The Sound of the Inside

Most film music tells you how to feel about the scene. Bernard Herrmann's tells you what the character feels, from the inside, often something the character cannot say and the image cannot show. He built his scores from short, obsessive cells — a few notes circling, a chord that refuses to resolve, an ostinato that loops like a fixed idea — because that is what an obsession sounds like, a small phrase that will not stop repeating. He began with Orson Welles, scoring Citizen Kane for a first-time director who understood sound from radio, and from the start the music was structural, a system of motifs rather than mood-wallpaper.

His great collaboration was with Alfred Hitchcock, and it produced the clearest demonstration of his method. The screeching violins of Psycho — strings used like knife-stabs, a sound of pure shrieking panic — are so iconic they have become shorthand for terror itself, but the deeper achievement is Vertigo, whose swirling, unresolved, endlessly rising-and-falling score is Scottie's obsession, a piece of music that spirals exactly as his fixation spirals, never landing, always circling the lost object. Herrmann scored the inside of a sick mind so precisely that you do not need the dialogue to feel it. In North by Northwest he wrote a frantic fandango for a man running through a plot he cannot understand; the music is the character's racing pulse made audible.

That this was a portable authorial signature, not just a Hitchcock effect, is proved by the end of his life, when Martin Scorsese asked him to score Taxi Driver — and Herrmann, in his final work, wrote a score that holds Travis Bickle's two warring selves in a single piece of music: a sleazy, lonely saxophone for the romantic delusion, a low, menacing brass-and-percussion dread for the violence underneath. It is the same method that scored Scottie's obsession, now scoring Travis's psychosis, the music doing what the film's images cannot — letting you hear the divided mind. Decades and directors apart, the principle is identical: the score is the character's interior, externalized as sound.

This is why Herrmann is an author of the films he scored and not merely their decorator. He grasped that music can reach a place the camera cannot — the inside of a consciousness — and he developed a consistent grammar for getting there: the obsessive cell, the unresolved harmony, the motif that behaves like a thought or a compulsion. His influence is the entire modern practice of scoring psychology rather than action, of using music to render the subjective state, the inner weather, the thing the character feels and cannot say. When a film today lets you hear a character's dread or obsession or grief in a few circling notes, it is using the language Bernard Herrmann built. He made the soundtrack into a place where the soul could be heard.

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The line: Citizen Kane → The Man Who Knew Too Much → Vertigo → North by Northwest → Psycho → Taxi Driver → Cape Fear

This line crosses:

• The Film That Watches You Back — Herrmann scored Hitchcock's great studies of looking and obsession; the Vertigo spiral and the Psycho strings are the cinema of the implicated eye given a voice.
• The Camera That Loves the Sin — his final score, for Scorsese's Taxi Driver, holds Travis Bickle's divided soul in sound, the inside of the sinner made audible.

Read through: Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann · Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (documentary).

A note on the argument: Herrmann's scoring method and his work for Welles, Hitchcock, and Scorsese are documented record. The framing of his signature as scoring the character's interior — the obsessive cell, the unresolved harmony as a mind made audible — is this essay's reading.