wow...guess things have been a little busy...
just ran across this news item concerning the Bernard Herrmann musical manuscript to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. This listing on Bonhams' Auction House's website gives some interesting information about this famous piece of music. Read on:
just ran across this news item concerning the Bernard Herrmann musical manuscript to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. This listing on Bonhams' Auction House's website gives some interesting information about this famous piece of music. Read on:
"Bonhams Printed Books and Manuscripts sale on 24th March includes the score for the film Psycho which upset the sleep of generations of film goers. This sale provides a unique opportunity to acquire an iconic cinematic score appearing on the market for the first time. Bernard Herrmann is widely celebrated as the most distinguished musical contributor to the world of film, especially through his work with Alfred Hitchcock. A collection of Herrmann’s scores, manuscripts and books has been consigned to the sale by his surviving third wife Norma Herrmann, the highlight of which is the original score for Hitchcock’s film “Psycho”, including the(in)famous shower scene. The score is signed and dated on the first page, and is estimated to sell for £30,000 - 40,000.
Bonhams catalogue notes: Lot 198, HERRMANN (BERNARD) £30,000-40,000 BERNARD HERRMANN'S MUSIC FOR ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S PSYCHO, INCLUDING THE MURDER IN THE SHOWER SCENE - 'PROBABLY THE MOST FAMOUS CUE IN FILM MUSIC' (Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire's Center, University of California Press, 1991, p.236). This manuscript comprises the key elements of the original score of Herrmann's music for Psycho as reassembled by him for the concert suite Psycho: A Narrative for Orchestra in 1968. Herrmann's music for Psycho and the Murder in the Shower in particular have been subjected to a great deal of analysis. Stephen Rebello, for example, in what has become the standard study of the film, assesses its overall impact: "For Psycho, Bernard Herrmann was to concoct nothing less than a cello and violin masterwork, 'black and white' music that throbbed sonorously as often as it gnawed at the nerve endings. The score would prove to be a summation of all of Herrmann's previous scores for Hitchcock films, conveying as it did the sense of the abyss that I the human psyche, dread, longing, regret - in short, the wellsprings of the Hitchcock universe" (Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of 'Psycho', paperback edition, 1998, p.139). While Herrmann's biographer, Steven C. Smith, provides us with a detailed account of the score's genesis: "Psycho was their collaborative masterwork, a film that, as Hitchcock admitted at the time, depended heavily on Herrmann's music for its tension and sense of pervading doom. It remains Herrmann's best-known score, unprecedented in its use of strings soli to match the texture of the cinematography, and featuring probably the most famous (and most imitated) cue in film music. At the time of its making, Psycho was hardly considered classic material. Based on a grisly novel by Robert Bloch, it included such sordid elements as mass murder, body snatching, and matricide... Paramount disliked the film, and after editing the final cut with George Tomasini in December 1959, Hitchcock too was disappointed. Fortunately, before recutting the film he screened it for Herrmann. 'Hitchcock...felt it didn't come off,' Herrmann recalled. 'He wanted to cut it down to an hour television show and get rid of it. I had an idea of what one could do with the film, so I said, "Why don't you go away for your Christmas holidays, and when you come back we'll record the score and see what you think."... "Well," he said, "do what you like, but only one thing I ask of you; please write nothing for the murder in the shower. That must be without music."' Herrmann's idea made cinema history. In thirty film scores he had used a wider, more successful diversity of orchestral combinations than any screen composer; but in limiting his Psycho score to strings alone, 'to complement the black-and-white photography of the film with a black-and-white score' (and to accommodate the budget restriction), Herrmann created his most audacious and brilliant challenge. 'In addition to the purely musical problem induced by a limitation of orchestral color,' wrote Fred Steiner in his study of the score 'Herrmann's selection of a string orchestra deprived him of many tried and true musical formulas and effects which, until that time, had been considered essential for suspense-horror films: cymbal rolls, timpani throbs, muted horn stings, shrieking clarinets, ominous trombones, and dozens of other staples in Hollywood's bag of chilly, scary musical tricks'" (Smith, op.cit., pp.236-7, quoting Steiner, 'Herrmann's "Black-and-White" Music for Hitchcock's "Psycho"', Filmmusic Notebook, Fall 1974, part 1, pp.31-32). After conceiving his orchestration, Herrmann devised ways of using it to tighten the film's deliberate pace. First came the credits sequence. 'In film studios and among filmmakers, there is a convention that the main title has to have cymbal crashes and be accompanied by a pop song - no matter what,' Herrmann said in 1973. 'The real function of a main title, of course, should be to set the pulse of what is going to follow. I wrote the main title to "Psycho" before Saul Bass even did the animation. They animated the music... After the main title, nothing much happens in the picture, apparently for 20 minutes or so. Appearances, of course, are deceiving, for in fact the drama starts immediately with the titles... I am firmly convinced, and so is Hitchcock, that after the main titles you know something terrible must happen. The main title sequence tells you so, and that is its function: to set the drama" (Smith, p.238). And then, of course, the murder in the shower, and the shrieking violins that are widely recognized as having become etched into popular consciousness: "Few viewers have ever forgotten after seeing Psycho's much-analysed shower sequence, visually outlined by Saul Bass and requiring seventy-eight camera setups. But as Hitchcock realized after watching the scene in dubbing, its impact was not all he had hoped for with only Leigh's screams and the sound of running water on the soundtrack. Herrmann silently agreed and without Hitch's knowledge wrote Psycho's most celebrated cue, a 'return to pure ice water.' 'Many people have inquired how I achieved the sound effects behind the murder scene,' Herrmann said 'Violins did it!... It's just the strings doing something every violinist does all day long when he tunes up. The effect is as common as rocks.' Yet its usage was unique in film music, linked powerfully to Psycho's visuals: the violin bridge slashes relate not only to the stabbing motion of Bates's knife and Marion's cries, but also to the imagery of Bates's stuffed birds, which hover throughout the film's design (When asked for his own description of what the cue suggested, Herrmann chose one word: 'Terror.')" (Smith, p.239). Herrmann conducted the first recording of the suite, Psycho: A Narrative for Orchestra, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Decca in 1968, as well as a version of the full score for the Unicorn label shortly before his death in 1975. The suite has since been re-recorded by Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and the full work by Joel McNeely with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra." I'm going to add this to my Bonhams wishlist!
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