rhapsode

Created by Sha FrasierBrooklyn, NY · 2026

Artist

Bernard Herrmann

Era1941–1975
InstrumentComposition, conducting
Genres
Cinematic classicalModern classicalOrchestral musicFilm score
ListenRYM·Credits·Apple Music

Alfred Hitchcock wanted the shower scene in Psycho to play in silence. Bernard Herrmann scored it anyway — violins, violas, and cellos shrieking in downward stabs — and when Hitchcock heard the cue against the picture he reversed himself on the spot and nearly doubled the composer’s salary.1 Asked years later what he had meant the shrieking strings to convey, Herrmann answered with one word: “Terror.”2 The episode is Herrmann twice over. The sound comes from an orchestra deliberately starved of everything except its strings, and it exists because a composer overruled his director about the director’s own picture. Herrmann refused the title of film composer altogether, treating every score as a symphonic argument that happened to run under images.3 Across thirty-five years, from Orson Welles’s first film to Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough, he wrote some of the most psychologically exact orchestral music the cinema has, nearly all of it made by leaving things out.

What he came from

Born in 1911 to a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant family — his optometrist father pushed the violin and took him to the opera — he won a composition prize at thirteen, and around the same age discovered Hector Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation, the nineteenth-century manual that treats orchestral color as a subject in itself.4 Timbre-first thinking became the core of his craft. He studied under the composer-pianist Percy Grainger at NYU, moved on to Juilliard, and at twenty founded his own New Chamber Orchestra to play the repertoire nobody else would program.5 The decisive inheritance was Charles Ives. Herrmann found Ives’s privately printed scores as a student, and in 1932, at twenty-one, published an advocacy essay in the little magazine Trend declaring the Fourth Symphony, then unperformed in full, “one of the greatest symphonies ever penned,” about a composer whose name, as Herrmann noted in the same piece, was unknown even in musical circles.6 The friendship lasted until Ives’s death in 1954; Herrmann premiered Ives works over the CBS airwaves and dedicated his own cantata Moby Dick to him.7 What Ives supplied was permission: an American proof that dissonance and cussed independence could carry the deepest feeling. What the Romantics supplied was the feeling itself. “My feelings and yearnings are those of a composer of the 19th century,” Herrmann wrote his wife in 1947. “I am completely out of step with the present.”8 Out of step, and yet armed with Ives’s permission: a nineteenth-century heart looking for a medium that would take both.

The radio workshop

The medium turned out to be broadcasting. Herrmann joined CBS in 1934 as a staff arranger and conductor, was running the experimental Columbia Workshop drama series within two years of its 1936 launch, and by 1940 was chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, where his programming of rarities and unheard living composers earned a Peabody citation “for bringing to the radio compositions and composers who deserve but might not otherwise have received a hearing.”9 The other half of the job built his method. By the composer David Raksin’s count Herrmann scored some 1,200 radio dramas: seconds-long cues for odd pickup ensembles, written fast, timed to dialogue.10 That workshop is where he forged the anti-leitmotif credo he preached for the rest of his life: “I don’t like the leitmotif system. The short phrase is easier to follow for an audience, who listen with only half an ear… a tune has to have eight or sixteen bars, which limits you as a composer. Once you start, you’ve got to finish… It’s putting handcuffs on yourself.”11 The refusal — aimed at the leitmotif system the Hollywood score was built on — began as radio pragmatism and hardened into doctrine.

At CBS he fell in with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, and on October 30, 1938, he was in the studio for the War of the Worlds broadcast — conducting no music of his own. The panic’s engine was a fake dance-remote: “From the Meridian Room in the Park Plaza in New York City, we bring you the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.” Raquello’s orchestra was Herrmann’s CBS players, gamely swinging “La Cumparsita” between ever-worsening bulletins from Grovers Mill.12 When Welles went to Hollywood, he took his conductor with him.

