THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
Volume 1, Number 2/3, Pages 121-150
ISSN 1087-7142 Copyright © 2003
The International Film Music Society, Inc.
EDITORIAL
Bernard Herrmann: The Beethoven of Film Music?
WILLIAM H. ROSAR
Beethoven did his own orchestrating—he didn’t need
any help. He was a musician!
—Adam Lemb, H. Doc. in Four Daughters
It is not possible to create a film without music, but you
can create a film without good music.
—Bernard Herrmann, Sound and Cinema
H
“
ello Luddy!” Heinz
Roemheld used to say
with an impish grin,
waving at a treasured drawing of
Beethoven’s death mask that
adorned the wall beside his grand
piano. “There were a lot of
composers in Hollywood in the
beginning who were not really
great composers,” he once remarked sarcastically.1 Nonetheless
Roemheld was among many who
were initially idealistic about the
future of film music in the first
decade of “the talkies.”2 This is
apparent from an enthusiastic
testimonial he gave to the press
while scoring Warner Bros.’
Four’s A Crowd (1938), then his
lengthiest score:
After ten years of making picture music, I am still fascinated
by it and find new and intriguing interests in every score that I
1
Heinz Roemheld, interview by the author, tape
recording, Laguna Hills, CA, January 21, 1976.
As one of my teachers, what I learned from
Roemheld of the history, art, and business of film
music could not have been gotten from any
published source, consisting as it did of his
write. I am of the opinion that
the scope of picture music is
almost unlimited and if it has
any limitations, they are on the
part of the musicians. Certainly,
the studios give us every facility
known to man for the enhancement of picture music, and if we
don’t produce something good,
it is largely our own fault. By
very reason of that fact, I believe
that if Wagner were alive today
he would be involved in making
pictures and picture music.3
Max Steiner, who by 1936 was
also at Warner Bros., went even
further in saying that “The idea
originated with Richard Wagner.
Listen to the incidental scoring
behind the recitatives in his operas. If Wagner had lived in this
century, he would have been the
Number One film composer.” 4
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, also at
Warners by then, was similarly
enthusiastic about film music,
invaluable insights from having composed music
for over 400 films.
2
Cf. Fred Steiner, “What Were Musicians Saying
About Movie Music During the First Decade of
Sound? A Symposium of Selected Writings,” in
Clifford McCarty, ed., Film Music 1 (New York:
Garland, 1989), 81-107.
even before he had composed his
first original film score, Captain
Blood (a film, as it happens, he
didn’t want to score). Already a
composer of renown in Europe
before being brought to Hollywood by Max Reinhardt in 1934 to
adapt the music of Mendelssohn
for the Warner film adaptation of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Korngold remarked about “incidental
background music” while working
on the Paramount musical Give Us
This Night (1936):
The reason modern composers
of serious music do not complain about working for the
movies is that they are given an
even chance to be as original as
they want. In this branch of
musical writing there have been
some of the finest examples of
orchestral music which our age
has produced. There have been
some ordinary, program pictures
3
R. Vernon Steele, “The Wheels Go ‘Round—
Literally,” Pacific Coast Musician, June 4, 1938,
p. 10. The article is a review of Roemheld’s
score for Four’s a Crowd.
4
Steiner quoted in Tony Thomas, Music for the
Movies (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1973),
122.
122
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
which are forgotten after three
months but which will be long
remembered by musicians as
containing some rare musical
writing.5
(Unfortunately for the sake of
film music history, Korngold did
not mention any examples in making this remarkable statement.)
There were also those such as
Los Angeles music critic R. Vernon
Steele who believed that sooner or
later a “great composer” would
emerge from the Hollywood
milieu itself: “I have long held
[that] . . . one fine day there will
come into pictures—or be developed in pictures—some man who
is capable of doing the same
monumental thing with pictures as
did Wagner with his music
dramas. When that day arrives—
and who knows but that it is ‘just
around the corner’—we shall have
productions that will make history.” 6 M-G-M composer Herbert
Stothart saw this as being almost
inevitable: “I have always held the
belief that the application of music
to the embellishment of great
drama is not only bringing greater
music to the public every day, but
is developing a new group of composers of great dramatic music
5
Jessica Duchen, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 160-61.
Steele, ibid., 10.
7
Herbert Stothart, “Film Music” in Stephen
Watts, ed., Behind the Screen (London: Barker,
1938), 139.
8
Ibid., 140.
9
Ibid., 139.
10
Walter Monfried, “The Future of Film Music as
Seen by Mr. Stothart,” The Milwaukee Journal,
April 26, 1936.
11
Monfried, ibid. Stothart cited as evidence of the
promise already shown at that time Steiner’s
score for The Informer (1935), Newman’s for Street
Scene (1931), Korngold’s for Captain Blood (1935)
and adaptations of Mendelssohn for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and Roemheld and
Kaun’s score for The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936).
Though Stothart had already scored one silent
film in New York, The End of St. Petersburg (1928)
before coming to M-G-M in 1929, he wrote only
6
that, in time, may result in great
classicists of the future.7 As the
screen daily demands greater
musical settings for greater drama,
the composers—those men who
write music in terms of its relation
to drama—are constantly being
‘groomed’ and developed. From
them will surely arise eventually a
Beethoven or Gounod of the
screen.” 8
It is ironic that Stothart, who
with lyricist Clifford Grey had
originally been brought by M-G-M
to Hollywood to write songs for
films, did not envision a “Beethoven or Gounod of the screen”
coming from among song writers:
“To me the screen’s importance,
musically, lies not in developing
new song writers, but in its potentialities for furthering the
appreciation of good music, and
for developing new serious composers.” 9 As he saw it, “The screen
will fulfill a destiny by developing
not budding Rombergs, Berlins, or
Kerns, but Beethovens. Let us not
worry . . . [t]he popular song boys
of Tin Pan Alley will always take
care of themselves, and the real
composers—why, they will be
developed by the screen!”10
Stothart was in a minority who
rather idealistically envisioned
that composing for films would
not only take its place as a legitimate form of art music in time, but
seemed to imply in his remarks
that it might ultimately even be the
art music of the future.11 Though
he didn’t say so, Stothart, who
himself was something of a Wagnerian, may have seen film music
as fulfilling Wagner’s ideas of
Zukunftsmusik (“music of the future”) and film as Gesamtkunstwerk
(“total work of art”).12 Others, of
course, saw the music of the future
differently. “Gone is the romanticism,” Kurt London wrote in 1936,
“which hovered over the musician
of the nineteenth century. In the
figure of the film composer we can
see also the type of the future artist. The development of film music
affords us a prophetic picture of
times to come with their radical
revolution of all values . . . .”13
In the heyday of Hollywood
movie studios, with notoriously
short composing deadlines being
the rule and musical decisions and
compromises often being dictated
by music department and studio
heads, the verities of motion picture composing were such that it
would be hard to imagine how
Stothart’s “prediction of a Hollywood Beethoven . . . arising on the
songs for the first eleven films on which he
worked. He moved from song writing to scores
with The Squaw Man (1931), but after scoring
Cuban Love Song, M-G-M fired him. He was
brought back to M-G-M late in 1932 at the behest
of M-G-M producer, Albert Lewin, and from that
time on, worked as a film composer until his
death in 1949. His transition from song writer to
film composer seems mirrored in remarks he
made in 1933 about a corresponding change in
films themselves: “The return of music in motion
pictures will not bring back the so-called theme
song. In its place will come a scoring designed to
interpret the mood and action of the story, rather
than make the plot a medium for ‘plugging’
songs. Music will become more and more an
integral part of motion pictures in the future.”
Herbert Stothart, “The Place of Music in the
Motion Picture,” The Film Daily, July 13, 1933,
n.p.
12
Cf. Laura Diane Kuhn, “Film as Gesamtkunstwerk:
An Argument for the Realization of a Romantic
Ideal in the Visual Age” (Master’s thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1986). Though
Kuhn discusses film music and cites certain films
composers, Stothart is not one of them. Elsewhere, another M-G-M composer, Miklós Rózsa,
freely expressed a debt to Wagner’s aesthetic
ideas: “My generation tried to establish the
serious motion picture score with a symphonic
background. I personally believe in the form of
motion picture derived from Wagner’s book
‘Opera and Drama.’ He discussed the Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-encompassing art of drama,
writing, and music. What could be closer to this
description than motion pictures?” Rózsa quoted
in Mark Evans, Soundtrack: The Music of the
Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), 207.
13
Kurt London, Film Music: A Summary of the
Characteristic Features of its History, Aesthetics,
Technique; and Possible Developments, trans. Eric S.
Bensinger (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 162.
