The Herrmann–Hitchcock murder mysteries: post-mortem1

This chapter’s ‘post-mortem’ of the Herrmann-Hitchcock collaboration focusses on what occurred between the two men during the fateful sessions in which Hitchcock fired Herrmann when he was dissatisfied with what the composer was developing for the film. However, the chapter searches more broadly for reasons why the partnership broke down, including Hitchcock’s philosophies about film scoring and exploring the history of the working relationship between the two men, looking in particular at the process of spotting and scoring Psycho that caused such friction and created a precedent for what happened on Torn Curtain, albeit with a very different outcome.

On the road with Hitchcock and Herrmann: sound, music and the car journey in Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960)

Of all the Herrmann-Hitchcock collaborations, Vertigo and Psycho remain not only the most famous but also the most aesthetically different. The intensely romantic, full-bodied Wagnerian score of the first would seem diametrically opposed to the chilling, strings-only score of the second. While Vertigo deals with romantic obsession, the sound of Psycho is one of ‘primordial dread’. What unites the two films, however, is the dominant role played by Herrmann’s music. This chapter will discuss sound, music and the representation of two separate car journeys. Through detailed scene analysis as well as close engagement with the writings of Jack Sullivan, Michel Chion and Elisabeth Weis amongst others, the chapter examines the importance of sound (and Herrmann’s music) in both driving the narrative but also reflecting characters’ unstable subjectivity.

The murder of Gromek: theme and variations

This chapter assesses the partnership’s working relationship by addressing their ninth film project together, Torn Curtain, for which Hitchcock rejected Herrmann’s score, dramatically bringing forth the end of their successful period of collaboration, giving background to the artistic conflict over Torn Curtain that resulted in the feud between Hitchcock and Herrmann, and ultimately saw the film rescored by John Addison. It discusses the effect this change had upon the film by drawing particular attention to what is perhaps the most famous scene, the murder of Gromek. Discussion addresses three different versions of the same scene; the final film version, in which there is no musical score, and Herrmann and Addison’s musical interpretations of this scene which were both rejected by Hitchcock. Drawing direct comparison between these three ways of viewing Gromek’s death, enables an analysis between the appropriateness of Herrmann and Addison’s music for Hitchcock’s filmmaking, and the ultimate effect created by the final scoreless version of the scene. By examining the discarded musical artefacts of Hitchcock’s relationship with Herrmann, we are able to reach a more thorough understanding of their working partnership, and the ways in which Herrmann could truly affect the reception of a Hitchcock film.

Portentous arrangements: Bernard Herrmann and The Man Who Knew Too Much

While Herrmann's twenty-four successful and one failed collaboration with Hitchcock – including films and television programs – featured compositional scoring to some degree, Herrmann's work on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is a peculiar deviation in the pattern of their regular working relationship because there are only a very small number of composed cues. The bulk of Herrmann's work on this film, which involved some considerable legal machinations, consisted of two very different kinds of contribution, each of which can tell us something about the composer's talents, diligence, and sensitivity to film production. On one hand he was called upon to arrange "received" music, and this in a wide range from Moroccan folk tunes to elaborate symphonic work, and including the traditionalist hymn, "The Portents." On the other, he became a member of the cast, on this one occasion only in his filmic work with Hitchcock, playing the role of a conductor at a performance in the Royal Albert Hall. This chapter argues that, since the overall score of the film is essentially an acoustic quilt, we find here evidence of a talent for assemblage and backgrounding that Herrmann does not have opportunity to show in his other work with Hitchcock.

The therapeutic power of music in Hitchcock’s films

In Vertigo, we have a sobering dramatization of the limits of music therapy – as Midge says sadly, Mozart isn't going to help very much when it comes to some life crises – but in several other Hitchcock films, the composition and performance of music are specifically linked to the resolution of very serious personal and interpersonal challenges and dilemmas, and can not only change or shape but save a relationship and a life. This chapter’s two key examples are Waltzes from Vienna and Rear Window, and it connects their presentation of the therapeutic function of music to Hitchcock's consistent "thematization" of music, that is to say, the extent to which his films not only utilize but are about music (a vital but often neglected aspect of the study of the relationship between film and music, in Hitchcock’s films and elsewhere) and also relates his presentation of the therapeutic use of music to several films in particular by one of his major influences, D.W. Griffith. Pippa Passes and Home Sweet Home provide models that Hitchcock made good use of in his dramatizations of the far-reaching redemptive power of music.

