by the Hollywood
film score when faced with social taboos, Herrmann’s
PSYCHO embraces the monstrous, and marks its presence as
continual, pervasive and unending.
PSYCHO’s score employs strings alone, and makes no
bones about its attack on the audience. In symbolizing the
necrophilia of its central character Norman Bates, Herrmann
presents the violin as an object of necrophilia –
carved from a living tree, hollowed out to falsely resonate
its human tuning, strung with the guts of an eviscerated
cat, and teased erotically by the hair of a dead horse.
Violins in their romanticized symphonic attire have become
emblematic of cinema’s epic sweep and heroic grandeur.
In so much romantic music they assail audiences with grossly
amplified beauty requiring hyper categories of kitsch. Listen
to Tchaicovsky’s Swan Lake and you’ll hear violins
whispering beauty in death. Psycho declaims it loudly.
Score [G/H]
G PSYCHO – parts I + J 3.17
H JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH – Salt Slides
(*) 2.44
Commentary [I] With Score H.2 positioned underneath
You’re listening to TRACES OF SOUNDTRACKS on ABC Classic
FM with me, Philip Brophy. And today, the music of film
composer Bernard Hermann. Herrmann’s body of work
can be split into films about the interior psychological
state of the human mind, and films about the exterior forces
that affect the human mind. The former category is best
represented by the 6 scores he did for Alfred Hitchcock
– MARNIE, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, VERTIGO, THE TROUBLE
WITH HARRY, THE WRONG MAN and PSYCHO. This grounding in
the psyche comes from the 8 years that Herrmann spent in
close collaboration with Orson Welles in the 30s, producing
radio drama for the CBS Mercury Theatre. Welles' first film,
CITIZEN KANE is a poster-sized portrait of the psyche, and
Hermann’s quasi-operatic score frames it perfectly.
But beyond the psychoses and neuroses embodied in these
works, Herrmann was also attuned to the psychologically
unnerving effects within more elemental presences –
like the ocean, the air, or even the centre of the earth.
Score [J]
J 1. JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH – Mountain
Top & Sunrise ; Prelude ; The Grotto 5.18
J 2. JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH – Salt Slides
(*) 2.44
Commentary [K] With Score J.2 positioned underneath
(again)
Bernard Herrmann’s score to Henry Levin’s 1959
film JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH is typical of his
quintessentially modern strategy: amplification. His scores
and orchestrations are less impressions of an overt appearance,
and more amplifications of covert suggestions. Herrmann
is not a teller of stories; he is a reader of symbols. His
music is about the psychological state that grips the mind
in the face of any situation.
Score [L]
L 1. JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH – The Giant
Chameleon & The Fight ; The Shaft & Finale 4.04
L 2. JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH – Atlantis
(*) 2.52
Commentary [M] With Score J.2 positioned underneath
(with end silence)
The novel JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH by Jules Verne
is a heroic exploration of a new world. But to Herrmann’s
ear, the earth itself is a trembling, formidable presence.
His score echoes the dark caverns, soaring towers and bottomless
pits sculpted inside the earth. It’s a dark unknown
territory that leaves humanity behind. Herrmann’s
score synchronises to this non-human realm. Heat, oxygen,
salt and larva become elemental forces against which the
story’s troupe is pitted. With a keen ear for musical
iconography, Herrmann bases his score around French horns
which bounce between mountainous walls, and subterranean
crypt organs which rise up from Hades. The carnival spookiness
here is figuratively and literally grounded, then symbolically
amplified through distinctive orchestrations that push discrete
instruments to the fore.
Herrmann treats the orchestra as a machine for metamorphosis.
He rejects the classical pursuit to define the orchestra’s
sound. Instead, he employs the modernist pursuit to transform
the sound of the orchestra into something else. In fact,
he specialises in imbuing the orchestra with an alien presence.
Score [N]
N 1. THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL – Outer Space ;
Radar ; Gort 4.59
N 2. THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL – The Robot (*)
1.55
Commentary [O] With Score N.2 positioned underneath
Robert Wise’s 1951 film THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
is regarded as one of the definitive Cold War sci-fi films.
The dread with which it paints its picture of aliens taking
over the earth is amplified by Herrmann’s brooding
score. Herrmann of course isn’t just depicting the
space ship and the aliens: he is scoring what they represent
within the movie – the threat of the unknown and its
encroach on the everyday.
