{"id":17491,"date":"2011-06-23T10:37:22","date_gmt":"2011-06-23T14:37:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=17491"},"modified":"2011-06-28T14:23:14","modified_gmt":"2011-06-28T18:23:14","slug":"who-is-bernard-herrmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/23\/who-is-bernard-herrmann\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Bernard Herrmann?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The name Bernard Herrmann may not be as familiar as Aaron Copland or Samuel Barber, but you\u2019d know his music instantly. Some of it\u2014the shrieking strings from\u00a0Psycho<\/em>\u2019s shower scene, for instance\u2014is as famous as anything written in a classical idiom this century.<\/p>\n

Herrmann wrote film scores\u2014most notably, nine for Alfred Hitchcock, including\u00a0Vertigo<\/em>,\u00a0North by Northwest<\/em>, and\u00a0The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em>. But despite his music\u2019s indirect fame, Herrmann (whose centenary is June 29) has yet to get his due as a serious composer. And he was one. His life had the dramatic arc of a great twentieth-century maestro: expulsion from Juilliard, works commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, major awards, an underappreciated symphony, friendship with Charles Ives, a feud with Leonard Bernstein.<\/p>\n

The word centenary<\/em> usually implies fanfare\u2014live performances, retrospective essays, new biographies competing for the cover of the\u00a0New York Times Book Review<\/em>. But scrolling through the News and Events section of bernardherrmann.org<\/a> is underwhelming. There\u2019s a smattering of concerts, mostly abroad (Edinburgh, Bristol, Frankfurt) and nothing from the New York Philharmonic that once performed his music. Herrmann\u2019s estate is once again trying to sell the original score to Psycho<\/em> (in 2009, it was sheepishly withdrawn from auction when it failed to garner a minimum bid). The Minnesota Opera is staging Herrmann\u2019s forgotten\u00a0opera based on Wuthering\u00a0Heights<\/em>. Perhaps a headline in the\u00a0Twin Cities Daily<\/em> best sums up the state of affairs three decades after the composer\u2019s death: Who in the world is Bernard Herrmann?<\/p>\n

I recently bought a few Herrmann sound tracks but, after listening to them, found them disappointing. Something was conspicuously absent. I couldn\u2019t shake the feeling that I was listening to the sound track of a missing movie.<\/p>\n

Is there a way to free film scores\u2014especially those as artistically rich as Herrmann\u2019s\u2014of their film-cue obligations without deflating them?\u00a0Can casual listeners appreciate Herrmann without the aid of Jimmy Stewart following Kim Novak around 1950s San Francisco? Maybe scores could thrive in a different context. In honor of Herrmann, I conducted an experiment. I loaded two scores,\u00a0Psycho<\/em> and\u00a0Vertigo<\/em>, onto my iPod and tried them out as personal sound tracks for wandering around New York.<\/p>\n

A mismatched location seemed important, so I took\u00a0Psycho<\/em> with me to the Museum of Natural History. The image in my head of fifth-grade field trips and giant dinosaurs seemed about as far as I could get from the Bates Motel. I made my suggested donation, and as the other museumgoers were donning audio-tour headsets, I pressed play on\u00a0Psycho.<\/em><\/p>\n