Nate Champion
Well-Known Member
Looking forward to this, particularly Nicholas Ray's 'On Dangerous Ground' with the great Robert Ryan. Yes.
THE FILM MUSIC OF BERNARD HERRMANN
Tuesday, 8 August 2006 - Thursday, 31 August 2006
http://www.irishfilm.ie/cinema/season.asp?PageID=49&SID=109
“Film music is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.” So said Bernard Herrmann, who between his first score (Citizen Kane in 1941) and his last (Taxi Driver in 1975), took film music to new heights of invention and innovation, revolutionising the studio orchestra, creating his own distinctive sound-world, and, in Howard Goodall’s phrase, “replacing sentimentality with anxiety.” Born in New York in 1911, Herrmann had studied at the Juilliard School of Music before joining CBS radio in 1934, quickly teaming up with a young Orson Welles to score his radio plays, including the notorious War of the Worlds. Welles was to give him carte blanche on the music for Citizen Kane, including the freedom to orchestrate and conduct his score (something on which Herrmann was subsequently to insist). When he won an Oscar for his next score, The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), he found he had to put aside his concert and conducting ambitions to fulfil his rapidly expanding film commitments. Although remarkably versatile, Herrmann proved particularly adept at scoring dark psychological melodramas, such as Hangover Square (1945) and On Dangerous Ground (1951), and it was perhaps inevitable that he would be teamed eventually with master of suspense and artist of anxiety Alfred Hitchcock. Their subsequent partnership resulted in a composer-director relationship unmatched in film history for creativity, flair and cinematic symbiosis. When the two fell out over Torn Curtain (1966), it proved a disaster for Hitchcock, but Herrmann enjoyed continued success until bowing out with Taxi Driver, completing the recording sessions on Christmas Eve in 1975 and then dying that evening in his hotel. Fantasy, romance, nostalgia, tenderness: it’s all there in Herrmann, as is his unsurpassable capacity in getting under a film’s skin and inside the characters’ heads to give full reign to their dark desires. Much imitated, fundamentally inimitable (as both Martin Scorsese and Gus Van Sant conceded when they reused Herrmann’s original scores for their remakes of Cape Fear and Psycho, respectively), Herrmann remains the giant of film music against whom all other contenders must measure themselves. - Neil Sinyard.
THE FILM MUSIC OF BERNARD HERRMANN
“Film music is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.” So said Bernard Herrmann, who between his first score (Citizen Kane in 1941) and his last (Taxi Driver in 1975), took film music to new heights of invention and innovation, revolutionising the studio orchestra, creating his own distinctive sound-world, and, in Howard Goodall’s phrase, “replacing sentimentality with anxiety.” Born in New York in 1911, Herrmann had studied at the Juilliard School of Music before joining CBS radio in 1934, quickly teaming up with a young Orson Welles to score his radio plays, including the notorious War of the Worlds. Welles was to give him carte blanche on the music for Citizen Kane, including the freedom to orchestrate and conduct his score (something on which Herrmann was subsequently to insist). When he won an Oscar for his next score, The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), he found he had to put aside his concert and conducting ambitions to fulfil his rapidly expanding film commitments. Although remarkably versatile, Herrmann proved particularly adept at scoring dark psychological melodramas, such as Hangover Square (1945) and On Dangerous Ground (1951), and it was perhaps inevitable that he would be teamed eventually with master of suspense and artist of anxiety Alfred Hitchcock. Their subsequent partnership resulted in a composer-director relationship unmatched in film history for creativity, flair and cinematic symbiosis. When the two fell out over Torn Curtain (1966), it proved a disaster for Hitchcock, but Herrmann enjoyed continued success until bowing out with Taxi Driver, completing the recording sessions on Christmas Eve in 1975 and then dying that evening in his hotel. Fantasy, romance, nostalgia, tenderness: it’s all there in Herrmann, as is his unsurpassable capacity in getting under a film’s skin and inside the characters’ heads to give full reign to their dark desires. Much imitated, fundamentally inimitable (as both Martin Scorsese and Gus Van Sant conceded when they reused Herrmann’s original scores for their remakes of Cape Fear and Psycho, respectively), Herrmann remains the giant of film music against whom all other contenders must measure themselves. - Neil Sinyard.
