Bernard Herrmann: The Colour of the Music

An Interview with Bernard Herrmann by Ted Gilling
Sight and Sound 41, No.l. (1971/72) pp. 36-39

 
Publisher: British Film Institute (BFI)

Hugo Friedhofer has said that any composer who comes to film hoping to find a vehicle for complete expression is doomed to disappointment. Is he right? 
No one person has complete expression because film is a mosaic art, and if you work in films, you have to partake of a community expression. I have worked for some of the most impressive directors of the twentieth century, and until recent times when the new young blades came along, they never heard the phrase ‘complete expression’. I never felt that I was being constricted or walked on or made to conform in any manner. I think that people who say that they were simply didn't have the aptitude for writing film music or music of a dramatic nature, though they may be marvellous composers without this ability.

I don't think you condemn a composer because he's not a symphonist. Puccini could only write operas; Brahms never did. I don't know any good composer who felt he was being degraded by writing for films. I agree with Vaughan Williams. He said, “If you can't learn how to write an interesting piece of thirty seconds duration, there's something wrong with you, not the film.” Some of Chopin's marvellous Preludes don't even last thirty seconds. If you have such a precious talent that it can't take any boundaries or rigid discipline, there's something lacking. Even Bach had to write for a village choir every Sunday. Handel wrote for the greatest singers of his time. But it's luck. It's where you happen to be at the time.

Where did you happen to be?
I learned to become a film composer by doing two or three thousand radio dramas. I worked in radio for fifteen years, and even as recently as four or five years ago I scored a great radio adaptation of Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD at CBS, using six musicians. And about seven or eight years ago I did a series for CBS called ‘Crime Classics’ for which I’d use three men at the most. Each week was different. Radio was the greatest place to train one’s dramatic sense, but I feel that for a composer to be a dramatist is something you either have or you haven’t. The ability to write a tune or sell records has nothing to do with it.

Could you be musically original or were you just another sound effect?
I’d say even more original than in films. I remember doing Archibald Macleish’s FALL OF THE CITY with Irving Reis, and the original ‘Suspense’ radio series with William Spier and Bill Robson. There was the ‘Corwin Presents’ (Norman Corwin) series and the Welles Mercury Theatre on the Air. For years I wrote piles of music every week for ‘The March of Time’. I was musical director of the Columbia Workshop and in charge of a suspense programme called ‘Lights Out’… I did so many I forget them all now. There was a lot of television too, but today you aren’t supposed to need any of these preparations or apprenticeships. You just go and play a cocktail piano and you get the biggest pictures available.

Many of your best film scores blend both manic rhythms and moody, elegiac sequences, frequently in the minor key. Have you deliberately sought out this kind of material?
No, I don’t seek it out - they seek me out. In California, they like to pigeonhole you. From the time I began working for Hitchcock, they decided I was a big suspense man. On other occasions, I’ve had fantasies or bittersweet romantic stories. I think I’d enjoy writing a good comedy score, but I’ve never had the luck to be offered such films. The nearest I got to it was Hitchcock’s THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY, and perhaps NORTH BY NORTHWEST. I have no particular theories about keys or modes I work in. The stories are nostalgic or wistful or full of inner contemplation. Mancini gets the cheerful ones. So that’s how it is.

In general, where have you had the greatest opportunities to experiment?
CITIZEN KANE was completely different from any other film ever made, and the score, like the film, works like a jigsaw. For William Dieterle’s THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER, I used a mixture of the rustic barnyard style of music and a very advanced electronic kind of music. When the devil plays at the barn dance, we superimposed for the first time four violin tracks on top of each other. That wasn’t repeated for the commercial recording because you have to see the visual to get the impact of it. And we had another effect which we got from recording the sound of singing telephone wires at 4 a.m. It was always used whenever the devil (Walter Huston) appears.

The film with the most experimental, avant-garde techniques was the picture I did for Robert Wise, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951). At that time, we had no electronic sound, but the score had many electronic features which haven’t become antiquated at all: electric violin, electric bass, two high and low electric theremins, four pianos, four harps and a very strange section of about 30-odd brass. Alfred Newman said the only thing we needed was an electric hot water bottle, which he supplied.