EDITORIAL
123
Paramount or M-G-M lot” would
be possible.14 Clifford Vaughan, a
veteran Disney composer who had
worked with Stothart and himself
composed at M-G-M, actually
preferred working as an orchestrator to composing: “Movie music
doesn’t bring out the best in a
composer. It is difficult to judge a
musician . . . by Hollywood standards—such as they are. I don’t
care for composition in this field. I
know its limitations and its restrictions, and I know that the ‘front
office’ is expecting something, and
I know the producer is expecting
something, and the audience is
expecting something. So where
does that leave you? If you have a
big name they’ll accept you because the name is on it.”15
Vaughan, whose own ambitions as a composer were
ultimately satisfied outside the
movie business, was hardly alone
in the views he expressed.16 In
spite of his early enthusiasm,
Roemheld, who had been a colleague of Vaughan’s at Universal
and Warner Bros., came to think of
himself as a musical “Jekyll and
Hyde,” because his art music had
taken a back seat to movie work
and he, like Vaughan, did not really feel fulfilled as a composer.
Roemheld thought that as long as
he was writing film music he
couldn’t write “serious” music (art
music), though for a time he did
write both. He would tell Vaughan
and other colleagues that “You
have to divorce yourself from Hollywood,” though he only retired
from the movie business in 1961
when he was already 60, having
worked on over 400 films. “One
has to get out of the verbiage, the
Hollywood style—in other words,
commercial music. You can’t write
a symphony under the influence of
commercial music,” Roemheld
maintained.17
Already in the 1930s music
critics were questioning film music
qua music, especially Hollywood
film music. Milwaukee critic
Walter Monfried, who challenged
Stothart’s prediction of a Hollywood Beethoven and, moreover,
his conviction that the great composers of the future would come
from film music, replied, “One
wonders how [Stothart] would
enjoy a concert hall program of the
music written directly for Hollywood productions . . . .” Monfried asked rhetorically whether
film music unlike, for example, the
Overture to Tannhäuser, really constituted “good music” or whether
it was “mere snatches of effective
obliggato, disconnected successions of 30-second efforts to
heighten the passion, action and
sentiment” in movies? His rhetorical answer was that “The
composition of picture accompaniment is, without doubt, an
exacting, respectable and quite
valuable task, but one should be
wary about confusing it with
enduring work. Henry Ford and
Walter Chrysler manufacture
efficient vehicles which at the
same time have noteworthy design
and appearance (free advt.) but
those gentlemen probably would
disclaim any affinity with Phidias
or da Vinci.”18
Representing a later generation
of composers writing music for the
movies, Leonard Rosenman even
questioned whether film music
was music at all, let alone good
music, expressing the same
misgivings Roemheld, Vaughan,
Monfried and others had
previously:
14
of columns he wrote entitled “On the Hollywood
Front” from 1936 to 1938 in Modern Music. In
spite of this, Antheil continued to compose for
films in Hollywood almost up until the time of
his death in1959.
17
Roemheld, interview by the author, ibid. This
did not stop Roemheld from writing a set of
orchestral variations on his hit song “Ruby” for
concert performance. Nonetheless, he revised the
orchestration of one of his concert pieces “Serenade to a Ballerina” to eliminate certain touches
of the Hollywood style (mainly the use of xylophone). In one his last works for piano (Seven
Preludes), Roemheld confessed that they included affectionate nods to his Hollywood
career, and that one of them was intended to
sound like a main title. His long time friend and
colleague, Bernhard Kaun, similarly revised the
orchestration of his Romantic Symphony originally
written in the 1930s to eliminate traces of the
Hollywood style (Kaun, discussion with the
author, n.d.). By the end of his life, Roemheld’s
output of art music consisted of only some
twenty-four works, mostly piano and chamber
music—this in contrast to the some 400 films for
which he had written orchestral music. Rather
like “Jekyll and Hyde” Roemheld, the title of
Rózsa’s memoirs, A Double Life, was intended to
convey that as a composer he had led two lives,
one in films and the other in art music. The title
itself came from a 1947 M-G-M film he had
scored starring Ronald Colman as an actor gone
mad, confusing an actress for the role she portrayed. Rozsa on the other hand was at pains to
keep his two lives as separate as possible.
18
Ibid.
Monfried, ibid.
Clifford Vaughan, interview by the author, tape
recording, Los Angeles, CA. Transcript edited
and amended by Vaughan and Rosar, March 9,
1975. Though Vaughan wrote four symphonies,
an oratorio, a violin concerto, chamber works,
and piano music, he was an accomplished
organist early in his career, and much of his art
music was written for that instrument, with five
organ symphonies, an organ concerto, and many
liturgical pieces for chorus and organ.
16
Any number of composers who came to Hollywood started off full of idealism but in time lost
it for these very reasons, though some took
longer to become disillusioned than others.
Among them was American modernist, George
Antheil, whose rather more rapid disillusionment with Hollywood is documented in a series
15
[Y]ou are using all the ingredients of music: counterpoint,
harmony, etc. But basically it
doesn’t function as music, because the propulsion is not
through the medium of musical
ideas. The propulsion is by way
of literary ideas. [I]t’s almost
music, but not quite. And the
minute you squeeze in music
under this aegis and you write
in a procrustean fashion, cutting
off the beat or stretching it out to
fit, then you are dealing with
124
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
extramusical evaluations, extramusical values. The result is the
overall picture of Hollywood
music as a series of truncated
little phrases, very often making
do to fit a scene—not being
complicated under dialog, under sound effects, punctuating
this, punctuating that. The composer who wishes to use films as
a laboratory for any length of
time, unless he really has his
wits about him and becomes a
real schizophrenic and divides
himself right down the middle
and knows what to draw from
what medium for what purpose,
will become very, very confused
in his serious work and will
begin to write these same truncated phrases, which indeed
most of these people write. So
there it has caused me a great
deal of burden in the writing of
my serious music.19
One record critic writing in
1958 summed up his impression of
film music using an old Hollywood anecdote as his point of
departure, “‘We can write symphonic music,’ a Hollywood
composer once boasted, ‘almost as
fast an orchestra can play it.’ More
often, the scores sound as though
the orchestra had started wandering from the mark before the
composer finished his job.” 20 Since
by implication it would be impossible for film music sui generis to
be “great” music because of limits
placed on its composition, as described by Rosenman and
members of the older generation
of Hollywood composers, how
then could by writing it someone
ever possibly achieve the status of
being a “great composer,” a
Beethoven?
Perhaps because of such deliberations, a paradoxical situation
arose, perhaps one first voiced by
musicians themselves, but already
implicit in Monfried’s questioning
the musical value of “snatches of
effective obliggato [sic],” and “disconnected successions of
30-second efforts.” The paradox
was that there could be “great film
music” but that it was not necessarily “great” music per se, and
therefore composers could, at least
in principle, be “great” film composers without necessarily being
“great” composers. This was because the “greatness” of a film
score and its composer would be
“great” by a different set of standards.
In 1947 Viennese music publisher Hans Heinsheimer tried to
resolve this paradox by comparing
Copland’s film music with his
concert works:
[His picture scores] are first-class
scores when you hear them with the
picture. Here they are absolutely
up to his finest and highest
standard. [H]is music for the
picture Our Town . . . is lovely
music, and whoever has heard it
on the screen is not likely to
forget it. But when it was played
in a concert we realized that the
music had not come to life, that
it was still mysteriously hidden
in the picture, that it was impossible to take it away without
damaging and destroying it.
Having said that Heinsheimer
then offered this insight relative to
criticizing film music:
The fact that a picture score is so
closely associated with and
integrated in the picture and has
little if any life of its own has
resulted in the strange fact that .
. . almost none has ever succeeded in stepping out from the
screen and leading a happy and
successful life as an independent
work of art. [Picture] music is
different in its purpose, in its
texture, in its form, and in its
technique. This is why it has to
be looked at with different eyes,
listened to with different ears,
and judged in a different frame
of mind . . . .
And as for the career film
composer:
While he might be inferior to the
man who writes a string quartet
or an oratorio, when it comes to
dreams of greatness, in one
respect the Hollywood composer knows he will beat them
all: he knows that he is writing
for the biggest audience any
composer ever dreamed of since
the cave man cut himself a piece
of bamboo, drilled a few holes in
it, and became the world’s first
flute-playing composer.21
But that audience was not the
concert hall in the opinion of
Heinsheimer and others, who
insisted that film music could not
stand on its own in a concert
setting.
Not all critics agreed, though.