Citizen Kane

Welles gave Herrmann conditions no Hollywood composer had: twelve weeks, where the Hollywood norm was a frantic few, working while the film was still being made. “I worked on the film reel by reel, as it was being shot and cut,” Herrmann told the New York Times in 1941. “Many sequences were actually tailored to match the music.”13 The scoring itself announced a new palette — “I avoided, as much as possible, the realistic sound of a large symphony orchestra,” he wrote; “a simple bass flute solo, the pulsing of a bass drum, or the sound of muted horns, can often be more effective than half a hundred musicians sawing away.”14 His wit was as exact as his color sense. For Susan Alexander’s disastrous opera debut he composed a genuine pseudo-French grand-opera aria and pitched it to climb to a high D far beyond the character’s modest voice, so the audience would hear the quicksand swallowing her; soprano Jean Forward dubbed the singing, engineered to sound strained rather than incompetent.15 And the “News on the March” newsreel carries no Herrmann at all — it was cut with stock RKO library cues at Welles’s preference, because a real newsreel would sound canned.16 Welles later put the score at half the film’s success.17 At the Academy Awards the following winter Herrmann was nominated twice in the scoring category and won — for the other film, The Devil and Daniel Webster (released as All That Money Can Buy), whose devil he conjured from four superimposed violin tracks and the recorded hum of telephone wires at four in the morning. It beat his own Kane, and it was the only Oscar he ever won.18

The Hitchcock decade

The defining partnership ran 1955 to 1964: seven scores, from The Trouble with Harry through Marnie, plus the electronic bird-shrieks he supervised as “sound consultant” on The Birds. Herrmann’s own account of the division of labor was characteristically modest: “Hitchcock only finishes a picture 60 per cent. I have to finish it for him.”19 He even appears on screen once, conducting the Storm Clouds cantata at the Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much — a piece he pointedly did not replace, judging that no one could better what Arthur Benjamin had written for the 1934 original; he re-orchestrated it instead.20

Vertigo (1958) is the masterwork. An American musicians’ strike kept Herrmann off the podium (the conductor Muir Mathieson recorded the score in London and Vienna, to Herrmann’s lasting irritation), but the music itself circles and rises without ever settling.21 Its love music, the “Scène d’amour”, takes the harmonic yearning of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and refuses it any arrival; as Alex Ross writes, the citations are audible while “the main melodic contour is his own; the harmony is still his idiosyncratic construction.”22 Against it Herrmann sets Carlotta’s habanera, a dance rhythm fixed obsessively on a single repeating D: memory as a needle stuck in a groove.23 For North by Northwest (1959) the studio wanted something Gershwinesque for the Manhattan bustle; Herrmann opened instead with a driving fandango overture, his musical reading of what he called “a crazy dance between Cary Grant and the world.”24 And Psycho (1960) pushed his lifelong reduction to its limit. Hitchcock reportedly wanted jazz; Herrmann turned the film’s low music budget into an aesthetic and scored for strings alone, what he called in biographer Steven C. Smith’s account a “black and white sound” to match the photography.25 The only electronics in the murder cue were microphones placed close to the instruments to catch the harshest possible bowing.26

The break

By the mid-sixties the industry had rebuilt itself around the soundtrack single, and the pressure — the same machine The song in film maps — reached even Hitchcock. On November 4, 1965, he wired Herrmann that the old approach was “out of step with the times and old fashioned” and demanded a score with a beat for Torn Curtain; Herrmann protested that Hitchcock “was not the kind of film maker who made pictures for children,” then cabled that he would be delighted to write a vigorous score.27 What he delivered was the opposite of a pop theme: an orchestra of twelve flutes, sixteen French horns, nine trombones, two tubas, timpani, eight cellos, and eight basses, and no violins at all. At the Goldwyn soundstage session in March 1966 the studio musicians burst into applause after the main title. Hitchcock arrived unannounced, pronounced the music exactly what he did not want, and dismissed orchestra and composer mid-session. In the phone call that followed, Hitchcock accused Herrmann of stabbing him in the back; Herrmann shouted that Hitchcock had abandoned his integrity and sold out. Years later, when Herrmann came by with his new wife to introduce her, Hitchcock refused to see them.28