Were there any other unusual combinations of instruments which you were the first to use?
I think the most important was in PSYCHO, because it was the return to pure ice water. It was written for a purely string orchestra. The strange thing was the number of colleagues and informed members of the public who have written me letters asking what instruments I used. They couldn’t recognise the sound of a string orchestra - the same kind of orchestra which plays the music of Mozart and Haydn.

Wasn't your work on THE BIRDS a musical innovation?
It wasn’t music at all. Remi Gassmann, a composer of electronic, avant-garde music, devised a form of sound effects. I just worked with him simply on matching it with Hitchcock, but there was no attempt to create a score by electronic means. We developed the noise of birds electronically because it wasn’t possible to get a thousand birds to make that sound. I guess you could if you went to Africa and waited for the proper day.

You once said that music is called upon to supplement what the technicians have done, and mostly what they have been unable to do.
The real reason for music is that a piece of film, by its nature, lacks a certain ability to convey emotional overtones. Many times in many films, dialogue may not give a clue to the feelings of a character. It’s the music or the lighting or camera movement. When a film is well made, the music’s function is to fuse a piece of film so that it has an inevitable beginning and end. When you cut a piece of film you can do it perhaps a dozen ways, but once you put music to it, that becomes the absolutely final way. Until recently, it was never considered a virtue for an audience to be aware of the cunning of the camera and the art of making seamless cuts. It was like a wonderful piece of tailoring; you didn’t see the stitches. But today all that has changed, and any mechanical or technical failure or ineptitude is considered ‘with it’.

Music essentially provides an unconscious series of anchors for the viewer. It isn’t always apparent and you don’t have to know, but it serves its function. I think Cocteau said that a good film score should create the feeling that one is not aware whether the music is making the film go forward or whether the film is pushing the music forward.

Is the composer, in a sense, an actor with a greater range of ‘voices off’?
I always think that film music expresses what the actor can’t show or tell. For example, when Janet Leigh is driving her car in PSYCHO, all we see is a pleasant young girl driving in the rain with the windscreen wipers going back and forth. From what you see, she might have been going to the supermarket or visiting a friend, but it’s the music that tells you that she has embarked on a very dangerous, horrifying experience. In the very opening of CITIZEN KANE, the music really tells you what ‘Rosebud’ is. When Kane is dying, all the musical motifs and atmospheres of his childhood are presented and the search for ‘Rosebud’ has really been told to the audience right away. At the end of the film, before the camera discovers the sled, the theme is given out again. And of course it also recurs at key moments of conversation between Kane and all the leading characters.

George Antheil has said that the overture or main titles sequence is the one area where strictly musical form should dominate. Do you agree?
It totally depends on what kind of film it is. I’ve done main titles that have no relationship to the music which follows. I don’t believe that the leitmotif is the only way of writing a film score, because I think you can do it using the operatic principles of Verdi where each number is separate and not derived from the others. They are only derived from the emotional content or the decorative effects of a given moment. The main title music in THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO is never repeated in the film, but it’s related because it presents the turmoil of the leading character (Gregory Peck). The idea was that in the film, we had different resolutions of his problems. So you can say that while the prelude presents the problems, other material has to evoke their solution.

Ideally, should film music be able to stand on its own away from the original material, or is it, as Malcolm Arnold says, a hybrid form of applied art?
I don’t think there are any laws. Sometimes you have a chance to write a piece of music that would stand up on its own; other times, you only have opportunities that are effective in the film itself. The public seem to remember the music if they remember the film. I don’t really know of a piece of music that’s had a life away from a poor film. Whatever it is, the film has had a certain life itself and the music goes with it. People don’t listen to THE THIRD MAN theme as a piece of music; they relate it to the film. I think film music is a strange kind of masquerading form of art.

I remember I did a score for ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1950) which John Houseman produced and Nicholas Ray directed. Robert Ryan starred with Ida Lupino, who played a blind girl. In it I used a viola d’amore because I felt that the instrument has a veiled quality. It’s a very good film; it’s still occasionally shown and I’m always very partial to it because I always felt that the colour of the music was like her character. I wouldn’t say that it was a piece you should hear in the concert hall, but with the film, it really worked.