Responding to Heinsheimer’s
position, Los Angeles music critic
Lawrence Morton argued that it
was only the caliber of the composers that was responsible for
this state of affairs: “[T]here is
nothing in the nature of film music
that gives it a mortality rate of
almost 100 per cent. It just hasn’t
yet been written by Mozart, Verdi,
and Wagner. When composers of
such stature come to work in Hollywood, they will undoubtedly
write film music that can lead a
‘happy and successful life as independent works of art.’”22
Yet one world class composer,
Igor Stravinsky, was not convinced
of Morton’s argument, even
though Morton was one of his
19
Interview with Bernard Herrmann by Pat
Gray, in Irwin Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes
on Film Music (New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1975), 186-7.
20
Music, Time, February 24, 1958, 49.
21
H[ans] W. Heinsheimer, Menagerie in F Sharp
(New York: Doubleday, 1947), 212-3.
22
Lawrence Morton, “A Smattering of Antheil,”
Hollywood Quarterly 2 (1947): 430.
EDITORIAL
intimates. Like Heinsheimer, he
explicitly argued that the standards of film music were different
from those of art music: “Film
music is significant, in many ways,
of course, but not as music, which
is why the proposition that better
composers could produce better
film music is not necessarily true:
the standards of the category defeat higher standards.”23 At least
Stravinsky admitted that the problem with film music qua music did
not necessarily rest with those who
composed it, but with the standards of film music as a
“category” (unfortunately he did
not elaborate). Unlike Stravinsky
but like Heinsheimer, Morton
maintained that film music could
validly be judged as music:
[I]t must be kept in mind that
the goodness of a score will not
be detected by those who evaluate film music according to
wrong criteria. Concert-hall and
opera-house standards are as
irrelevant to film music as they
are to one another. Film music
has its own standards. These are
not theoretical; they have been
established by example and
tested in the theater. Certainly it
has been proved that although
film music does not have to be
good in order to fulfil its function, good music actually
performs that function far more
satisfactorily than bad music.
The worst that can be said about
most film music is that it does
not live up to its own best standards.24
23
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and
Commentaries (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1960), 103-4.
24
“Foreword” by Lawrence Morton, in Film
Composers in America: A Checklist of their Work
(Los Angeles, 1953), xvi.
25
Roemheld, interview by the author, ibid.
26
Ibid. Roemheld recalled, “I have nothing but the
deepest admiration for him, outside for motion
125
In an effort to dispel the prevalent idea that film composers
could only write film music,
Roemheld once attempted to
arrange a concert of music by
Hollywood composers that was
not film music. He went to Max
Steiner’s office at Warner Bros. and
proposed the idea to him. Steiner
got up, locked the door, and said
to Roemheld that while there was
no limit on the amount of melodic
music he could write, he could not
write anything with musical form,
as would be expected of a concert
hall piece. The concert never materialized.25
The second fiddle status of the
film composer relative to that
accorded to the concert composer
was expressed in various ways,
ranging from outright scorn to
faint praise. Roemheld liked to tell
about the first time he met Korngold at Warner Bros. in 1934 when,
much to his surprise, Korngold
respectfully addressed him in German as “Meister.” Flattered, but
slightly bewildered knowing
Korngold’s fame as a composer in
Europe, Roemheld demurred,
“Nein! Ich bin nicht der Meister,
Sie sind der Meister!” (No! I am
not the maestro, you are the maestro!) In German the word
“Meister,” perhaps more than
“maestro” in Italian and “master”
in English, has the musical significance of being both the leader of
an orchestra (or other ensemble)
and of being a master in the sense
of the guilds—including musical
guilds—with their “apprentice
singers” and “master singers” that
were the subject of Wagner’s
musicdrama Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg. Because of Roemheld’s
obvious consternation, Korngold
graciously explained that all he
meant was that Roemheld was the
‘maestro’—that is, a master of the
specialized craft of composing
motion picture music, whereas he
was the novice. (As it happened,
Roemheld went on to tutor Korngold on the craft of Hollywood
film scoring.26 )
Few musicians in the concert
world, let alone critics, believe that
film music could be both well
crafted and artful yet not necessarily suited for performance away
from the film for which it was
written. Because performance in
the concert hall remained the
ultimate test of any music worth
hearing, given the aesthetic of
absolute or autonomous dominating
musical thinking in twentieth
century art music, this seemed to
be a test that most film music
could not pass. However little
attempt was even made to perform
film music in concert, so concertgoers themselves, if not music
critics, were not given an opportunity to judge the merits of film
music played in a concert setting,
but only in terms of themes
popularized for radio and records.
Occasionally film composers
themselves would talk of preparing a suite from one or another of
their scores for concert perfor-
pictures. In fact, and I’m not speaking out of
school, he came to me and said, ‘Heinz,’ he
spoke in German of course, ‘Please help me.’ He
said, ‘I know nothing about this business.’ Well
he didn’t, he had no experience—nothing—he
had no chance to, and I said, ‘Meister,’ master,
‘I’d be very happy to do anything for you.’
Korngold told Roemheld to charge him for
helping him, but Roemheld refused, saying, “‘I’ll
charge the studio, but I certainly won’t charge
you anything!’” Korngold told Roemheld that he
admired his approach over Steiner’s at the time,
saying that in a scene of children playing
Roemheld would just score it with a scherzo,
whereas Steiner would instead “Mickey-Mouse”
every child falling down while playing.
126
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
mance, but only rarely were the
suites realized and even more
seldom performed, mainly because
they were busy writing film scores.
Even more rarely a music critic
himself would suggest that music
from a film merited concert performance. For example, Los Angeles
critic Bruno David Ussher in writing about Alfred Newman’s score
for Wuthering Heights (1939) expressed this opinion about its
musical worth: “I think Newman
could well shape this music into a
short tone poem. In concert form,
without aid of the screen, this music still would tell of love and
price, of longing and cruel regrets
which make the characters of this
old novel so immediate and modern. This is finely realistic music,
humanly direct, folksong like.”27
But generally an explicit double
standard came to prevail in the
music world, the standards of film
music being deemed lower rather
than merely different than those of
concert music.
Thus film music was mostly
regarded by the music world as
just being second-rate music or,
more usually, inferior to concert
music, rather than being “almost
music” as Rosenman characterized
it—or painful “noise” as Sir
Thomas Beecham once called it.28
More than its form or structure,
the main reason given for its deficiency was a lack of originality,
which was seen as a measure—
even the sole one—of one’s talent
as a composer. Russian musicologist Leonid Sabaneev alluded to
this in the 1930s:
Whether by choice or not,
Sabaneev’s reasons for discounting
originality in film music could just
as readily be applied to any composer who chose to write in the
style of another period, or made
an arrangement of another composition. One is left to surmise that
these demands were frequent
enough that the film composer in
Sabaneev’s day was not often
permitted opportunities for origi-
nality, though Sabaneev does not
actually say that.
Consequently film composers
were largely viewed as copycats
by the music world and thus
dismis-sed as being hacks for that
reason. In characterizing the Hollywood scene, critic Robert Pollak
noted in 1938, “Hollywood is the
paradise of the hacks, and in the
music department they are supercolossal hacks. They can do
anything, and they do it very well.
The best of them have a keen sense
for imitation. They can write for a
hundred feet of film in the Puccini
manner, or score in the best Wagnerian style.”30 Heinsheimer saw
the film composer’s modus operandi as being a continuation of
silent film practice: “The times
when a movie score was made up
of bits from Tchaikovsky, Dvorák,
and Rimsky-Korsakov are over.
Most of the music you hear today,
to be sure, still sounds like
Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, and RimskyKorsakov, but it isn’t. It is music
originally composed just for the
purpose of being used in a
film . . . .”31 Pianist-composer
Oscar Levant made a two-fold
distinction as a result of his tenure
composing film music in Hollywood during the 1930s, “Two
types of orchestration have come
into such general use in Hollywood that I began the custom of
referring to them as ‘generic’ or
27
Bruno David Ussher, Music, Los Angeles Daily
News, March 27, 1939. Ussher was also professor
of music criticism at USC. In the 1990s some
excerpts from the score were finally performed
under the baton of Fred Steiner, at a time when
film music had already found a place on concert
programs.
28
Beecham quoted in Time, ibid., 49. Film music is
in good company, given how many works by
great composers now considered great whose
music was at one time or another dismissed as
being “noise,” e.g., Bartók, Berlioz, Bloch,
Brahms, Copland, Debussy, Harris, Liszt,
Milhaud, Prokofiev, Saint-Saëns, Schoenberg,
Scriabin, Strauss, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky,
Varèse, Verdi, Wagner, and needless to say,
Beethoven. Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical
Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since
Beethoven’s Time (NY: Coleman-Ross, 1965), 27273.
