Computer Animation Arts

To round off the series of ‘Tunes’ featuring Bernard Hermann, I’m featuring his final ever score. The soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s 1976 New Hollywood masterpiece. Taxi Driver. Recording apparently finished hours before Hermann’s death in 1975 and Scorsese’s film was released to incredible critical acclaim. It became the seminal film of a generation. Hermann’s score meanwhile becoming something of a revered cult classic amongst soundtrack-lovers, traded amongst collectors like the guns and drugs of the film. Not his most famous or recognisable, but for me at least, easily one of his best. Like all great film soundtracks, the music in Taxi Driver becomes the landscape of film as much as the imagery. The palpable tensions and inner madness of the main character Travis Bickle ripple across the eardrums like some sort of sleaze filled tsunami. Slate.com has a great article about the soundtrack. “What resulted from their collaboration is an astonishing piece of film music ...

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) is a clammy, psychoanalyst's dream of a movie. The scene in which James Stewart's character refashions Kim Novak into the exact likeness of the dead woman with whom he is obsessed erotically is not easily forgotten, and the then-innovative camera effect evoking Stewart's character's fear of heights is now an established device in cinema's bag of tricks . Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo manages to be both dreamy and menacing, with its use of shivery strings and circling motif. As Martin Scorsese observed in a 2004 edition of Sight & Sound magazine: "Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession." Prelude/The Rooftop

Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's game-changing 1960 classic frightener Psycho couldn't be further from the lush orchestration of his 7th Voyage of Sinbad . Herrmann's strings-centric music hardly needs any introduction, so famous is his composition accompanying the iconic, much parodied murder of luckless Marion Crane . Psycho 's score is one of the great pleasures of cinema; it is pared down and propulsive, driving the film fowards at a terrific whip. Like the film itself, Herrmann's music is 'black and white' - a monochrome of strings. The Psycho Suite

The Sinbad movies, featuring the Dynamation delights of stop-motion pioneer, Ray Harryhausen , represent another essential component of my childhood viewing. Many rainy Sunday afternoons were spent delighting in Harryhausen's fantastical creations and Sinbad's various quests, trials and tribulations. Bernard Herrmann's score for the Harryhausen-produced The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) is lushly orchestrated, effortlessly evocative and a delight to revisit, and in the swooning Baghdad movement, you'll detect nascent hints of Herrmann's Vertigo . Be sure to listen out for the Duel With The Skeleton @ 2.15 - you can hear the bones clacking together. (You can view the sequence here ). Overture/The Duel With The Skeleton/Baghdad For excerpts from Herrmann's The Day The Earth Stood Still score, go here.

Film composer, Bernard Herrmann will be forever associated with the films of Alfred Hitchcock - and with Pyscho 's infamous jarring strings in particula r. I'm going to be showcasing Herrmann's work 'little and often' on the CGAA Blog, so you can expect 'death-by-violin' to feature soon enough. I'm kicking things off with Herrmann's eerie and hugely influential score to Robert Wise's 1951 science-fiction classic The Day The Earth Stood Still . Herrmann utilised the theremin in his scoring for the film - an early electronic instrument now synonymous with 1950's science-fiction. It gives the composer's music a truly other-worldly sound. Just hearing this score makes me ache with nostalgia for a time when classic 1950's sci-fi would play on BBC 2 opposite the six o'clock news on BBC 1 - my first exposure as a child to flying saucers, robots - and the music of Bernard Herrmann. Prelude/Radar Gort/Visor/The Telescop e For more ...