Why do you say that it’s a great mistake to use the symphony orchestra, as such, in film scoring?
Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the symphony orchestra has always been an agreed body of men performing a repertoire of music. But since a film score is only written for one performance, I could never see the logic in making a rule of the standard symphony orchestra. A film score can be made up of different fantastic groupings of instruments, as I’ve done throughout my entire career. But I did use the 120-piece London Philharmonic Orchestra for THE BATTLE OF NERETVA, which I scored two years ago. It’s a big epic with a documentary flavour, and a lot of mass movement. There, it’s better to use a symphony orchestra. It was made in Yugoslavia as a homage to Tito, but the version I did (which will be seen in the West) is not really that. It’s a very impressive film: I enjoyed it.

Do you have a typical working method, once the assignment is set?
The first step is to get inside the drama. If you can’t, you shouldn’t be writing the music. I like to start at five in the morning and work till ten and that’s it. You generally have four to five weeks to write an hour of music and they don’t give you enough time to revise. It’s better to trust your own instinct, which is generally better than your brains. Give me a man who is instinctive in his art. It’s always superior to the intellectual double talk.

I like to work on a film from the very beginning, but very few producers or directors, think of that. They bring you in when the picture is near its final cut and they want you to do it within a very short time - always the least amount of time in which you can possibly do it. ENDLESS NIGHT, which I’ve been working on, is an exception. It’s based on one of Agatha Christie’s thrillers. Sidney Gilliat is a very experienced director who understands the problems, and he asked me to talk with him and consider what we should do musically at an early stage. I find that the older generation of directors do this. The younger ones who are great experts on making bikinis think you can write an hour of music in two days. The film business today is full of bikini manufacturers.

Some of your best work has been with Welles and Hitchcock. Are they particularly sensitive to music?
Nearly all the directors I’ve worked with had some feelings about the kind of music a picture should have, or if they didn’t, the producer might. In the end, I don’t think they have definite ideas. The best you can get out of a director is some of his sensitivity about collaborating with a colleague on making a film. Hitchcock, for example, is very anxious for you to tell him when you see a rough cut where you plan to use music, because if you’re using music, he’ll cut it differently. A scene without dialogue may seem endlessly long by itself, but appears to shorten with the music. PSYCHO has many scenes like this which seemed to take place in a few seconds, yet the sequences are quite long. The opposite happens with the shower murder, which only lasts about ten seconds. People will tell you that it goes on for ever, but it’s the intensity of the music which makes it seem so.

You always work with Hitchcock from the beginning, from the time of script. He depends on music and often photographs a scene knowing that music will complete it. If that is the case, he may eliminate dialogue completely. When we worked on VERTIGO, he said when we came to the famous recognition scene, ‘If we’re going to have music, we won’t have one word of dialogue; we’ll just have the camera and you.’

And, not that it’s exactly the same, but in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1956), the audience knows that the murder will happen when the cymbals crash. The whole function of this big concert was to build the audience toward that moment. I could have written a new piece instead of keeping Arthur Benjamin’s music, but I didn’t think that anybody could better what he’d done in the original version. I’m still very happy that I made that decision.

It’s hard to talk about Hitchcock. It was a collaboration which I no longer have for many different reasons - none of them personal. The people who produce his films feel that he should use a kind of pop music and I don’t agree with that, so I prefer not to bother. I think that Hitchcock’s films depend enormously on music to build his nutcracker of suspense, and to impose on him a kind of pop culture is to deprive him of one of the greatest weapons in his arsenal. However, it’s not for me to say…

One of the least discussed moments in CITIZEN KANE is the disastrous opera debut. How did that evolve?
We needed something that would terrify the girl and put the audience a bit in suspense. I wrote the aria in a very high key which would make most performances sound strained. Then we got a very light lyric soprano and made her sing this heavy dramatic soprano part with a very heavy orchestration which created the feeling that she was in quicksand. Later on, that aria was sung many times by Eileen Farrell, who had the voice to sing it absolutely accurately in that key, and it sounded very impressive. Some writers have said that the singer in the film performed it deliberately badly, but that's not so. She was a good singer performing in too high a key.

