How Bernard Herrmann introduced avant-garde music to the masses
Film is the 20th century's own art form and many of the most emotive musical moments in cinema history came from the pen of Bernard Herrmann. According to Howard Goodall, Herrmann put film music on the map, and his compositions will be remembered by generations of filmgoers, long after other composers have been forgotten. Born in 1911, his life spanned the period when film was breaking new ground and gaining huge audiences.
Though Herrmann is not as well-known as other avant-garde composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, his electrifyingly mood-changing music is recognised by millions of filmgoers. Who can forget the terrifying orchestral shrieks that accompany the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho? Or the eerie sounds that form the backdrop to the arrival of an alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still?
Film music as an art form
Though in his time Herrmann was sidelined and ignored by the classical elite, he was developing the kind of ideas explored by the most avant-garde classical composers. Working with the film giants of the era – Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Martin Scorsese – he built on a technique called musical collage, first used by Charles Ives, the father of modern American music. Ives laid different styles and sounds on top of one another. So, for example, he might have two military bands playing different pieces simultaneously. In the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster, Herrmann created a similar effect by recording four violin solos then placing them on top of each other – a dubbing trick he had learnt working for CBS Radio in his twenties.
Revolutionary recording techniques
Herrmann also revolutionised the shape and sound of the orchestra. Earlier Hollywood composers had inherited the orchestral sound of 19th century Europe. Herrmann changed the layout of the orchestra, and transformed the relationship of the instruments to each other by using electronic techniques. These included close micing (a technique that involves placing a microphone close to the sound source in order to pick up direct sound and avoid picking up reverberant sound), playing tapes backwards and introducing one of the world's earliest electronic musical instruments, the theremin.
The changing face of film
As film storylines began to emerge from the sentimental to the psychological, Bernard Herrmann totally changed the role and impact of the film score. The sentimentality of vibrato violins was out, except in very specific circumstances. Instead, in came a punchy, direct string sound, played without vibrato, sometimes muted, sometimes as repeated jarring discords.
Herrmann also introduced classical music's most extreme experiment of the 20th century in serialism, a composing technique based around fractured sounds. Classical audiences may have found the technique difficult to comprehend but in Herrmann's hands, and in a film context – most notably in the final scene of Psycho – it construed pain and inhumanity to dynamic effect.
