Movie Music, the Communicating Link

Bernard Herrmann, likely the most celebrated of classic era film composers today, who wrote the scores  for Citizen Kane, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and Taxi Driver among countless others, once said of the function of the film score:

Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock

“I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry.”

This is surely true of Herrmann’s own remarkable work for Welles, Hitchcock, Scorsese and others, as it is of the contributions of Max Steiner to films like Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, The Letter and Now, Voyager and David Raksin’s work on such films as Laura and The Bad and the Beautiful. Herrmann’s contention has been borne out over the decades through scores by the likes of Franz Waxman, Miklos Rozsa and all of Hollywood’s “big five” Golden Age composers. Beginning with Jaws and Star Wars, the prodigious work of John Williams continues to prove Herrmann’s point as do the scores of modern era film composers such as Alexandre Desplat for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Celebrating One of Hollywood's Legendary Talents

Let's ponder for a moment what Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) might have in common beyond having been voted the two finest films in cinema history*.  The particular feature they share that I have in mind is also shared with, to name just a few films, Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the Ray Harryhausen “Dynamation” hit, The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), the Gregory Peck/Robert Mitchum thriller Cape Fear (1962), Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Canny classic movie buffs have determined by now that composer Bernard Herrmann is the common denominator.

Sight & Sound...Classic Cinema with Live Music

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo at Davies Hall, San Francisco, November 1, 2013

A few months ago the San Francisco Symphony announced that it would kick off a season-long classic film series with Hitchcock Week, October 30 - November 2. Each night a different Hitchcock movie was to be presented with its music track scrubbed and the score performed live by the symphony orchestra. Psycho launched the series on the 30th, followed by The Lodger on Halloween, Vertigo on November 1st and, on the 2nd, a night of 'greatest hits' excerpts (To Catch a Thief, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, North by Northwest) hosted by Eva Marie Saint. Most appealing to me among these events was the Vertigo program, not only because Vertigo is one of my favorite films of all time, but also because the symphony's musical accompaniment would be the world premiere live performance of Bernard Herrmann's full score. But the event was sold out by the time I found out about it. Only due to my good fortune in making a connection with a very considerate symphony representative did a pair of orchestra section seats come my way. And so it was that on the first Friday night in November my dear friend, Mike, and I, filled with anticipation and excitement, set off for Davies Symphony Hall to see Vertigo and hear its luscious score live. Once there, we sampled the special cocktail concocted for the evening, "The Voyeur" (sparkling wine, Grand Marnier, cognac), had a quick bite to eat, took our seats and waited for the lights to dim.

Bernard Herrmann - Composer Of Haunting Music and Treacherous Dreams

by guest contributor Whistlingypsy

Just as my fingers on these keys

Make music, so the self-same sounds

On my spirit make a music, too.

~ excerpt from Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens

"I don’t think Mozart’s going to help at all."

~ Midge in Vertigo

British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams, who greatly influenced young Bernard Herrmann and for whom he had a great admiration, took the subject of film score composition seriously and in encouraging his contemporaries to do the same said, “I believe that the film contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamed of, and I would therefore urge those distinguished musicians who have entered the world of the cinema to realize their responsibility in helping to take the film out of the realm of hack work and make it a subject of a real composer.” Music constitutes an essential part of the film experience, yet we often fail to acknowledge its importance to the way we perceive film. This is not to say that music is comprehensible only to those who have formal training; to the contrary the ability to appreciate music is a capacity we all share. The often overlooked genius of composing for film in general, and of Bernard Herrmann specifically, is an ability to work within the parameters of music theory while exploiting the viewer's instinctive knowledge of musical conventions, creating a lush musical landscape perfectly suited to the emotional content of the image captured on film.

Deadly Obsession: Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO

by guest contributor R.D. Finch

"What's that old Oscar Wilde thing? 'Each man kills the thing he loves...' That I think is a very natural phenomenon, really."

Alfred Hitchcock, in a 1963 interview

In his fifty-five year long career in films, Alfred Hitchcock directed sixty-seven movies. At least a dozen of these are bona fide masterpieces, and about an equal number are excellent movies that fall just short of the masterpiece mark. By any measure that's an impressive record, one unequaled by any other filmmaker I can think of. Even more impressive is that Hitchcock's pictures are not rarefied works of art of interest mainly to aesthetes and film scholars, but full-blooded movies that appeal equally to ordinary filmgoers looking for accomplished entertainments and to cinephiles looking for an intellectually and artistically stimulating film-viewing experience. Of all Hitchcock's pictures, none managed to combine these two modes—entertainment and art—so skillfully, so intriguingly, and so pleasingly as his 1958 film Vertigo.

North by Northwest - free to the public...

When I was a little girl, the only director whose name I knew was Alfred Hitchcock. Though I didn't see any of his signature films of the era in a theater - Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) - I must've seen the trailers, because I was well aware that he made exciting, colorful and glamorous movies.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic Performs Bernard Herrmann...

James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo

While perusing YouTube the other night I happened on the video below of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, performing Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d'Amour" from his score for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. I watched and listened several times, swept up in it...and then, afterward, remembered something I'd nearly forgotten...


900 Lombard, San Francisco, today

Just about a year ago a videographer friend and I toured and shot footage of San Francisco film locations. I later recorded a voice track and hoped to post the video online, but had problems uploading it. Naturally, we got footage of Vertigo sites (the film includes many locations in the city) and I also took some still photos of 900 Lombard St., "Scottie Ferguson's" apartment in North Beach. The building had changed so little in the 50+ years since the movie was made that I almost expected a vintage green Jaguar to pull up and an elegant, ethereal blonde to slide out...