It has been said that classical music did not die in the 20th century but continued as film music, and if so, Bernard Herrmann must be its greatest exponent. Herrmann's film music embraced Citizen Kane, Psycho – probably the most imitated chords in cinema history – Vertigo, the Mount Rushmore sequence in North by Northwest, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and finally Taxi Driver.
Herrmann's music had American roots, and he greatly admired the innovative Charles Ives and his ideas of "musical collage." An early example is The Devil and Daniel Webster, for which Herrmann repeatedly overdubbed fiddle playing to create a frantic effect.
Herrmann revolutionised film music. He discarded Vienna's classical influences, combining instruments not normally heard together, scoring unusual combinations mixed in the studio, and introducing the eerie theremin, first heard in The Day the Earth Stood Still. His electronic music pre-dated Stockhausen and Carlos by some years.
His Hitchcock collaboration, beginning with The Trouble with Harry in 1955, produced music for nine of the director's films. Music became crucial to the storytelling: sentimentality gave way to anxiety, with less vibrato and tighter strings – never more so than in the shrieking violins and four dissonant chords of Psycho. In Vertigo, Herrmann introduced harps, celeste and woodwind, abandoning long arcing phrases and smooth strings for violent chords.
Tormented by his exclusion from the classical elite – his name barely features in Grove's Dictionary of Classical Music – the brash, opinionated, pushy Herrmann found his outlet at CBS radio. There he got his break working with Orson Welles on the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, providing the musical backdrop. Radio proved a stepping stone, and Welles brought Herrmann to Hollywood for his first film score, Citizen Kane. From that point, Herrmann strove to make music carry the narrative rather than serve as mere incidental accompaniment.
Influenced by Bartók, Herrmann in turn influenced minimalists such as Reich and Glass. He kept film music from becoming predictable, and after his final Hitchcock film, Torn Curtain, moved to the UK. French New Wave director François Truffaut chose him to score Fahrenheit 451. His final film was the edgy, jazzy Taxi Driver, for which Martin Scorsese had specifically sought him out.
Part 2 also covered the early English composer Henry Purcell, another composer who died tragically young, but not before becoming the "go-to" composer for Royal occasions and mastering the idiom of theatre music, as in Dido's Lament. We concluded by listening to Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, written shortly before the composer's death.