“Hitchcock only finishes a picture 60 per cent,” composer Bernard Herrmann liked to say. “I have to finish it for him.” The pair worked on eight movies together, creating some of the 20th century’s most enduring matchups of image and music.
Hitchcock so valued his composer that he showed Herrmann early cuts of his films, and even invited him into the pre-production process. He wrote one note card about sound-effects during the editing of Vertigo: “All of this will naturally depend upon what music Mr. Herrmann puts over this sequence.”
Would Hitchcock’s films have been as effective without Herrmann’s music? The director didn’t think so. The composer was attuned to the anxieties and yearnings in Hitchcock’s work. Ennio Morricone, the Italian whose music for Sergio Leone made both their names, likes to say: “You can’t save a bad movie with a good score.”
But it’s also true that a good score can make a great movie live forever – something the BBC aims to celebrate in a season of radio and television programs, The Sound of the Cinema. Most celebrated movies are unimaginable without their iconic music: Jaws, Star Wars, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Out of Africa. But it is instructive to revisit these films and find there are whole chunks of the score that one doesn’t particularly remember. Great scores first and foremost serve the demands of the narrative. Film scores make things clear when needed (“now you laugh, now you cry”) but they also offer subtle, almost subliminal, pleasures, hinting at the subtext of a story or at a character change to come.
Back in the silent days, the cinema organ player or orchestra used “mood music” books to accompany a film.
These were collections of sheet music with titles like Night: Suspense, Chase and First Kiss. More innovative distributors supplied sheet music with their films, but matching them was still a hit-and-miss affair.
With the arrival of the talkies, music was recorded at the same time as the actors on the sound stage. It was only when technology allowed for the music to be recorded separately that the real art of the movie score took shape.
Under the studio system there was usually a music department, which could resemble a glorified factory. Many composers would work on parts of a single score simultaneously: some composing themes, others working on the orchestration, and others still conducting the recording. (Credits for “additional composing” are still common today.) The key relationship for a film composer is with the director. Usually, the two will sit through a polished cut of the film for a “spotting session,” deciding which parts of the film need music. This is where some of most productive partnerships in movie history were made: Prokofiev and Eisenstein, Lean and Jarre, Leone and Morricone, Williams and Spielberg (39 years and counting). But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. When Williams first played the Jaws theme on his piano, Spielberg burst out laughing and said: “Well, that isn’t going to do it.”
Film historian and composer Neil Brand says that the first truly modern film score was created by Max Steiner (a prodigy from Vienna who was taught by Brahms) for King Kong in 1933. In his forthcoming BBC Four series, The Music that Made the Movies, Brand explains how Steiner pioneered the use of symphonic techniques, such as recurring themes or leitmotifs for key characters, King Kong among them.
Steiner went on to score everything from The Big Sleep to Gone with the Wind and The Searchers.
James Horner said of his work for Titanic: “I probably wrote all the material in about three hours. The themes literally came to me in 20 minutes.” (Conversely, John Williams went through 300 versions of the five-note alien greeting in Close Encounters of the Third Kind before Spielberg was happy.)
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