This article was updated in February 2025
“Where’s the theme song?”
In March of 1966, Alfred Hitchcock stormed out of a recording session at the Goldwyn Studios in Los Angeles after firing Bernard Herrmann in front of nearly 60 professional musicians. Hitchcock had listened to the new score for Torn Curtain and was instantly enraged. “Where’s the theme song?” Hitchcock demanded. “Where’s the theme song?” Movie soundtracks of the mid-1960s relied heavily on chart-topping commercial hits (Mancini’s “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and Hitchcock was looking for a feature song for his latest film. However, Herrmann was not going to be the man to provide it. The truth is Herrmann had never written a “theme song” in his entire career. Herrmann didn’t want the audience to leave the theater whistling a pretty melody; he wanted the audience to leave the theater having experienced a prescribed sentiment. Herrmann’s core philosophy of scoring film music was not to provide music to accompany the action of the film, but rather to paint a psychological portrait or arouse a compelling atmosphere, a tormented character in Citizen Kane or a hellish city in Taxi Driver. And it is this aesthetic that paired so perfectly with the mind of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of conjuring psychological intensity through cinematic composition.
Benny
Bernard Herrmann (known by his friends as “Benny”) built a substantial career as a musician, conductor and composer, studying at NYU and Juilliard after growing up a regular Wunderkind. Before focusing mainly on film, he spent several years as the chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, where he composed for radio drama and collaborated regularly with Orson Welles. Moreover, he wrote a few works outside of film and radio, including Moby Dick: Cantata dedicated to Charles Ives and other programmatic pieces like Tempest and Storm: Furies Shrieking! (for solo piano) or Silent Noon (for 14 instruments), exemplifying his signature grim tendencies as well as his future career with Hitchcock.
“I don’t like the leitmotif system.“
Much of Herrmann’s compositional style stems from the classical tradition, tracing back to Hollywood soundtracks of the 1930s by Korngold and Max Steiner and even further to fin-de-siècle Viennese composers like Mahler and Berg, as well as modernists such as Stravinsky and Ives. Some of his later works utilize new innovations in music like sound editing and Moog synthesizers, adding to his own novel orchestrations to create other-worldly timbres in The Day the Earth Stood Still or the devil’s fiddle from The Devil and Daniel Webster. A predominant style does not govern his works, though the quality is generally dark.
In contrast to film composers before him, Herrmann did not cling to the leitmotif or tuneful melodies for that matter. In an August 1975 interview, Herrmann said:
“I don’t like the leitmotif system. The short phrase is easier to follow for an audience, who listen with only half an ear. Don’t forget that the best they do is half an ear. You know, the reason I don’t like this tune business is that a tune has to have eight or sixteen bars, which limits you as a composer. Once you start, you’ve got to finish, eight or sixteen bars. Otherwise, the audience doesn’t know what the hell it’s all about. It’s putting handcuffs on yourself.”
His pseudo-Romantic melodies are often difficult to hum and often not distinguished enough to remember when walking home from the theater. This characteristic diverges from 1930s Hollywood composers, as well as neo-Wagnerian film music of the 1980s, especially that of John Williams, giving Herrmann his own unique niche in film music. Herrmann’s goal was not to set the music to match the drama in the film; the music was to stand on its own outside the film.
Hitchcock’s Man
In the mid-1950s, Herrmann was quite popular in Hollywood, averaging about three film scores a year, when he met Alfred Hitchcock for their first collaboration in 1955. Over the course of eleven years, Herrmann composed the scores for seven Hitchcock films. Thrilling, mind-wrenching, and anxiety-driven, the scores employ the use of rhythmic drive and bipolar intensities that motivate the listener to recall a feeling or psychological state. Let’s take a brief look at each film individually.
The Trouble with Harry (1955)
The score begins with a counterintuitive dance number that cycles through lyric, yet un-memorable Romantic melodies. The folksy tune provides the provincial setting of the small town in Vermont, while the constant interruptions by various instrument groups remind the listener that something is a little bit off. The score is perfect for the plot that follows a Romantic-comedy somehow un-interrupted when a dead body is found on a hill. Herrmann arranged his music for The Trouble with Harry as a suite titled "A Portrait of Hitch" that he recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the composer himself.