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 |
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.