The concert composer he insisted he was

“As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression,” his printed credo begins.3 He backed it with a catalog: Moby Dick, premiered by John Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic in April 1940, then a Symphony played by the same orchestra in 1942. The work he regarded as his central achievement was the opera Wuthering Heights, composed 1943–1951 to a libretto by his first wife, the suspense writer Lucille Fletcher. No company staged it in his lifetime. He recorded it complete in 1966 at his own expense — film money paying the concert composer’s debts — and Portland Opera finally staged it in 1982, seven years after his death.29

His working terms were absolute — “I have the final say, or I don’t do the music,” he told an audience in 1973 — and he orchestrated every note himself: “To orchestrate is like a thumbprint… It would be like someone putting color to your paintings.”30 Yet the man who considered himself a nineteenth-century symphonist also insisted that the motion picture was “the first truly original art form of the twentieth century” and that “any composer who disdains writing music for films, radio or television, or any other medium, is doomed to oblivion.”31

The disciples

Exile made him a legend. Relocated to London after the Hitchcock break, conducting LP re-recordings of his own catalog and scoring British pictures — among them Twisted Nerve (1968), with its softly whistled theme — Herrmann was rediscovered by directors young enough to have grown up on him.32 François Truffaut, asked why he wanted Herrmann and none of his avant-garde friends, answered: “They’ll give me music of the twentieth century, but you’ll give me music of the twenty-first.” For Fahrenheit 451 Herrmann repaid the compliment by refusing electronics entirely: strings, harps, and tuned percussion for the future, reasoning that “the music of the next century would revert to a great lyrical simplicity.”33

Brian De Palma’s editor Paul Hirsch, temp-tracking Sisters with Psycho cues, talked the director into summoning the man himself; Herrmann came from London and scored the film with a Moog synthesizer carrying its main themes, then wrote Obsession, his Vertigo-haunted music for De Palma’s Vertigo-haunted film.34 Scorsese’s Taxi Driver he initially waved off — “I don’t know anything about cabdrivers” — until the scene where Travis Bickle pours peach Schnapps over torn-up white bread intrigued him; he took the job on his usual terms of total control.35 The score sets a mournful alto-saxophone main title (played in the film by Ronny Lang; Tom Scott plays it on the album’s re-recorded arrangements) against harps and muted brass that curdle as Travis does, and its final gesture was Herrmann’s last compositional decision anywhere: told a closing sting was too obvious, he said “Play it backwards” and left the room.36 He finished recording on December 23, 1975, and died in his sleep in Los Angeles hours later, at sixty-four. The film went out dedicated to him, its closing card offering “our gratitude and respect.” The Taxi Driver score won him the BAFTA. Fifteen months later, at the March 1977 Academy Awards, came two posthumous nominations, for Taxi Driver and Obsession, his first since the forties; both lost to Jerry Goldsmith’s The Omen.37

The afterlife

Smith’s biography A Heart at Fire’s Center (still the standard life) calls the shower cue “probably the most famous (and most imitated) cue in film music,” and the imitation is the point: his short repeating cells and pared-down ensembles are simply how screen suspense is scored now.38 The inheritors say so themselves. Danny Elfman: “…I became a film music fan because of The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was the first time I noticed a composer’s name: Bernard Herrmann” — and it was Elfman who adapted Herrmann’s own Psycho score for the 1998 remake.39 John Williams has named the Hitchcock–Herrmann films among his earliest strong impressions.40 It was Elmer Bernstein who gave the rejected Torn Curtain score its first recording, in his mail-order Film Music Collection, and adapted Herrmann’s 1962 Cape Fear music for Scorsese’s 1991 remake.41

The afterlife long ago escaped the concert hall. It reached pop within Herrmann’s lifetime: for “Eleanor Rigby”, George Martin scored a string octet in biting close-miked staccato drawn from the Psycho score, planting the Herrmann sound in the middle of Revolver.42 Quentin Tarantino resurrected the Twisted Nerve whistle for Kill Bill Vol. 1, Daryl Hannah’s Elle Driver whistling it down a hospital corridor, and Busta Rhymes’s “Gimme Some More” (1998) runs on the Psycho prelude’s stabbing violin figure — the concert-hall refusenik become breakbeat, via Sampling.43 Alex Ross’s verdict, “the greatest of all Hollywood film composers,” is the consensus now.44 It rests on a career built almost entirely of refusals: of the leitmotif, of the tune, of the Gershwinesque, of the pop single, of anyone else’s orchestration. Every refusal named a convention the movies didn’t actually need, and what was left after the subtractions is still what dread sounds like.

