Bernard Herrmann

Introduction

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.

Psycho (1960)

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. 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 which ensnares 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.

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 are set 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.

Journey To The Centre Of The Earth

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. 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.

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.

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

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. 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. They 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.

Taxi Driver (1976)

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 bear Herrmann’s final score – TAXI DRIVER.

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.

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.

Outro

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.