How did the recutting of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS affect your participation?
It only affected the ending. As it affected Welles, it affected me. They never asked him to reshoot the ending or me to write new music for it. A composer named Roy Webb wrote the last few minutes of music. They finished AMBERSONS in a totally different style; they didn’t even attempt to carry out the textures of Orson Welles. It’s said that when Orson’s final version was first shown, David Selznick wanted RKO to make a copy for the Museum of Modern Art. But they wouldn’t even spend the money to do that. I don’t think there is a copy available.

How did Truffaut approach the function of the music scores for FAHRENHEIT 451 and THE BRIDE WORE BLACK?
I originally asked him why he wanted me for the Fahrenheit music when he knew avant-garde composers like Boulez and Stockhausen. He said, ‘Because they’ll give me music of the twentieth century. You’ll give me the twenty-first.’ It sounds like a glib remark, but it wasn’t. I felt that the music of the next century would revert to a great lyrical simplicity and that it wouldn’t have any truck with all this mechanistic stuff. Their lives would be full of it from morning to night. Their lives would be scrutinised. In their music they would want something of simple nudity, of great elegance and simplicity. So I said, ‘If I do your picture, that’s the kind of score I want to write - strings, harps and a few percussion instruments. I’m not interested in all this whoopee stuff that goes on being called the music of the future. I think that’s the music of the past.’

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK is Truffaut’s homage to Hitchcock, with only one touch that wasn’t Hitchcockian - the use of lovers’ quarrels. Hitchcock has always been a great observer of the pursuit of lovers, but he rarely goes into their quarrels. I feel that it’s a remarkable picture, but it has been mucked around in both English and French versions. You know, Truffaut keeps recutting his films. When I last saw him, he was talking about recutting LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS. He feels that a director can continue to go back and recut. He doesn’t like to leave a film just as he has finished it, contrary to Orson who says ‘That’s it’ and Hitchcock who never looks at his films again. He runs them for people but he always leaves the room. When it says ‘The End’, he comes back with a cigar. He says, ‘Why do I want to see it? I see all the things that are wrong with it. There’s nothing I can do now.’

THE EGYPTIAN score which you wrote with Alfred Newman in 1954 was your only collaboration with another composer for a film. Was it difficult?
Newman has never been completely appreciated for his remarkable achievement in films, because he was the first film composer (and maybe in many ways the last) who achieved the highest technical finish and polish of film performance. I think he did a marvellous job on THE SONG OF BERNADETTE and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Collaborating with him on THE EGYPTIAN was a pleasure, and I’m very fond of that score because it embodies many of the things we’ve been talking about.

No one knows anything about Egyptian music of that period (5000 B.C.), so we had to invent it, and I’m proud of the result. I feel that if they did have music, ours would be something like it. I don’t feel this intellectually; I feel it emotionally and I feel it so strongly that I believe that in a way it must be so. Alfred felt that way too. That score and others like BENEATH THE TWELVE MILE REEF and JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH were all done in four-track stereophonic recordings, but all the versions of these films which you see today are monaural pushdowns. To see and hear THE EGYPTIAN in CinemaScope and colour and stereo sound is a different world altogether. It’s a shame in a way that all these wonderful movies end up on the television screen with terrible sound and three-quarters of the picture cut off.

Who wrote what for THE EGYPTIAN?
Alfred handled all the sequences dealing with Merit (Jean Simmons) and I did all the sequences involving Nefer (Bella Darvi). The rest we wrote together. After all these years, the record we did of it still sells very well. It and THE ROBE and THE BIG COUNTRY by Jerome Moross are about the only ones of that vintage still around.

Aside from Newman, are there other composers whom you admire and who have perhaps influenced your work?
One of the finest scores ever written for a film was by the Polish composer Karol Rathaus for a German production of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV in 1931. I met him many years ago in New York. He lived in Brooklyn and taught at Queen’s College. This man was one of the absolute geniuses of film music, but in the last thirty-five years of his life no one ever gave him the opportunity to do any kind of film. UNCLE SILAS was an original and unique film and Alan Rawsthorne’s score is a remarkable achievement. He should have done more films.

And I admire the great achievements of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The most amazing Prokofiev score was for IVAN THE TERRIBLE, which I think was superior to ALEXANDER NEVSKY.

