This complex and irascible man was plagued by frustration, but remains one of cinema’s most iconic musical voices, says Michael Beek
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
Composer of the month
A young woman steps into a motel shower; she smiles, the water seemingly washing away her sins – she stole a lot of money, but has decided to return it. Beyond the shower curtain the door opens and a dark figure approaches slowly before ripping back the curtain; with it comes a torrent of shrieking strings, the musicians’ slashes and stabs working in unison with those of the faceless, knife-wielding maniac. When it’s done, as the sounds of the cellos ebb away, so too does the woman’s life.
Marion Crane’s demise at the hands of (spoiler alert) Norman Bates is one of the most famous scenes in cinema history. But this shocking moment from early in director Alfred Hitchock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho could have been very different. Hitchcock didn’t want music in the scene, but composer Bernard Herrmann felt he knew better (as he often did) and wrote some anyway. Herrmann was almost 20 years into his film career by this point, so knew his craft; Hitchcock was quickly convinced, but they wouldn’t always see eye to eye, famously going their separate ways a few years later.
Herrmann’s first music for the big screen was as groundbreaking as the film it was written for: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). He had composed and conducted music for Welles’s famous ‘Mercury Theatre on Air’ at CBS Radio in New York, including the now infamous 1938 War of the Worlds episode that sent many listening Americans into a spin thinking the East Coast was under attack. Much of Herrmann’s work for radio has been lost, but it was a fertile training ground for a film composer, requiring the writing and conducting of a lot of narrative music week after week. Ingenuity was the order of the day, and that would serve Herrmann’s vision of what a film score could, and should, do. For Welles’s film he created an orchestral atmosphere and textures hitherto unheard on screen, deployed as a series of short, transitionary cues and utilising a bespoke palette of sounds where required – as opposed to writing for the standard symphony orchestra that was, by then, the sound of Hollywood.
The son of a New York optometrist, Herrmann played violin and piano as a child and his passion (obsession) for literature and music resulted in something of an encycopaedic knowledge – thus musical studies at Juilliard and NYU (the former especially) proved