29
Sabaneev, v, as quoted in part by Fred Steiner,
“What Were Musicians Saying about Movie
Music During the First Decade of Sound? A
Symposium of Selected Writings,” in Clifford
McCarty, ed. Film Music 1 (New York: Garland,
1989), 90-1. As it happens, Steiner, a musicologist
who had been a prolific TV composer, on occasion was observed to imitate Herrmann. Yet
ironically he always bristled if someone pointed
out to him that his music sounded like someone
else’s. “I hate it when people compare my music
to other composers!” Steiner would angrily
protest. Film and TV composer John Morgan
once confronted Steiner saying, “The trouble
with you Fred is that you never had a style of
your own.” Steiner once made the remarkable
statement that the “best musicologists” don’t
compare one composer’s work with another’s.
Nonetheless he indirectly admitted to writing in
the styles of other composers, on one occasion
saying that were he free to compose as he chose,
his music would probably sound something like
Dvorak’s. When MCA music agent Abe Meyer
asked Steiner what his style was like so as to
have some way of describing it to prospective
producers, Steiner replied facetiously,
“Beethoven.” Fred Steiner, personal communications, n.d.
30
Robert Pollak, “Hollywood’s Music,” Magazine
of Art 31 (1938): 513.
31
Heinsheimer, 209.
As a rule, the cinema composer
stands apart from his fellows,
inasmuch as originality and
novelty are not required of him;
he is an arranger or transposer
of the inspirations of others,
rather than a creator. The ability
to borrow wisely and opportunely, to imitate good and
suitable examples, is a valuable
endowment in his case, though
these qualifications by no means
add lustre to the ordinary composer. Sometimes the choice is
not left to him, and he is called
upon to write in the style of a
certain period, or to make an
arrangement of a particular
composition. While the cinema
composer can dispense with a
talent for original work, he
must, nevertheless, be fully
equipped from a technical point
of view.29
EDITORIAL
127
‘derivative.’ ‘Generic’ is something
that sounds like something else.
‘Derivative,’ however, is a term of
stronger censure implying that
you have lifted the whole texture
from some not-too-familiar
source.”32
Thus film music was early on
categorically rejected by the world
of art music as being imitative and
its composers being imitators
(whether skilled or not). The fact
that films not infrequently interpolated existing music along with
original music quite naturally led
to the persistent impression
among casual listeners—and even
some critical ones—that film
scoring was less composing than
arranging, as that term is understood in popular and commercial
music. Stothart, faulted by many
film music aficionados for using
classical music in scores (though
sometimes at the behest of producers such as Irving Thalberg and
David O. Selznick) felt insulted
rather than praised when M-G-M
song writers would say he was a
good “arranger.”33 This, of course,
was a case of the standards of
popular music being (mis-)applied
to another musical genre: in popular music talent was judged on
one’s ability to write a good tune.
Further evidence of this is that
what in the music world would be
designated a score, even if in some
way using existing music, would
be designated musical arrangements
in the film world, perhaps because
there was uncertainty whether the
music heard in films was original
or not. Stravinsky once remarked,
“[I]t is said that in Hollywood
Haydn would have been credited
as the composer of the Variations
on a Theme by Haydn and Brahms
as their ‘arranger.’”34
Given the cult of originality
that dominated twentieth century
art music, from its beginnings was
obviously an aesthetic tension in
film music between having original music, composed and carefully
tailored to films, versus using
and/or adapting existing music,
especially the music of “the masters.” Yet it is apparently not
generally known in film music
studies today that the music of
“the masters” was sometimes used
because studio music directors and
even film composers themselves,
regarding it as being musically
superior, assumed that it was
therefore also superior in terms of
potential dramatic effectiveness in
films. Stothart, for example, explicitly advocated this in 1937: “My
own best successes are those in
which Chopin, Tschaikowsky, and
other composers can be recognized. The idea of a completely
original score for a picture is a
broad statement. I contend that the
score which best expresses the
mood of the picture is the important thing. The idea of an original
score is something else again.
None of us is a Mozart or a
Tschaikowsky.”35
Ironically, Stravinsky, who was
interested in composing for films,
was expressly opposed to the view
put forth by Stothart and others
(perhaps because of his unhappy
experience in having his Le Sacre
‘rearranged’ for its use in Fantasia):
32
35
37
Oscar Levant, A Smattering of Ignorance (Garden
City, NY: Garden City Publishing, Co., 1942),
122-23.
33
Constance Stothart Bongi, personal communication, n.d.
34
Stravinsky and Craft, ibid., 104.
Stothart quoted in “Public’s Broader Views
About Music Help to Improve Motion Picture
Art,” Minneapolis Tribune, Oct. 22, 1937.
36
Dahl, ibid., 35; cf. William H. Rosar, “Stravinsky
and MGM,” in Clifford McCarty, ed. Film Music 1
(New York: Garland, 1989), 108-22.
If I am asked whether the dissemination of good concert
music in the cinema will help to
create a more understanding
audience, I can only answer that
here again we must beware of
dangerous misconceptions. My
first premise is that good music
must be heard by and for itself,
and not with the crutch of any
visual medium. If you start to
explain the ‘meaning’ of music
you are on the wrong path. Such
absurd ‘meanings’ will invariably be established by the
image, if only through automatic associations. That is an
extreme disservice to music.36
For the first two decades of
sound films the idea of completely
original film music, let alone a
score written by a single composer,
was more an exception than the
rule in Hollywood (and elsewhere), as the liberal use of
existing music and the preponderance of scores written by music
department staffs attests during
Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”37
Completely original scores were
often reserved for high budget
films, whereas low budget films
were routinely scored with existing music (though mostly from
earlier films), where there was no
money in a film’s budget to pay
for music to be composed.
Yet already in the 1930s some
composers rejected the use of existing music on aesthetic grounds,
feeling strongly that scores should
be solely original music. Ironically,
Korngold whose film career began
by adapting Mendelssohn (A Mid-
A perusal of the composer filmographies in
Clifford McCarty’s Film Composers in America:
A Filmography 1911-1970 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000) reveals the predominance
of multiply-authored scores during the 1930s,
and gradually declining by the end of the ‘40s.
128
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
summer Night’s Dream) and ended
by adapting Wagner (Magic Fire),
was one of the partisans of this
position. Once, to meet his
deadline scoring Captain Blood,
Korngold resorted to the expedient
of using part of a piece by Liszt in
one sequence. Because the score
incorporated music composed by
another composer, Korngold
would not take credit as composer
and insisted instead that his screen
credit should be for “musical arrangements.”38 Yet when he
quoted “La Marseillaise” the following year in his score for
Anthony Adverse, his screen credit
read “music by.” What was the
difference? It must remain to
future research and study to explicate the musical ethics underlying
notions of original composition in
film music.
In his 1975 book Knowing the
Score: Notes on Film Music, American composer Irwin Bazelon was
apparently unaware of all the aesthetic deliberation about film
music that had previously gone on
among Hollywood composers,
weighing its pros and cons as
music. Instead he wrote dismissively of virtually the whole
musical output of Hollywood’s
“Golden Age,” which he thought
was derivative, much as Heinsheimer had years earlier:
Although the actual works of
the old European concert composers were discarded as
workable film scores, there arose
38
Duchen, ibid., 164. According to Duchen, it
was one of Liszt’s “Transcendental Studies”
(“Etudes d’exécution transcendante”), but
Friedhofer recalled that it was a fugal section
from Liszt’s symphonic Poem, Prometheus.
Irene Kahn Atkins, An American Film Institute
/ Louis B. Mayer Foundation Oral History.
Hugo Friedhofer, 121.
39
Bazelon, ibid., 23.
40
Ibid, 28.
41
Tony Thomas, “Hugo Friedhofer,” Films in
Review 16 (1965): 501.
in their place a new group of
live film composers capable of
writing—or, more accurately,
rewriting—music in the exact
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century style of
Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky,
Mahler, Wagner, Strauss,
Moussorgsky, and others. Later
the impressionistic influences of
Debussy and the rhythmic devices of Stravinsky crept into the
musical picture. Now film music
was flooded with imitations—
minus, of course, the original
name credits.