See also

  • Cinematic classical — the orchestral film-score tradition Herrmann helped define, and the note that tells the Hollywood score’s whole arc
  • Modern classical — the dissonant art-music wing his Psycho pushed the film score toward
  • Classical music — the concert tradition Herrmann insisted his film work belonged to
  • Cooke - A History of Film Music — the standard single-volume history of the art Herrmann remade

Footnotes

  1. Hitchcock’s original intention to leave the shower scene unscored, Herrmann’s strings-only cue written against that instruction, Hitchcock’s reversal, and the nearly doubled salary per the LA Phil’s Psycho program note (adapted from Steven C. Smith’s biography) and BBC Music Magazine’s Herrmann feature (“Herrmann felt he knew better (as he often did) and wrote some anyway… Hitchcock was quickly convinced”); the salary hedge (“nearly doubled”) per the Psycho shower-scene entry, Wikipedia (all accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  2. The one-word “Terror” answer per the LA Phil program note, from Smith (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  3. Herrmann’s printed credo — “As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic… I do not care for purely decorative music” — as published in Edward Johnson’s Bernard Herrmann: Hollywood’s Music-Dramatist (1977), reproduced at the Bernard Herrmann Society’s biographical sketch and its “Nature” page; his rejection of the film-composer label per Britannica’s Bernard Herrmann entry (all accessed July 27, 2026). ↩ ↩2

  4. Birth (June 29, 1911, New York) to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant parents, the optometrist father’s violin push and opera trips, the composition prize at thirteen, and the Treatise on Instrumentation discovery per Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia, the Bernard Herrmann Society sketch, and Movie Music UK’s Herrmann profile (all accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  5. NYU under Percy Grainger and Philip James, Juilliard under Bernard Wagenaar and Albert Stoessel, and the New Chamber Orchestra founded at twenty per the Bernard Herrmann Society sketch and Movie Music UK (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  6. Herrmann’s “Charles Ives,” Trend: A Quarterly of the Seven Arts no. 3 (Sept.–Nov. 1932) — the Fourth Symphony “in the writer’s opinion, one of the greatest symphonies ever penned”; “aside from a handful of specialists and musical cranks, even his name is unknown in so-called musical circles” — reproduced in full at the Bernard Herrmann Society archive (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  7. The Ives friendship “from 1933 until Ives’ death in 1954,” the CBS premieres (American broadcast premiere of the Third Symphony, 1946; British premiere of the Second, 1956), and the Moby Dick dedication per the Bernard Herrmann Society archive headnote and sketch and the Moby Dick cantata entry, Wikipedia (accessed July 27, 2026); David Raksin recalled Herrmann conducting “six weeks of radio concerts of Ives’ music… in the 30s when hardly anyone knew who Charles Ives was” per the Camera Three CBS transcript, September 1976 (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  8. Letter to his wife, November 1947, quoted in Smith’s biography (p. 137) and reproduced at the Bernard Herrmann Society (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  9. CBS from 1934, the Columbia Workshop (launched 1936) music directorship, the CBS Symphony chief-conductor post from 1940, the rarities programming, and the Peabody citation per the Bernard Herrmann Society sketch and Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  10. “music for radio dramatic programs, 1200 of them!” per David Raksin in the Camera Three transcript (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  11. Herrmann to Royal S. Brown, August 1975 interview (published High Fidelity, September 1976), reproduced at the Bernard Herrmann Society (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  12. Herrmann directing the CBS studio musicians as “Ramón Raquello and His Orchestra,” the “La Cumparsita” opener, and the broadcast’s use of pre-existing music throughout per BBC Music Magazine’s musical guide to The War of the Worlds and the broadcast script at Wellesnet (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  13. Herrmann, “Score for a Film,” New York Times, May 25, 1941, quoted at YourClassical’s Composers Datebook (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  14. The 1941 orchestration credo from the same Times piece, reproduced at the Bernard Herrmann Society sketch (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  15. The aria written to strain — “wrote the vocal parts so high it would sound strained and inept” — per David Raksin in the Camera Three transcript (accessed July 27, 2026); the high D beyond the character’s range and the Jean Forward dub per the production accounts collected in Peter Bogdanovich’s This Is Orson Welles (1992), as carried in Kane scholarship. ↩