The anatomy of aural suspense in Rope and Vertigo

This chapter explores the dramatic employment of music in two classic Hitchcock films, Rope (1948) and Vertigo (1958), both of which effectively sustain suspense throughout the filmic narrative. In Rope, Phillip Morgan, one of the killers, gives an on-screen performance of the first movement of Francis Poulenc's Mouvements Perpétuels (1918) during a macabre dinner party, where one of the guests lies dead in a trunk. The chapter argues that we can hear echoes of Rope’s score, based largely on Francis Poulenc’s Mouvement Perpétuel (1918) in Herrmann’s score for Vertigo. The ‘musical ambivalences’ of both scores provide counterpoints for the two film’s narrative complexities.

How could you possibly be a Hitchcocko-Herrmannian?: Digitally re-narrativising collaborative authorship

This final chapter explores the enduring legacy and fascination surrounding the Hitchcock branding. Since his death in 1980, Hitchcock has continued to fascinate audiences, scholars, critics and culture in general. By exploring the repeated rereleases of Hitchcock’s work on DVD (despite the relative youthfulness of the format, Psycho has already been released in seven different DVD editions in the UK alone), and Varese Sarabande's series of reissues of Herrmann soundtracks on CD, this chapter looks at how the co-authorship of Herrmann and Hitchcock has been contextualised, narrativised and conceptualised in different ways by the artefacts included in the reissued, remastered and recontextualised versions of Hitchcock’s work with Herrmann (and Herrmann’s work without Hitchcock). Drawing on recent scholarship on the DVD as ‘auteur machine’ by Catherine Grant, and new work on authorship by C. Paul Sellors, the chapter argues that the digital reconceptualization of authorship struggles to account for a notion of collaboration.

Mending the Torn Curtain: a rejected score’s place in a discography

This chapter explores the rejection of Herrmann’s score for Torn Curtain and offers an historical overview of the last Hitchcock-Herrmann collaboration on the film that ended the legendary relationship. Due to the rejected score, the film is now considered by many to be an artistic and commercial failure, which may not be entirely true if we examine contemporary reviews and box-office returns. In particular, however, this chapter examines the musical legacy of Herrmann’s Torn Curtain score. Despite being rejected by Hitchcock, the unused music has become increasingly influential, having been re-recorded several times and its material has been re-used in scores such as Battle of Neretva (Herrmann), Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (Elmer Bernstein adapting material from Herrmann) or Torment (an early score of Christopher Young). Overall, this chapter aims to provide new perspectives in discussing rejected scores with more objectivity than previous research.

Musical romanticism v. the sexual aberrations of the criminal female: Marnie (1964)

Hitchcock and Herrmann had a symbiotic and complementary artistic relationship. However, as this chapter contends, rather than necessarily synergic in their understanding of the unified requirements of drama, sometimes their complementary relationship took on a different character. In Marnie, Herrmann’s music attempted to ameliorate Hitchcock’s dark interests, in an attempt to romanticize Hitchcock’s bleak and grotesque story about a psychologist’s fantasy about possessing a disturbed kleptomaniac killer, which includes a deeply disquieting rape scene. The music moves to make these elements bearable, with a ‘sleight of hand’ that misdirects us from the utter darkness and irredeemable characters and obscene aspects of the film narrative.

The sound of The Birds1

This chapter explores the role of sound in The Birds. It is well known that Hitchcock does not use a conventional score in The Birds and music is heard only twice in the film. The rest of the soundtrack consists of dialogue and sound effects. However, prominent among the sound effects are the sounds of the birds themselves that were created with the help of an electronic instrument called the Mixturtrautonium devised and played by Oskar Sala. The Mixturtrautonium was a more sophisticated, “solid state,” version of an older valve instrument called the Trautonium, invented by Sala’s mentor Friedrich Trautwein. The “processed” character of the bird sounds, the complex role they play in the film, and the fact that they sound as if they are made by an “instrument” rather than simply being a “naturalized” sound effect, the chapter argues, all contribute to the sense that sound of the birds functions, in certain respects, like an electronic score, as opposed to a source sound.