O
ne exception Bazelon
singled out was Bernard
Herrmann, commenting
parenthetically that his “musical
style is closer to Aaron Copland’s
native idiom.” Even though
Bazelon included Herrmann in a
group of composers whose “style
reflected the lush, impassioned
romanticism of mid-Europe in the
late nineteenth century,” 39 he contradicted himself in writing that
“Once in a while the refreshing
musical talents of Aaron Copland
and Bernard Herrmann were allowed to shine through. Copland’s
earlier scores for Of Mice and Men
and The Red Pony and Herrmann’s
scores for numerous Hitchcock
films and especially his music—a
classic in film-music circles—for
William Dieterle’s 1942 production
of All that Money Can Buy (sometimes called The Devil and Daniel
Webster) revealed a clean-cut, decidedly American musical profile
in spirit and style, and even today
these scores sound fresh and
scintillating.” 40
Mainly an overblown critical
essay presenting his own views
about film music and snobbish
predilections, Bazelon’s book is
useful just for that reason, regardless of whether his summation
regarding Hollywood film music is
valid (let alone accurate). It is use-
ful precisely because it represents
a characteristic attitude found
among contemporary composers
and musicians in the world of the
concert hall to this day. “A strange
snobbery toward this business
exists,” Friedhofer once said, “but
it exists largely among composers
who haven’t been asked to write
music for films.” 41 Though Bazelon
scored films (main shorts) he never
scored a Hollywood film. For
Bazelon, Herrmann’s film music
was noteworthy and stood out
from that of his contemporaries
because, like Copland’s, he felt it
departed from his conception of
the prevailing Hollywood style
(“lush, impassioned romanticism
of mid-Europe in the late nineteenth century”).
The implication would seem to
be that, in Bazelon’s estimation,
the “Golden Age” scores were
devoid of musical and dramatic
value, and that film music needed
to be a different style to be worthwhile, let alone appealing to his
own snobbish and jaded musical
taste. But perhaps this was because
for so long the Hollywood style
was simply taken for granted
without reflection, perhaps because it was so familiar—and
familiarity breeds contempt, as the
old saying goes. Apparently Herrmann’s style was sufficiently
different from it to gain Bazelon’s
attention.
One is left to believe that it is
because of Herrmann’s style alone
that Bazelon both liked his film
music and deemed it superior (viz.
“clean-cut, decidedly American,”
etc.) However, Bazelon, did not
say that Herrmann’s music was
stylistically original, comparing it
as he did to Copland’s “native
idiom” (whatever that might be).
Despite his characterization of
Herrmann’s style, in discussing
various examples from Herr-
EDITORIAL
mann’s scores, Bazelon does not
once use them to illustrate that the
music is “decidedly American” (let
alone “clean cut.”)42 Herrmann
biographer Steven C. Smith characterized Herrmann’s style more
or less in the same way Bazelon
had in lumping together all the
composers of the “Golden Age”:
“His music, almost all of it programmatic, embodied the German
Romanticism of Wagner and
Mahler as well as the psychological impressionism of the French
school (Debussy and Ravel especially)—perceived through the
Anglo-American culture
Herrmann adored.”43 In reality the
same could be said for virtually
every other composer working in
Hollywood when Herrmann did,
whose music also had an American accent, if not an American
42
Bazelon touches on Herrmann’s music in scenes
from All that Money Can Buy, North by Northwest,
Psycho, Hangover Square, Citizen Kane, and Vertigo.
43
Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life
and Music of Bernard Herrmann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 4.
44
Cf. for example Hugo Friedhofer’s
characerization of Alfred Newman’s style: “[H]e
was a bit of a child prodigy who gave piano
recitals at age nine or ten. His repertoire consisted largely of the XIXth century
romantics;-Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn and
such-like. These, plus the orchestral works of
Wagner, Tschaikowsky and I daresay some
Brahms, which latter he loved, but never really
took the trouble to analyze in depth. His melodic
lines (though good) remained firmly affixed to
the XIXth century right up to the end. I’m convinced the only music of our own time that he
really liked were the show tunes of Gershwin,
Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rogers. Later, he
came to like the early Stravinsky, Prokofieff and
Shostakovitch. He also liked a great deal of
deBussy [sic] and Ravel,-also Richard Strauss
(largely via Korngold’s film scores, which for a
while had considerable influence on his own
writing).) Indeed, with the passage of time his
musical horizon did expand,-although at bottom
he never really cut loose from the XIXth century
except on rare occasions. Right from the beginning I’d say that Alfred had two things going for
him i.e., a sense of the orchestra (based more on
instinct that on actual knowledge) and an inborn
sense of drama which seldom if ever went astray.
These two, added to his truly remarkable conducting ability,-constituted he ‘Newman style’
(or idiom, if you prefer).” Hugo Friedhofer, letter
musical sensibility.44
129
ike Leonard Bernstein,
another New York composer-conductor of Eastern
European Jewish parentage,
Herrmann’s attitudes about his
background were known by his
associates to be ambivalent.45
Though not a pious man Herrmann was proud of his heritage
and well read in Jewish history
and culture. Yet in spite of that he
once remarked that he was Jewish
“in name only.”46 But ironically
Herrmann was not his family’s
original name, nor is it a traditionally Jewish name unlike their
original name, which was Dardik
(Dardek, Dardick), meaning child in
Yiddish.47 Smith speculated that
Herrmann’s father, Abram Dardik,
who was from Ukraine, changed
his name because of “the growing
success of German Jews in
America . . . .”48 In reality, though,
Abram Dardik’s reasons for taking
the German-sounding name
Herrmann are not known to the
family today.49 The consensus of
opinion among family members is
that for one reason or another,
Abram assumed a German persona, as he spoke fluent German
without an accent. One family
member who has done extensive
genealogical research found that
he had taken the name August
Herrmann while working on a
plantation in Hawaii before
immigrating to the United States
in 1892.50 It is perhaps no coincidence that the given name of the
plantation owner was Hermann
and that the given name of the
foreman was August. Though
to the author, 7 December 1976.
Though Herrmann’s Jewish background is
discussed in Smith’s biography (see 7-8) there is
no entry in the index of the book about it, nor
any discussion of his ambivalent feelings about
his own Jewishness. In reading letters to his
wives one is tempted to believe that he was a
deeply spiritual man, with definite religious
leanings, if not towards his own religious background, then towards Christianity (see 142-3,
146). For Bernstein’s ambivalence towards his
own Jewish background, see Joan Peyser, Leonard
Bernstein: A Biography. Revised and updated.
(New York: Billboard Books, 1998), 179-81.
46
John Steven Lasher, Conversation, October
1982. Lasher told me that in a conversation he
had with him Herrmann had been making antiSemitic remarks about his colleagues and the
film industry, and at one point Lasher exclaimed,
“But Benny, you’re Jewish!” to which Herrmann
replied indignantly, “In name only!” While
attending a performance of Mahler’s second
symphony (the “Resurrection” Symphony) with
Charles Gerhardt, Herrmann remarked during
the second movement, “Jewish wedding—it’s a
Jewish wedding!” (Smith, 245). Some might
construe this as being an anti-Semitic slur. But
perhaps Gerhardt did not appreciate why this
music struck Herrmann as funny prompting
what was obviously a humorous remark. One
obvious possibility is that the work is doublyironic in that the unofficial subtitle (“Resurrection”) of the symphony suggests that it is
about Christ, a Jew, and that Mahler had been
born a Jew, but converted to Christianity. Given
his erudition, it seems unlikely that Herrmann
merely thought that music sounding like Jewish
wedding music was out of place in a symphony
whose subtitle presumably alludes to Christ.
47
I am grateful to Herrmann family genealogist
Steven E. Rivkin for sharing his research with
me. Email from Steve Rivkin, 15 April 2002. An
authority on Jewish names noted the following:
“[T]he name ‘Herman’ [or Herrmann] was
unknown among the Jews of Eastern Europe. It
is a German name derived from Old German
words meaning ‘army man’, i.e. ‘soldier’—but I
imagine that 20th-century Jews knew nothing of
this derivation. ‘Herman’ was likely a randomlychosen ‘American’ name, selected to help
assimilation.” Email from Warren Blatt, 29 July
2003.
48
Smith, 8.
49
Herrmann did not pronounce his name as it
would be pronounced in German, Hairmaan, but
instead as the given name “Herman” would be
pronounced in English Conversely, compare
remarks about the pronunciation of Leonard
Bernstein’s name, “In 1985, Nicolas Slonimsky .
. . in the seventh edition of Baker’s Biographical
Dictionary of Music . . . wrote that ‘intimates used
to refer to him as Bernsteen, and he himself said
he preferred the “democratic Yiddish” Bernsteen
to the ‘aristocratic Germanic’ Bernstyne.’”
(Peyser, 287).
50
See Steve Rivkin’s article for the Bernard
Herrmann Society from March 1997, “Benny,
Max and Moby,” Echoes: The Bernard Herrmann
Society Journal http://www.uib.no/herrmann/
articles/family/rivkin01.html. After writing it
Rivkin learned that Abram Herrmann had
already taken the name Herrmann in Hawaii
before coming to the United States. See his
postings on “Talking Herrmann” in response to
the subject “Herman/Herrmann Name.” http://
www.uib.no/herrmann/.