  16. The “News on the March” sequence cut from RKO stock-library cues rather than Herrmann originals per David Cairns’s “Mondo Kane” analysis (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  17. Welles’s later estimate that the score “accounted for 50% of the success of the film” per Film Music Review’s Citizen Kane entry (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  18. The double nomination at the 14th Academy Awards (February 1942) and the win for All That Money Can Buy — “his only Academy Award” (Raksin) — per the Academy’s 1942 ceremony page and the Camera Three transcript; the four superimposed violin tracks and the 4 a.m. telephone-wire recording per Herrmann’s interview with Ted Gilling (Sight and Sound, winter 1971/72), quoted at the Bernard Herrmann Society sketch (all accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  19. The seven completed Hitchcock scores 1955–1964 plus The Birds consultancy per Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia and Neil Sinyard’s essay on the partnership; the “60 per cent” claim, from a recorded interview held at the Museum of Modern Art, per IMDb’s Herrmann biography page (all accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  20. The Royal Albert Hall cameo per Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia; Herrmann declining to replace Arthur Benjamin’s 1934 cantata — “I didn’t think anybody could better what (Benjamin) had done” — and re-orchestrating it instead per the Hollywood Bowl’s Storm Clouds program note (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  21. The AFM strike, the Muir Mathieson-conducted London and Vienna sessions, and Herrmann’s lasting complaint that the recordings suffered per the Vertigo soundtrack entry, Wikipedia and Film Music Review’s Vertigo entry (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  22. Alex Ross on the Tristan citations and Herrmann’s transformation of them, from his essay on the Vertigo score at The Rest Is Noise (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  23. The Carlotta habanera as an ostinato fixed on a repeating D per Movie Music UK’s Vertigo analysis and Tom Schneller’s study “Death and Love: Bernard Herrmann’s Score for Vertigo” (Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas) (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  24. MGM’s request for “Gershwinesque” title music, the fandango Herrmann wrote instead, and his “crazy dance between Cary Grant and the world” characterization per the Hollywood Bowl’s North by Northwest program note (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  25. The strings-only decision, the low-budget-turned-aesthetic, and the “black and white sound” formulation per the LA Phil program note, adapted from Smith and the Houston Symphony’s “The Sound of Psycho” (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  26. Close microphone placement as the murder cue’s only electronic manipulation per the Psycho shower-scene entry, Wikipedia, citing Christopher Palmer (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  27. The November 4, 1965 telegram (“out of step with the times and old fashioned”), Herrmann’s “not the kind of film maker who made pictures for children” retort, and his delighted-to-comply wire per Steve Vertlieb’s account at mfiles and TCM’s Torn Curtain article (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  28. The violin-less Torn Curtain orchestra, the March 1966 Goldwyn session, the players’ applause, Hitchcock’s mid-session dismissal, the phone-call recriminations, and the refused introduction of Herrmann’s new wife per Vertlieb at mfiles (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  29. Moby Dick premiered by Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic (April 11, 1940) and the 1942 Symphony performance per the Bernard Herrmann Society sketch; Wuthering Heights — composed 1943–1951, Lucille Fletcher libretto, unstaged in his lifetime, the self-financed 1966 complete recording, and the posthumous Portland Opera premiere (November 1982) — per the opera’s Wikipedia entry, the Society sketch, and the Camera Three transcript (all accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  30. “I have the final say, or I don’t do the music” (George Eastman House Q&A, October 1973) per Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia; the orchestration-as-thumbprint credo per the Royal S. Brown interview (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  31. “The motion picture is the first truly original art form of the twentieth century… any composer who disdains writing music for films, radio or television, or any other medium, is doomed to oblivion” per the Bernard Herrmann Society sketch (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  32. The London relocation, the Decca re-recording years, and Twisted Nerve per Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia (accessed July 27, 2026). The original Twisted Nerve recording is absent from US streaming; the theme is linked by search placeholder pending a verified URL. ↩