There are others who are not mentioned much today, like the remarkable scores of Ralph Vaughan Williams for 49TH PARALLEL and THE LOVES OF JOANNA GODDEN. The late Anthony Collins who worked with Herbert Wilcox did some remarkable work and was able to blend the most formal music with the most hilarious situations. William Walton we all know, but I differ from my colleagues and contemporaries who like his big epic scores. They are marvellous, but l think his most amazing achievement was for MAJOR BARBARA and I remember that and his score for ESCAPE ME NEVER with the most pleasure. Both had more intimate music.

Now  that  the  studio  system  is  all  but dead,  are you discovering  greater freedom in your  assignments,  both  in  the  style  of the material and the mechanics of your own participation?
I always had the greatest artistic freedom when I was working for a studio. The more it became laissez faire, the less freedom I had. Today you have a bikini manufacturer or a cigar maker who knows all about everything. All he wants to hear is “Yes, it’s great.” I don't think it's freedom at all. What has happened is that a lot of incompetent people have been able to get work pretending they're artists whereas in the old studio system they wouldn't have got far, because they'd have been assigned to be somebody's assistant and their level of talent would have been quickly discovered. I recently worked on a film with a fellow. He's a nice enough chap and I think he may have seen a thousand movies in his life, yet he hadn't the vaguest idea of how a film was made. He was the director.

Until recently, people had a career in films through creating a body of work with a team of people. Each director or producer had a team within the studio set-up. Today, no matter who you are, you have no continuity of career. You’ve got a chance to make a film, and unless that makes an exorbitant commercial return, you’re finished. Schlesinger said recently, “If this [Sunday, Bloody Sunday] doesn’t go, I’m finished.” Why should a man of his talent even dream of saying such a thing? Every director is entitled to make bad films. Everybody does sometimes. Even Beethoven had bad music. But not in this thing. You’re just as good as you were a second ago. They are not people who know about aesthetics. When PSYCHO was made, nobody in the front office liked it. They all thought they ought to cut it drastically and sell it as a television show. They only know in music how many records you sell.

What do you see as the future shape of film production, and how will it affect your own work?
I’m very pessimistic. Every three weeks, there’s a group of new geniuses. I don’t believe that it’s possible for civilisation to turn out this amount of talent in three weeks. Talent is the smallest thing about being an artist in anything. You need many years of apprenticeship to develop the craft that goes with being creative - the discipline, the experience. If I were starting to work in films today as a young man, I’d tell them, “Get lost. You have no need for me. You want everything that sounds like everybody else.” The point of sounding like everybody else is to be safe. We live in a time when everybody is terrified to be on his own. He has to be part of it all. I don’t know what ‘it’ means. Where you can go and see a Western with a rock score? What am I supposed to identify with?

Georges Auric once explained to me very acutely the disadvantage of using pop music dramatically in films. He said, “The trouble is that all popular songs are based on an eight-bar phrase, so once they start the melody, they’ve got to finish it. It has to last that long.” Ideally, film music should be based on phrases no longer than a second or two, but a popular song needs a certain span and this is partly why so many film scores today are disappointing. You go to a pop concert, not a film score. It goes along with the picture; it doesn’t go with it. It often has no relationship to the picture. Sometimes the people who write it never see the film. Most music today is no longer used for any purpose except to sell gramophone records. Now you make pictures with the commercial record in mind.

What   annoys   you   most   about   your profession and what pleases you?
It once demanded from those who worked in it great professional skill, and it saddens me to see that this is no longer needed, in the same way that it’s no longer needed to have marvellous people like those who enamelled jewellery in the sixteenth century. The art of writing music for films is close enough to extinction that unless tastes change very quickly in the next few years, it will become extinct, because the new people coming into it simply haven’t got the technical knowhow. The art of writing or orchestrating a musical is going to die out too, because today they don’t seem to want that kind of pit sound. They want a rock group. Not from me. I’m not saying that rock is wrong. I’m all for anything, but I’m against it when it takes over and becomes common to everything. I don’t have to hear the Mozart G minor Symphony with a rock background and I don’t like the Mona Lisa with a moustache, but some people evidently do.

But I was lucky enough to work during the golden years of the film industry, when it was dominated by personalities who knew how to put together big films using impressive techniques. It afforded me a great opportunity to express myself.