Bernard Herrmann

“I never forgot a picture I once saw a few years ago, of Bernard Herrmann conducting in one of those huge airplane hangars out in California where they record. And he was there with this 110 piece orchestra, on a podium, and behind him was this enormous screen, and just blackness around everyone. It had someone raising an axe and someone else screaming … they were synching the music to the screen. That was an incredibly thrilling picture to me, to be able to score these specific images.” —Jim Steinman

They say Bernard Herrmann died in the mid-70s, but I refuse to believe it; people like him don’t die, they’re alive forever. Born in 1911, his soundtrack debut was for Citizen Kane (1941). Instead of going downhill, like director Orson Welles, Herrmann simply got better. A partial list of his credits dazzles the memory: much work with Hitchcock, including Psycho (1960) and the electronic effects in The Birds (1963), a brace of Ray Harryhausen special animation mythology binges, such as 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason & The Argonouts; Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Devil & Daniel Webster; up to modern classics like his work for De Palma on Sisters and Obsession and his final job, Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, before he evanesced.

Herrman was given to Wagnerian bouts of individualistic orchestral modification and mutilation: enlarged percussion sesctions, no strings, purely strings, five organs, three trumpets (each with a different mute). His music thrusts and lunges with a confident pulse of genius, the ability to transcend the limitations imposed by the film medium. If Herrmann heard it in his head, you got to hear it as well. Steinman recalls Brian De Palma telling him how Herrmann left a screening of Obsession in tears because he found the movie so emotionally affecting. “Will you do the music?”, De Palma yelled as the great man jumped in a cab, confident that if his film had gained this response then Herrmann would take the assignment. But no was the answer. Why not? “I don’t like the deal,” he shouted, speeding off into the night. The contract was altered to Herrmann’s satisfaction the next day.