L
45
130
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
conjecture, presumably Abram
Dardik combined the two names
to form the name he adopted, later
dropping August and reverting to
Abram in America.51 In spite of
this, as Smith noted, “Bernard
would have enormous contempt
for the ‘airy’ Germans [but this]
did not prohibit [his] admiration,
sometimes idolatry, of German
composers.”52
With his well-known propensity for likening music to food,
Friedhofer once commented that
he could hear “no chopped liver”
in Herrmann’s music.53 Herrmann
himself actually disdained the
“schmaltzy” string playing style of
his day known as the “Hollywood
style,” perhaps because it was too
reminiscent of a cultural background that he wished to eschew,
at least outwardly. Studio bassoonist, Don Cristlieb recalled, “While
a conductor like Alfred Newman
loved high-intensity string playing
with a lot of vibrato, Herrmann
was just the opposite: he wanted a
cool sound with almost no vibrato.
He’d abuse the orchestra for half
the morning: ‘Get that hysterical
sound outta the strings!’” 54
P
rior to composing for films
Herrmann had entrenched
himself in the New York art
music scene, and among other
51
Rivkin, “Talking Herrmann,” ibid.
Smith, ibid.
Friedhofer, conversation with the author, n.d.
54
Cristlieb quoted in Smith, 82. Much the same
was said by violinist Louis Kaufman in the film
documentary Music for the Movies: Bernard
Herrmann (1992). Kaufman who had been a close
friend of Herrmann’s, recalled that Herrmann
rejected the very expressive molto vibrato “Hollywood style” of string playing that Alfred
Newman liked, that he wanted a “cold factual”
sound, not a “hot” sound, such as Alfred
Newman, for one, liked. Interestingly Newman’s
parents were also Ukrainian. Friedhofer and
Raksin, like Herrmann, did not care for
Newman’s tendency to “schmaltz up” the strings
52
53
affiliations, was a member of the
Young Composers Society organized by Copland, joining it at a
time when he had been fascinated
the music of Charles Ives. During
this period Herrmann paid the
cause of American music a good
deal of lip service, but there is
reason to believe that it was a
passing phase with him. Though
Smith stated that Herrmann was a
“passionate champion of contemporary American music,” 55 he
noted that Copland’s music, for
one, had “little influence on
Herrmann’s own stylistic development.”56 Jerome Moross, who had
been Herrmann’s friend from boyhood, and had shared his
enthusiasm for Ives, said frankly
that he was much more interested
in American music than Herrmann
was. 57
For that matter, an Anglophile
from his youth, Herrmann’s passion for English music and culture
almost unquestionably surpassed
that which he had for his own
country’s music and culture, a
passion that eventually culminated
in his marrying an English
woman, Norma Shepherd, and
moving to England where he spent
the last years of his life. His most
ambitious work was undoubtedly
the opera Wuthering Heights. Yet in
spite of his love for things English,
no critic has ever said that Herrmann’s music sounded particularly
English. If anything, there is every
reason to believe that Herrmann’s
taste in music was quite catholic.
For example Moross recalled how
Herrmann was fascinated with
Mahler when they were in their
teens, and also how absorbed they
both were in the operas of Richard
Strauss, which they would play
piano four hands, or sometimes
with Moross at piano and Herrmann playing the vocal parts on
violin.58
“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. I
like to write music which takes its
inspiration from poetry, art, and
Nature. I do not care for purely
decorative music. Although I am
in sympathy with modern idioms,
I abhor music which attempts
nothing more than the illustration
of a stylistic fad; and in using
modern techniques, I have tried at
all times to subjugate them to a
larger idea or grander human feeling.”59 That seems to be as far as
Herrmann would go in characterizing himself as a composer and
his musical idiom, because there is
no record of him ever mentioning
even one composer who had influ-
when conducting, to the point where Raksin
thought that it made his music sound like
“Gypsy music.” As a result they would write on
their scores, “Please, no chicken fat on the
bows!” or “Keep the Ukraine out!” (Hugo
Friedhofer, conversation with the author, February 19, 1977). “I don’t object to schmaltz,”
Friedhofer once remarked, “except when it gets
to be sweaty, over-wrought and hysterical. In a
word, -hyper-Slavic. (The Newman syndrome.)”
Hugo Friedhofer, letter to the author, 16 November 1976. Roemheld recalled that there was a
time in Hollywood when the Russian Jewish
violin playing style was so common that
Kaufman, who was of middle European Jewish
background and often played in the style of Fritz
Kreisler, was much sought after as a soloist, just
to get away from the all-too-familiar sound
(Roemheld, conversation, n.d.). Whether called
Gypsy, Ukrainian, Slavic, the “Hollywood style,”
or just schmaltz, the various ethnic allusions
(euphemisms?) tend to point to an Eastern
European Jewish melos, exemplified by Klezmer.
55
Smith, 2.
56
Ibid., 23.
57
Jerome Moross, interview by Craig Reardon,
tape recording, New York, NY, 16 April 1979.
58
Ibid.
59
Robert Bagar and Louis Biancolli, The Concert
Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to Symphonic
Music (New York: Whittlesey House, 1947), 335.
EDITORIAL
enced him. The very absence of
remarks by Herrmann on his
influences is telling. Moross, who
probably knew Herrmann and his
work as well as any of his contemporaries did, observed that while
his film scores possessed an “exotic quality,” there was a basic
failing in his music. “That is one
strange thing,” said Moross in
judging his lifelong friend’s work,
“I don’t think Benny ever found a
style. There is nothing that you
hear which you can say, ‘This is
Bernard Herrmann.’ If you know
the piece, that’s something else,
but I mean stylistically he never
found a style.” 60 Hollywood
orchestrator, David Tamkin, was
less charitable, saying that Herrmann “never wrote an original
note in his life.” 61 (Presumably
Moross’s and Tamkin’s remarks
were not made out of professional
jealousy.)
On the face of it, these criticisms seem to run contrary to the
widespread impression that Herrmann’s music is in some way
stylistically more distinctive—and
thus presumably original—than
that of other composers working
in Hollywood at the same time he
did. For example, film music critic
Page Cook wrote in 1967 that
“[Herrmann] never resorts to such
spurious modernisms as tone-row
fireworks, nor to such cinematic
banalities as mickey-mousing.
There is a Herrmann style, and
Herrmann music can be identified
as such on first hearing.”62 Of
60
Moross, ibid.
David Tamkin, interview by William H.
Rosar, Los Angeles, CA, May 30, 1975.
62
Page Cook, “Bernard Herrmann,” Films in
Review, August-September, 1967, 412.
63
Hugo Friedhofer, letter to the author,
November 16, 1976.
64
Hugo Friedhofer, letter to the author,
August 25, 1975.
61
course, one could say the same
about virtually any composer once
they know their work as well as
Cook knew Herrmann’s. Hugo
Friedhofer, whom Lawrence
Morton also regarded as “being of
the Neo-romantic persuasion,”63
felt the distinctiveness of Herrmann’s music could be accounted
for in terms of his particular
musical background: “Much as I
love and admire Bernard Herrmann, he’s far from being an Ivory
Tower tenant. The reason he
sounds remote from the Hollywood scene is because he put
down his roots otherwhere. His
more discernible antecedents are
Holst, Vaughan-Williams, Moeran,
Tippett, plus early Copland stridencies and Stravinskiian ostinati.
His sense of the orchestra is nothing less than brilliant. On occasion
he veers toward the operatic, as in
North by Northwest; the almost
Tristanesque eroticism of the railway compartment scene, and the
quasi-Verdian melos in certain
sections of The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit.”64 That all these influences were “discernible” can only
mean that to Friedhofer’s ears, at
least, Herrmann’s film music was
perceptibly derivative.
Robert Kosovsky has suggested that this derivativeness was
by intention on Herrmann’s part,
and that he was following in the
footsteps of Charles Ives, with an
aesthetic predicated on the use
and value of musical quotation.65
One reason why Moross ultimately
became somewhat disenchanted
with Ives’ work was because he
realized that Ives scarcely ever
produced any thematic material of
his own. Whether this is because
Ives lacked a talent for writing
melodies is open to debate. But
knowing Herrmann much more
intimately than he did Ives,
Moross said that “Benny never
had a capacity for writing melodies. So he always stayed away.
