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Abstract
This work examines the film music of Bernard Herrmann within the context of the mode of film scoring practised in Hollywood in an attempt to demonstrate the challenges that this composer offered to the prevailing system.
In Chapter I, the style of film music established by Steiner, Newman, Korngold and others in Hollywood in the thirties, and the prevailing ideas of its function in film are outlined, followed by a consideration of alternatives and challenges to that system. Herrmann's training and temperament are then reviewed to account for the attitudes and approaches he brought to film scoring.
In Chapter II, the structural methods of Herrmann's film-scoring technique are investigated. The implications of the composer's rejection of extended melody in favor of a more flexible structural unit consisting of a small group of notes is examined at both the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic level: the choice of a flexible cellular unit is shown to allow, at the level of the sequence, maximum interaction with the filmic articulation; furthermore the potentiality of these cellular units for reinforcing and creating structural patterns across the film text as a whole is demonstrated by analyses of the score for Citizen Kane, Obsession and Taxi Driver.
Chapter III examines orchestral color in Herrmann's film scores and his rejection of both conventional orchestral groupings and the use of orchestrators. Here the intersection of musical and cinematic codes is explored from a different perspective: selected scores are analysed to reveal the specific strategies, harmonic, instrumental, or rhythmic, which Herrmann exploits to create, in each case, an orchestral color uniquely suited to the particular narrative. The question of orchestral color is reduced to a specific problem in Chapter IV. Three an analysis is made of the techniques used by Herrmann to create musical suspense in his scores for Hitchcock's films. Chapter V and VI each look at single scores for Hitchcock films--Vertigo and Psycho. In each of these chapters the specific techniques isolated in previous chapters are analysed in terms of their interaction within a single film-music text.
