Bernard Herrmann: Music as a Measurement of Time

Orson Welles (L) and Bernard Herrmann (center, back) rehearse for "The Mercury Theatre on the Air," a show that performed the infamous "War of the Worlds" prank on radio listeners in 1938. Public Domain

In 1952, “Sight and Sound,” a prominent British journal of film criticism, named “Citizen Kane” the best film ever made. Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece held to that position for six decades until, in 2012, the No. 1 slot was turned over to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958).

The two films had only one thing in common: Both boasted scores by composer Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975).

Bernard Herrmann in a 1970 photo. Public Domain

Herrmann’s place in the history of film composition owes to a broad spectrum of scores for films by a range of directors. In addition to composing for films by directors Welles and Hitchcock, Herrmann provided musical accompaniment to “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951), directed by Robert Wise; “Fahrenheit 451” (1966) directed by Francois Truffaut; and “Taxi Driver” (1976), directed by Martin Scorcese.

Yet in the world of pop culture, he’s associated with one iconic scene: the stabbing death in the shower of Janet Leigh in Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960). The shrieking high-pitched violins are the terrifyingly perfect musical accompaniment to the horrific violence of the visuals.

It’s an unfair pigeon-holing, given the depth with which Herrmann composed for film. His forte was the shaping of time in music to complement the director’s visual shaping of time on the screen.

Time in Movies and Music 

Both music and film unfold over time, unlike painting or poetry. In a sense, music and film change our perception of time. Time can be compacted or expanded by an able composer or an aware director, who paces the measures of a sonata or the frames of a film as part of the work’s expression. Two minutes of music can be manipulated to feel much longer, or much shorter, than two minutes.

Herrmann’s cues for “Vertigo” are a study in temporal elongation. He took for his model the music of Richard Wagner , particularly the famous “Tristan” chord in Wagner’s opera, “Tristan und Isolde.” The “Tristan” chord is a grouping of four notes that create a sense of stasis.

“Tristan and Isolde,” 1902, by Edmund Leighton. Public Domain

Most chords have a definite relationship to other chords, as when a guitarist plays a “I-IV-V” chord progression. But the Tristan chord is unrelated to other chords. To put it another way, it’s related to all of them at the same time. The Tristan chord doesn’t  lead the ear to an inevitable next harmony. The next harmony could be almost anything, so the Tristan chord doesn’t resolve, but demands to go on and on.

Herrmann’s pensive music for “Vertigo” uses this device to stretch time like taffy. At around 18 minutes into the film, private investigator (played by James Stewart) tracks the movements of Kim Novak through San Francisco. For seven minutes, there’s no dialogue, just music that changes as the scenes shift from a restaurant to city streets to a Spanish mission. It’s only a few minutes on screen, but the music makes it feel like the half-day the scenes represent.

Endings that lead to beginnings

For Hitchcock’s next movie, the time element is reversed. Everything in “North by Northwest” ends almost before it begins. The film is made of short episodes, each of which concludes in a situation that sets the scene for the next episode. Herrmann’s theme, heavy on winds and kettledrums, frantically throws off energy, then stops abruptly. This cuts one scene off from the next, which is exactly the plan of the movie. It assembles discrete blocks into a coherent structure.

Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) runs from a crop dusting plane, in "North by Northwest." Public Domain

The music and the movie come to a temporary halt three times: when Cary Grant is kidnapped and driven to a mysterious mansion, when he crashes the car after his captors pour a bottle of bourbon down his throat, and when he witnesses a murder at the United Nations. Time returns to its normal flow only when he meets Eva Marie Saint and the romantic subplot is introduced.

The famous crop-duster scene and large portions of the film around it have no music. Hitchcock did this to emphasize moments of alienation.

The longest and best-known example of creating a sense of alienation is in Hitchcock’s “The Birds” (1963). Hermann contributed only electronic imitations of birdsong.

Music in the Eternal ‘Now’

Time neither speeds ahead nor slows down in “The Day the Earth Stood Still“; it comes to a dead stop—the very title proclaims it.  A spacecraft from another planet lands in Washington, stopping the flow of history. Herrmann’s music is appropriately static. In an early scene, a single high tone hovers over the repeated blasts of brass and percussion to indicate the destruction of earthly weapons. In many of the cues, one can hear a single tone running through myriad surrounding changes, suggesting a kind of ”eternal now.”

Herrmann knew that the usual orchestral sound wouldn’t depict otherworldliness well. So he employed the Theremin—the “ooh-ahh” instrument that would become a staple of science fiction flicks. To that, he added a unique combination: two Hammond organs, a large studio organ, pairs of harps and pianos, three vibraphones, two glockenspiels, three each of trumpets and trombones and an astonishing four tubas. It created a low-pitched mess of notes resembling chaos.

Bruce Woolly poses with an early version of a theremin. Soundsweep/CC BY-SA 4.0

Classical Roots, Limitless Imagination

What of Herrmann’s film debut of ? While “Citizen Kane” (1940) is famous for many things, but the music gets less credit than it should. The final scene is a perfect musical cue. It tells a musical story parallel to the story in the direction and dialogue.

In the final scene, Kane utters “Rosebud,” and the meaning of “Rosebud” is slowly revealed. It refers to an object from Kane’s childhood, a childhood ripped from him when he was forced to get on a train leaving home. When we viewed this scene near the beginning of the film, a train whistle blew in the background. We hear that train whistle again in the final scene, not as a sound effect, but as a musical imitation folded into the final chords of Herrmann’s score.

Herrmann’s reimagining of time through music didn’t just spring into place. He was a serious classical music student who studied at The Juilliard School. He  spent years as the conductor of his own chamber orchestra, where he explored the music of modern classical composers. When he joined Welles’s radio-show company in the late 1930s, Hermann found his voice, providing music that enhanced words and action.

Hermann’s work influenced virtually every film composer after him. His music is timeless.

To see other kinds of arts and culture articles, please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]