Reworking the orchestra
The American film industry inherited the traditional 19th century orchestra from central Europe. This included four families of instruments.
Strings: violin, viola, cello, double bass and harp
Brass: trumpet, French horn, trombone and tuba
Woodwind: piccolo, flutes, clarinet, oboe, cor anglais and bassoon
Percussion: xylophone, timpani, tubular bells, cymbals, triangle, maracas and tambourine
Keyboards: piano, harpsichord or organ
Each instrument has its own position in the orchestral layout, but in the traditional orchestra, the strings dominate: they sit at the front and have the most prominent sound.
Bernard Herrmann changed that. Using a technique called close micing, he brought together instruments that couldn't possibly be heard together in the concert hall. For example, the booming kettle drums would drown out the eerily quiet bass flute if both instruments were played at the same time. However, by putting the microphone close to the bass flute and turning the timpani down in the mix, Herrmann found that they could both play effectively together. He did this hundreds of times with scores of different instrumental combinations, and was able to draw on a completely new palette of sounds and styles.
Even when he did allow the string section to predominate, Herrmann did not reproduce the sentimental sound of earlier Hollywood movies, where violins were used to signify love, sadness and nostalgia. In the older films they brought tears to the eyes of audiences by using vibrato – a technique in which the violinist wobbles the fingers of the left hand, while bowing the strings with the right hand. Herrmann directed his string players to play with little or no vibrato, producing a clean, direct sound and giving the strings new attack and forcefulness.
The emergence of electronic music
The combination of close micing quiet instruments to make them louder, while making loud instruments sound quieter, signified the beginning of a whole new range of electronic techniques that could change, distort and produce new sounds. In The Day the Earth Stood Still Herrmann created a spooky sound montage made up of pianos, harps, brass, percussion, electric violin and cello, a lute taped backwards, oscillating sound-effects, plus one of the world’s earliest purely electronic musical instruments, the theremin.
Who is the father of electronic music?
Invented in 1917 by a Russian called Leon Theremin, this was the world’s first ‘virtual’ device. It exploited the body’s relationship to two different electrical circuits to produce strange wobbling and swooping sounds. This spooky effect was produced without the player even touching it. All the musician had to do to do was move his hands to and fro above it.
Musical textbooks locate the first significant experiments in electronic music in Karlheinz Stockhausen's Etude of 1952 and Edgar Varese’s 'Deserts' of 1954. In fact, both of these works came after Herrmann’s colourful and imaginative use of electronic techniques in The Day the Earth Stood Still.
The impact of serialism
Classical music in the 20th century broke away from its roots in numerous ways but one of the most significant was serialism, invented by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in the early 1920s. Schoenberg's aim was to dismantle all the patterns, forms and shapes that had held Western music together for nearly 2,000 years. Instead of using familiar scales and keys, Schoenberg gave all 12 notes of the chromatic scales equal prominence, completely undermining the rules of harmony.
Serialism was based on Schoenberg's idea that each note has equal weight – there was no home key and, to stop melodies sounding predictable or familiar, no note in a tune could be repeated before all others had been played. 'Rows' rather than scales of notes were repeated, forwards, backwards, with the intervals between them reversed and in other different variations to produce music that was discordant and often difficult to listen to.
Despite having great significance among classical composers for about 40 years, serialism petered out. Most concert-going audiences hated it. Bernard Herrmann, though, used it to huge effect in his film scores, most powerfully in the final scene of Hitchcock's ground-breaking Psycho.