[But] he would admire a good
song when it came along.”66 This
is not to say that Herrmann’s music lacks lyricism. As Friedhofer
observed: “Bernard’s got a lyrical
streak in him that is sometimes so
deeply concealed that you have
the feeling he’s a little embarrassed by it. The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit . . . had this wonderfully romantic theme for the Italian
girl, and I thought it was delightful. It revealed an entirely different
aspect of Bernie.”67
The question becomes then
what is the difference between an
imitative composer who lacks
originality and one who quotes
other music? Unlike Ives, Herrmann borrowed more than he
actually quoted. In Ives the sources
are usually and intentionally recognizable, whereas in Herrmann,
they are typically transformed,
though still nonetheless apparent
to well-tutored ears such as
Friedhofer’s. Though having said
what he did about Herrmann’s
musical roots, Friedhofer also expressed the opinion that
Herrmann nonetheless had “a
very, very unique and individual
profile.”68 He also noted:
65
Robert Kosovsky, “Bernard Herrmann’s
Radio Music for the ‘Columbia Workshop’”
(Ph.D. diss., City University of New York,
2000), 173 et passim.
66
Reardon, ibid.
67
Hugo Friedhofer, interview by William H.
Rosar, tape recording, Hollywood, CA,
July 8, 1975.
68
Ibid.
131
[I]t’s well to remember the years
[Herrmann] put in at CBS, when
he was conducting symphonic
broadcasts of all sort of worthwhile and sadly neglected
portions of the repertory far
removed from the confines of
the 50 or 60 embalmed master-
132
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
pieces which, at the time, were
(and still are) the average
conductor’s stock-in-trade. With
so much exposure, I’m fairly
certain that he absorbed a great
deal, (either consciously or subconsciously) but I’m certain as
well that whatever rubbed off
on him was well-digested and
bears his own personal (and to
me, unmistakable) thumbprint.”69
This is rather like what Leonard Bernstein said of himself:
“‘The better a conductor you become, the harder it is to be a
composer.’” In her biography of
Bernstein, Joan Peyser commented, “No doubt ‘known’ music
crowding into a conductor’s head
may impede the emergence of
fresh musical ideas. But Bernstein
is particularly hard on himself
here. Generally he needs to use
found material to get off and running; then the piece becomes
idiosyncratically his own.”70 Might
this also apply to Herrmann? One
record critic in 1971 seemed to be
of the same opinion as Friedhofer:
“There may be bows in the direction of some styles or composers,
but Herrmann assimilated his
influences well.”71 This suggests
that Herrmann personalized his
influences, though not so much so
that they were no longer recognizable, at least to the discerning
69
Hugo Friedhofer, letter to the author, September 11, 1975.
70
Peyser, 268.
71
Howard Klein, “The Man Who Composed
‘Citizen Kane,’” The New York Times, June 27,
1971.
72
Smith, 16. Perhaps in response to the sniping of
critics, composers themselves adopted this
critical stance, a case in point being Leonard
Bernstein, as Joan Peyser recounted in her
biography of him: Aaron Copland faulted a
passage in one of Bernstein’s student compositions for sounding like “pure Scriabin.” “All that
has got to go,” Copland told the young composer, “You’ve got to get that out of your head
and start fresh” (53). In turn Bernstein himself
would reciprocate and do the same to his peers,
while at the same time borrowing liberally from
listener, though not to the average
moviegoer who would scarcely
notice his music, let alone whom it
sounded like.
It is also useful to juxtapose
Friedhofer’s perceptions of
Herrmann’s music with those of
Moross and Tamkin. Whereas
Friedhofer was essentially a Hollywood film composer by choice,
Moross and Tamkin devoted themselves principally to composing art
music. Moross, who continued to
reside in New York after Herrmann moved to Hollywood in
1951, worked mainly in Hollywood as an orchestrator and
scored relatively few films. Tamkin
worked almost exclusively as an
orchestrator while writing opera.
Perhaps this is another instance of
the double standard in the music
world, art music being judged by
one set of standards, and film music by another, more specifically,
that originality was not something
expected of film music, as Sabaneev had written in the early days
of sound films. Friedhofer, who
had heard the radio broadcast of
the premiere of Herrmann’s Moby
Dick cantata in 1939 (performed by
the New York Philharmonic under
the baton of John Barbirolli) before
Herrmann did Citizen Kane nonetheless seemed to judge
Herrmann’s whole musical output—not just his film music—by
standards of originality that would
not be critically accepted at the
time in the world of art music,
whereas Moross and Tamkin were
judging it by just those standards,
where stylistic originality had
come to be valued almost above all
else: If a music critic observed that
a new work in the concert hall
sounded like another composer it
was invariably noted in a derogatory way. Imitation was not
considered the sincerest form of
flattery and was often levied as an
accusation of artistic fraud. Herrmann himself was obviously very
aware of this when, as a teenager
he dismissively criticized a student
composition of Moross’s for being
“Dishwater Tchaikovsky.”72
Being stylistically eclectic,
Herrmann’s music would be completely at home in the stylistic
melting pot that was Hollywood
film music in Herrmann’s day. In
the 1940s Lawrence Morton wrote
of the “spirit of electicism [sic]” in
Hollywood film music that “too
often permits a variety of . . . styles
to be gathered together in a veritable Babel.”73 Once when I played
some recordings of Korngold’s
film music for Roemheld without
telling him who composed it, or
Copland, Marc Blizstein, and others. For example, when William Schuman asked Bernstein
for an opinion of his second symphony, all
Bernstein said after seeing the score was, “You
like Sibelius.” (41) Samuel Barber threw out an
orchestral piece he was writing after Bernstein
accused him of using a four-note motif from
Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloë (373). Morton Gould
had a similar experience ten years earlier: “As I
played, Lenny was calling out all the different
influences. By that time I had had my work
conducted by Stokowski, Reiner, and Mitropoulos. As he was shouting out the influences,
he had the nerve to add his own name to the list.
The fact is that the work I was playing had been
composed before the one of his that he named”
(374) Joan Peyser, Leonard Bernstein: A Biography.
Revised and updated. (New York: Billboard
Books, 1998). Peyser told me that Copland was
circumspect about chiding Bernstein for borrowing from him during the period when Bernstein
was championing his works as a conductor.
However once Bernstein had left the New York
Philharmonic Copland became more vocal in this
regard. After the premiere of Bernstein’s Mass in
1971 Copland lambasted Bernstein for his voluminous borrowings from him in this stylistically
eclectic work. Peyser noted that for Bernstein to
accuse anybody of borrowing was a clear case of
psychological projection. Joan Peyser, telephone
conversation with the author, July 18, 2003.
73
Lawrence Morton, “The Music of ‘Objective:
Burma,’” Hollywood Quarterly 1 (1946): 394.
EDITORIAL
even that it was film music, he
remarked with mild disdain that
the music “sounds like everybody.” When I told him who wrote
it he was disappointed, given his
long admiration for Korngold. 74
T
he perception of a multiplicity of musical
personalities in a work
sometimes results in the overall
impression that the music is without a personality of its own, and
that by sounding like everybody it
sounds like nobody. Perhaps
worse is the sense that a work is
“faceless,” a term sometimes applied to film music as a whole. As
late as 1958, one record critic remarked, “[E]ven the best screen
scores—laden with what the industry calls ‘the old
gutseroo’—suffer from the terrible
facelessness that is the bane of
most movie music.”75 Friedhofer,
who freely admitted to his own
stylistic eclecticism, summed up
things this way: “[T]he fact is, that
. . . nobody with a really strong
personal idiom, so strong that it’s
unflinching and unchangeable, can
sit down and make a living in this
business. He’s maybe called in to
do certain pictures, like Copland,
let’s say. You can’t imagine
Copland doing a Korngold-type
score, or you can’t imagine Korngold doing a Copland-type score.
But on the other hand, you can
imagine me doing either a
Korngold-type or a Copland-type
score—and that’s the difference.”76
In spite of that, Friedhofer averred
that “I’ve seldom (if ever) written
anything in deliberate imitation of
anyone in particular, but I have
tried to keep in touch with my
time, and admit to being swellheaded enough to believe that
(like Herrmann) I’ve got my own
thumbprint.”77
Steven Smith writes that “Be-
fore . . . Citizen Kane in 1940, film
music in Hollywood was mostly
homogenous in style and orchestration. Perhaps Herrmann’s
greatest achievement in film was
his remarkable use of orchestration
to reinforce theme and character
psychology: each Herrmann instrumentation was uniquely
tailored to the subject matter of the
film it accompanied. Unlike many
of his contemporaries, Herrmann
eschewed the use of long melodic
ideas in his dramatic scoring, preferring the more succinct short
phrase, which he felt could be
transformed more effectively
throughout a score. Although he
did make use of the classic device
of the leitmotiv, this use was often
startlingly original: a thematic idea
was used not merely for static
identification of character, but for
psychological enrichment of it.