  33. The Truffaut exchange (“They’ll give me music of the twentieth century, but you’ll give me music of the twenty-first”), the Fahrenheit 451 forces, and Herrmann’s “great lyrical simplicity” rationale per Movie Music UK’s Fahrenheit 451 analysis (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  34. Paul Hirsch’s Psycho temp-track, De Palma’s response, Herrmann’s summons from London, and the Moog-led Sisters score per TCM’s Sisters article and the Criterion Collection’s Sisters essay (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  35. “I don’t know anything about cabdrivers,” the peach-Schnapps-and-bread scene that changed his mind, and the total-control terms per Dana Stevens, “Listening to Taxi Driver,” Slate, March 2011 (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  36. Ronny Lang’s alto in the film per the Ronny Lang entry, Wikipedia; Tom Scott’s soundtrack-album performance per the Tom Scott entry, Wikipedia; the “Play it backwards” instruction (preserved in the 1992 documentary Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann) per Stevens, Slate (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  37. The December 23, 1975 final session, the death in his sleep in Los Angeles hours later, the dedication, the BAFTA win, and the two posthumous nominations lost to The Omen per Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia, Stevens, Slate, and the 49th Academy Awards entry, Wikipedia (all accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  38. Smith’s “probably the most famous (and most imitated) cue in film music” per the Psycho shower-scene entry, Wikipedia; the biography’s standing and its characterization of Herrmann (“a creative genius, an indefatigable musicologist, an explosive bully, a generous and compassionate man who desperately sought friendship and love”) per UC Press’s edition page (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  39. Elfman’s “I became a film music fan because of The Day the Earth Stood Still…” per Dread Central’s November 2025 interview; his adaptation of Herrmann’s score for the 1998 Psycho remake per the remake soundtrack’s Wikipedia entry (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  40. Williams on the Hitchcock–Herrmann films among his “earliest strong impressions” (interview remarks as transcribed by fan archives) per Bernard Herrmann, Wikipedia (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  41. Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Collection (1974–1979) premiering the unused Torn Curtain score, and his adaptation of Herrmann’s 1962 Cape Fear music for Scorsese’s 1991 remake, per Soundtrack.net’s Film Music Collection overview and Jon Burlingame’s account (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  42. George Martin’s “Eleanor Rigby” octet — four violins, two violas, two cellos, played mainly staccato with close microphone placement — modeled on Herrmann’s Psycho score per the Paul McCartney Project’s “Eleanor Rigby” entry and the Beatles’ official song page (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  43. The Kill Bill Vol. 1 whistle scene per CBR’s Twisted Nerve history; “Gimme Some More” built on the Psycho prelude figure per WhoSampled’s entry (both accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

  44. Alex Ross, “the greatest of all Hollywood film composers” (from his notes for the Salonen/LA Phil recording of Herrmann’s film scores), quoted in NPR’s “Bernard Herrmann at 100” (accessed July 27, 2026). ↩

Sources drawn on

  • Ross — The Rest Is Noise — The twentieth century's classical music is best understood as a history of the twentieth century itself — composers mattered, entangled with wars, states, and technology — and the 'progressive' and 'conservative' camps deserve equal time, because what sounds like noise on first hearing may reveal hidden beauty on the second.
  • Cooke — A History of Film Music — Film music is one continuously evolving craft, shaped as much by recording technology as by aesthetics and continuous with the concert tradition rather than sealed off from it; it is a global story that Hollywood dominates without defining, and the symphonic score and the pop soundtrack are two branches of that single history rather than a tradition and its decline.

Published July 28, 2026