Herrmann’s use of the theremin is a landmark in spine-tingling
musical fantasy. But all of the score to THE DAY THE EARTH
STOOD STILL eerily floats free of gravity. Our laws of physics
don’t seem to apply to the orchestra and its players.
The sound their instruments like agents under mind-control.
Drums spill awkwardly; oboes rise stiltedly; harps loop
in hysterical grid-lock. Herrmann again proves to be a meta-scorer:
a composer who cannot simply treat the orchestra as a neutral
device for producing beautiful tones. Ever the modern sceptic,
Herrmann doubts the orchestra, and conducts it with affecting
unease.
Score [P]
P 1. THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL – Terror; Farewell
& Finale 3.17
P 2. THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL – Space Control
(*) 1.17
Commentary [Q] With Score P.2 positioned underneath
(with end silence)
Maybe his vibrant scepticism of stylistic convention caused
Bernard Herrmann to fall out of favour with producers and
directors in the later 60s. What is clear is that as cinema
went through a crisis of representation after the collapse
of the studio system, the orchestra was deemed ill-fitting
to the times. But fortunately, a new crop of directors rediscovered
Herrmann and employed him to return a deeper psychological
resonance to cinema – one that was largely missing
from 60s and 70s realist schools. The Freudian idea of the
return of the repressed always resonated in Herrmann’s
brooding scores, expressing the darkness lurking beneath
the surface. It’s clearly heard in the scores Herrmann
did for Francois Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and
FARENHEIT 451; Brian DePalma’s OBSESSION and SISTERS;
and Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film that would bearHerrmann’s
final score – TAXI DRIVER.
Score [R]
R 1. TAXI DRIVER – Part 1 1.56
R 2. TAXI DRIVER – Part 2 (*) 2.16
Commentary
[S] With Score R.2 positioned underneath
Set in a typically hot New York summer, TAXI DRIVER paints
the town as seething, melting, hissing, steaming. Cabs drive
in slow motion through clusters of steam rising from manhole
covers, suggesting the city is on the boil. Bernard Herrmann’s
score ‘auralises’ this metaphor.
Essentially a series of variations between two and four
note oscillations, brass and string clusters inhale and
sigh. This replicates the breath of a spent body –
the eponymous antihero of the story. Robert DeNiro portrays
the taxi diver Travis Bickle as an emotionally exhausted
and psychologically drained being into whose empty hull
has seeped the city’s social sewer. By extension,
the orchestra often sounds like it is breathing through
him; through the manholes and through the psychic being
of the city and its inhabitants. This is Herrmann’s
most astute work of psychological amplification. It’s
the musical equivalent of a doctor’s stethoscope on
a body wrought with consumption.
Score [T]
T TAXI DRIVER – Part 3 3.19
Commentary [U] With Score R positioned underneath
Herrmann’s melodic oscillations convey an incredible
weight, always suggesting that they are not only playing
notes, but modulating keys. Each phrase is drawn out to
symbolically drag everything down with its own weight. This
is not music of the airborne, the flighty, the ethereal:
this is the sound of sinking – slowly and perceptibly.
Mixed loudly in an onslaught of aural waves which envelop
the image-track, the score drips like melted glue. This
taxi driver is slipping.
Skirting around this phlegmatic musical ooze is a cycling
jazz motif which many might read as a symbol of the city
as a cosmopolitan hub. But Herrmann utterly repels that
clichéd son-image of the city as melting jazz pot.
This New York is not sexy and saucy; it is asexual and acidic.
The bass lumbers like an exhausted dancer on an empty dance
hall. The vibraphone moves asynchronously to the key melody.
All instruments blur with each other more than connect.
The jazz motif’s maudlin sax line is a sign of New
Yorkers’ emotional desperation and their displaced
humanity. Among other things, it represents Travis’
yearning for an impossible intimacy with a liberal politician’s
beautiful campaign assistant. The theme’s allusion
to love is decrepit and acrimonious. It’s a love theme
Herrmann-style.
Score [V]
V TAXI DRIVER – part 4 (*) 3.20
Commentary [W] With final 30” of Score V positioned
underneath
Film composer Bernard Herrmann. Neither impressionist nor
expressionist. Attracted not to the lyrical or the pastoral,
but to the psychological and the humoral. Hermann remains
a passionate structuralist whose sense of musical logic,
psychoacoustics and dramatic tempering mark him as one of
the most modern and most cinematic of film composers in
the 20th Century.
