Bernard Herrmann on Film Music

Cinema, and certainly the development of cinema, is undoubtedly the most important artistic development of the 20th century. Many people in the arts have refused to take it seriously in its infancy, which also happened at the same time with the gramophone. Today a composer who writes for the cinema reaches a worldwide audience to begin with, and it is the only form of art today which uses music as part of its artistic expression. I don't feel that the theatre, for example the living theatre, uses music to the extent that the cinema does. As a matter of fact I may be bold enough to say that with very few exceptions a piece of film or a film cannot come to life without the help of music of some kind.

Hitchcock who deals very rarely with character portrayal or has little or no interest in people's emotions, but who deals in situations generally that of a suspenseful nature, his interest in music is only in relationship to how the suspense can be heightened. [Regarding] Orson Welles films - I did three with him, CITIZEN KANE, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, JOURNEY INTO FEAR - all these three films dealt with characters, with people’s emotions and attitudes and therefore the music for such films [was] of an entirely different nature. [With] Hitchcock one has to create a landscape for each film, whether it be the rainy night of PSYCHO or the turbulence of a picture such as VERTIGO, as against in CITIZEN KANE a picture of people within a specific time and how they felt against external events - I mean of attitudes of hatred, love, revenge.

Film music must supply what actors cannot say. The music can give to an audience their feelings. It must really convey what the word cannot do. If you are dealing with an emotional subject, this is the complete purpose of a film score. But if you're dealing with a picture, such as a Hitchcock film, or by anyone of enormous skill and taste - a film is made of segments, is put together and either artificially linked by dissolves or cuts or montages - there are many ways in which a film can be made - it is the function of music to cement these pieces into one design that the audience feels that the sequence is inevitable.

Now it is one of the paradoxes of cinema music that music correctly used can be music of a very poor quality and be effective or can be music of a magnificent quality and also serve its purpose. But the strange thing about cinema, and this would go for television film, is that no one really knows why music is needed. I would say after a lifetime in it that I cannot tell you why. But it is not complete without it. And anyone who writes in, and people do write to papers to say you shouldn't have music in your television and the noise is too loud, this is rubbish, all you have to do is look at a film without music and it would be almost unbearable to look at it. And I feel that it is a responsibility of any gifted composer of our time to do a certain amount of creative work in these media.

I believe that all composers at all times had to do music of their time and meet the music that was needed. I mean, after all, Mozart and Haydn were not above writing dinner music while their patrons ate and they were not above writing music for special singers or instrumentalist(s). And on the other hand Bach certainly thought nothing of writing his weekly cantata for a church service. It's only a question of the time one lives in. The present time we live in is cinema and television, it's the great vehicle for contemporary music and by contemporary music I mean that you can have experimentation in both those mediums. In the most avant-garde musical techniques, an audience will accept it providing it is compatible with the dramatic situation of the film.

Recorded ca. 1970