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Throughout their history, movies have been accompanied by music, and ever since 1908, when Camille Saint-Saëns wrote the score for L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, composers of distinction have had a hand in creating it. In addition to Aaron Copland, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rózsa, Dmitri Shostakovich, and William Walton, each of whom devoted a significant portion of his career to writing film music, the roster of such distinguished composers includes Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Honegger, Sergei Prokofiev, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Yet the fact remains that most of the countless film scores composed since 1908—many for films of the first rank—have been musically undistinguished. Indeed, the enduring paradox of film music is that it need not be good in order to be dramatically effective. The American director John Ford actually preferred to accompany such grimly forceful films as They Were Expendable (1945) and The Searchers (1956) with sentimental scores based on folk tunes and popular ballads. More recently, a number of prominent directors, the best known of whom is Martin Scorsese, have gone so far as to “score” their films with pop records chosen solely for their evocative quality. Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) and Casino (1995) are cases in point.

Even when first-rate composers collaborate with first-rate directors, moreover, trouble can set in—as when William Wyler ordered a staff arranger to rewrite the main-title music to Copland’s Oscar-winning score for The Heiress (1948). Such meddling long ago became a byword, which is one of the reasons why eminent composers often refuse to write for the movies. Still, commercially successful pictures have been married to scores of high musical quality. They include Michael Curtiz’s Captain Blood (1935, music by Korngold), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950, music by Franz Waxman), Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956, music by Rózsa), John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960, music by Elmer Bernstein), and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974, music by Jerry Goldsmith).

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Over the course of the studio era in Hollywood, however, there was only one director who employed music with such unfailing sensitivity that the quality of the scores accompanying his films became one of his trademarks. That director was Alfred Hitchcock.

Indeed, Hitchcock made extensive use of music not only off the screen but on. Many of his characters sing or play an instrument, and in several of his films—including The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943)—the plot itself hinges on the recollection of a half-remembered tune. More ambitiously still, the climactic sequence of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, remade 1956) portrays an assassination attempt in a concert hall midway through a performance.

As for the scores themselves, they were written by some of Hollywood’s best-known composers, including Waxman, Alfred Newman, Roy Webb, and John Williams, and a few became popular in their own right. Miklós Rózsa’s music for Spellbound (1945) was among the first film scores to be performed and recorded independently of the picture for which it was written. The most famous musical “cue” in a Hitchcock film, the screeching violins that accompany the stabbing of Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960), long ago entered the common stock of pop-culture reference.

Unlike most Hollywood directors, Hitchcock closely supervised the writing of his film scores. The extent to which he was responsible for shaping them prior to actual composition is documented in Hitchcock’s Music, an important new book by Jack Sullivan.¹ The first monograph to be written about an individual film director’s relation to music, it makes illuminating use of surviving archival material like the notes prepared by the director for the guidance of the composers with whom he worked.

As these notes show, Hitchcock sought to employ music as (in Sullivan’s words) “an organic part of a psychodrama rather than an outside effect or accompaniment.” And he had clear, consistent ideas about how to accomplish this. Hitchcock disliked the once-common practice of letting quasi-symphonic music play continuously under long stretches of dialogue, preferring instead to leave certain scenes “open” and to “spot” his cues in unexpected, often startling places. At the same time, he appreciated the power of music to heighten the dramatic effect of the extended dialogue-free sequences that are the most distinctive feature of his mature directorial style, and in these scenes he (usually) gave his composers free rein. As Maurice Jarré, who scored Topaz (1969), put it, “Hitchcock wanted counterpoint, not icing on a cake.”

Hitchcock had no formal musical training, and none of his biographers has shed any light on the extent of his musical knowledge. But John Williams, who scored Family Plot (1976), his last film, told Sullivan that he appeared to know a great deal:

He talked a lot about English music, which he was very interested in: Britten, Walton, Elgar, Arthur Bliss, and Vaughan Williams. . . . I haven’t met many film directors in my lifetime who had that breadth of interest and intimacy in the concert repertory.

But whatever the actual extent of Hitchcock’s musical knowledge, there can be no doubt of the subtlety of his touch—even if, for a long time, there was a noticeable gap between that subtle touch and the quality of the music itself. The composers who scored Hitchcock’s early sound films in England were studio hacks. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1940, he worked with many of Hollywood’s top musicians, but the results varied in quality. Prior to 1955, the strongest scores were yoked to second-rate pictures—Spellbound and Rebecca (1940, music by Waxman)—while the two best feature films he made during that period, Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Strangers on a Train (1951), were scored by Dimitri Tiomkin, a Russian émigré whose florid orchestral rhetoric was out of keeping with the director’s increasingly cool and sardonic approach to the making of virtuoso thrillers.

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It was not until 1955 that Hitchcock began to collaborate regularly with a composer whose idiom was fully compatible with his own, and it is no coincidence that three of the films he made thereafter—Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest, and Psycho—were among his most critically acclaimed. All three were scored by Bernard Herrmann. Though Hitchcock was notorious for his reluctance to share credit, he himself admitted that Herrmann’s music was central to the appeal of these remarkable films.

Born in 1911, Herrmann was a New York-based radio composer and conductor who had been brought to Hollywood by Orson Welles to score Citizen Kane (1941). Unlike most of the composers working there at the time, Herrmann was a musical modernist (if a conservative one), and he had broken with the late-Romantic idiom that was the lingua franca of Hollywood film scoring. Citizen Kane immediately established him as a major figure in film music, and between 1941 and 1955 he wrote eighteen equally impressive scores for such movies as John Brahm’s Hangover Square (1945), Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952), and Henry Hathaway’s Garden of Evil (1954).

In a 1945 essay published in the New York Times, Herrmann summed up his artistic credo:

Music in the films is a vital necessity, a living force. . . . Music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

The way in which Herrmann accomplished these goals was deceptively simple—in part because of his own musical limitations. Unable to write distinctive-sounding melodies, and uncomfortable with large-scale organically developed musical forms, he chose instead to build his film scores out of two- and four-bar musical “cells.” These consist of sequences of chords, juxtaposed and (on occasion) chromatically altered in such a way as to make them sound tonally unstable, superimposing brief, stammering fragments of melody atop the shifting harmonies. The cells are spliced together and repeated at will with little or no development, thereby creating an unsettled musical atmosphere that is heightened by Herrmann’s darkly luminous orchestral palette.²

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