Herrmann’s cues were often
shorter, more terse than other
composer’s; he knew the value of
understatement.”78
Regrettably Smith’s appraisal
of Herrmann’s contribution to the
art of film music does justice to
Herrmann at the expense of
others, and mainly reiterates
generalities prevalent in the film
music literature (especially on
Herrmann) that are not based on a
close and thorough examination of
Hollywood film music practice of
the 1930s and ‘40s (whether or not
compared with Herrmann’s), but
only of well-known scores (or
scores for well-known films) and
their composers (the Hollywood
Golden Age “canon,” as some
might say today). Writers in
general, and not just Smith, have
tended to exaggerate Herrmann’s
contribution, if unwittingly,
making Herrmann appear an
iconoclast, instead of elucidating
the specific ways in which his
work was unique and differed
133
from theirs but at the same time
was also similar to it. When Herrmann himself referred to his own
personal favorite The Ghost and
Mrs. Muir as being his ‘Steiner
score’ and finest work, doesn’t that
tell us something?79
Returning once again to views
expressed by Herbert Stothart as a
point of comparison, it is interesting to find Stothart already
espousing in the 1930s techniques
and approaches to scoring that
Smith credits as Herrmann innovations. Writing about what he
called his “musical narrative” for
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935),
Stothart noted: “I approached the
task with the intention of having
the score actually tell the story in
psychological impressions. The
listener can, without seeing the
picture, mentally envision the
brutalities at sea, the calm, the
storms, the idyllic tropics, mutiny,
clash of human wills, and retribution. With the exception of some
special cases, none of the music
was purely melodic, but rather
impressionistic, depending on
instrumentation and technique to
create imagery, rather than on
tunes to suggest definite ideas. We
do not stress melodic themes as
much as we seek musical effects
that generate certain impressions.
Stravinsky does it on the concert
stage, and he has the ideal picture
technique.”80 A few years later
Stothart wrote in The New York
Times emphasizing again that he
found that “moods are generated
74
Heinz Roemheld, personal communication, n.d.
Music, Time, ibid., 49.
Hugo Friedhofer, interview by William H.
Rosar, tape recording, Hollywood, CA, July 17,
1975.
77
Hugo Friedhofer, letter to the author, September 11, 1975.
78
Smith, ibid., 2; cf. 77.
79
Ibid., 131-2.
80
Stothart, “Film Music,” 144.
75
76
134
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
more effectively by color and
effects in instrumentation than by
melodic strains, in most cases.” 81
Franz Waxman, who had been
Stothart’s colleague at M-G-M,
stated essentially the same view:
“The first and foremost principle
of good scoring—for me—is
orchestration color. Melody is secondary. When I look at a scene or
sequence a horn may come to
mind, or a harp, or massed violins.” 82 So obviously Herrmann
was not alone in departing from
the ‘mostly homogenous style and
orchestration’ of Hollywood film
music circa 1940 as Smith characterized it—if indeed there was
such a homogeneous style.
It is also difficult to reconcile
Smith’s stylistic appraisal of
Herrmann’s film work with, for
example, that of his Hollywood
colleague, Herschel Burke Gilbert,
who could never understand what
all the fuss over Herrmann was
about: “To me it always sounded
like very old film music,” Gilbert
said and that, if anything, Herrmann’s film music was stylistically
old-fashioned for its time.83 In this
regard, I must admit that what
initially drew me to Herrmann’s
film music was that it had a
melodramatic quality and certain
stylistic features that reminded me
of the scores to Universal’s horror
films of the 1930s that had fascinated me, particularly The Mummy
(1932).84 To me, much of the Sturm
und Drang in Herrmann’s work
has never sounded particularly
modern, even by film music standards but, if anything, often tends
to remind me of the melodramatic
music of the silent days and early
sound films.
81
ing third-related minor chords in the “March
Funebre” from Roemheld’s score for White Hell of
Pitz Palu (1930). Not only was this chord progression a favorite device of Herrmann’s (cf. “The
Sail” and “The Flag” heard when the pirate ship
is seen in Mysterious Island), but Roemheld’s
whole cue is built on an ostinato inspired by the
slow movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in
E-flat. This cue is later reprised as part of the
musical montage accompanying the flashback
sequence, where Ardeth Bey (Boris Karloff)
shows Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann) scenes
from their former life in ancient Egypt: A cue
simply entitled “Lento” by Roemheld (film
source unknown), again recalls favorite sonorities of Herrmann’s, comprised as it is of
augmented triads and half-diminished seventh
chords (“Tristan” chords) largely on the chromatic scale, serves to introduce a long cue, a
piece of silent movie music composed by the
Belgian composer, Michel Brusselmans entitled
Herbert Stothart, “Film Music through the
Years,” The New York Times, December 7, 1941.
82
Page Cook, “Franz Waxman, Films in Review,
August-September, 1968, 421.
83
Herschel Burke Gilbert, personal communication, n.d.
84
The Mummy contained both original music (by
James Dietrich) and track music, much of it
redolent of Herrmann’s style, even the very first
anonymous bars that introduce scene 2 from
Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake suite: Ostensibly borrowed from the beginning of Gounod’s Funeral
March of a Marionette, with nasal muted trumpets
playing descending tritones and ensuing rumblings in low strings, muted brass, and timpani,
this half-minute fragment anticipates any number of such moments in Herrmann scores written
even decades later. Showing the Cairo Museum
where the mummy and funerary equipment of
the Princess Anck-es-en-Amon are on display, we
hear a solemn chromatic progression of ascend-
B
y way of contrast, one
might assume from a
summary observation
made by Graham Bruce that Herrmann’s film music was
progressive stylistically: “One of
the most significant features of
Bernard Herrmann’s film music is
its avoidance of extended melody,
a characteristic which . . . radically
challenged the richly melodic style
that prevailed in Hollywood when
Herrmann arrived there in 1940
[sic]. Instead of the extended
melody, Herrmann favored a small
cluster of notes as a structural unit,
a musical phrase lasting perhaps
only two measures or even two or
three notes.”85 Unfortunately
Bruce’s characterization only
serves to perpetuate a myth that
Hollywood film music in the 1930s
and ‘40s was primarily melodic
and that Herrmann’s was not. One
need only listen to portions of his
early scores for Citizen Kane, The
Magnificent Ambersons, The Devil
and Daniel Webster, Jane Eyre, and
especially The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
and compare them with any number of scores written by others at
the time to realize that Herrmann’s
are no less (or no more) melodic
than those of many of his contemporaries working in Hollywood.
The myth no doubt has its
basis in the fact that the most
popular film music from that
period, that which is most remembered and loved by film music
devotees, is melodic if not actually
songful—the scores of Steiner,
Newman, Korngold, Young,
Tiomkin, Rozsa, and to a lesser
extent, Waxman. The music of
probably a hundred or more other
film composers from the same
period that is less melodic (or that
has less memorable melodic
material or that was for less
memorable films) has been forgotten or largely ignored—for
example: the work of composers
such as Roy Webb, who was
Steiner’s cohort at RKO in the ‘30s,
or the pioneer film composer from
the silent era, William Axt, who
“Scene tragique.” A kind of slow solemn dance
with Latin American overtones, the melodic line
of this piece, set in the bass, is ostinato-like,
mostly moving up and down the chromatic scale,
the harmony distinctively featuring the same
third-related progression of minor chords
Roemheld used in “March Funebre,” the rhythm,
the harmony, and even the orchestration readily
bring to mind similar passages in Herrmann’s
work. Dietrich’s cues “Im Ho Tep,” “The Pool”
and “Whemple,” are essentially melodic ostinati
based on the whole tone scale and/or augmented triads—favorite sonorities of
Herrmann’s. Rosar, “Music for the Monsters—
Universal Pictures’ Horror Film Scores of the
Thirties,” 400-01.
85
Graham Bruce, Bernard Herrmann: Film Music
and Narrative (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1985), 35. According to Smith, Herrmann arrived
in Hollywood in October 1939 (Smith, 74).
EDITORIAL
was at M-G-M when Stothart arrived, and Daniele Amfitheatrof
who occasionally ghost wrote for
Stothart there, or Bernhard Kaun,
working at Warner Bros. anonymously when Korngold and
Steiner came to the studio, or
Adolph Deutsch and David
Buttolph who arrived there after
they did, or Gerard Carbonara and
John Leipold at Paramount, Marlin
Skiles and George Duning at
Columbia, Frank Skinner and
Hans Salter at Universal, Cyril
Mockridge and Leigh Harline at
Fox—to mention only several
among the dozens of staff composers at the major studios, and
even the minor ones, whose work
was not taken into consideration
by Bruce or Smith and, for that
matter, whose names are probably
only names to most film music
devotees. Without exception, these
were composers whose music was
less melodically-oriented than
their more famous Hollywood
colleagues who scored most “A”
pictures. In some ways
Herrmann’s music is more typical
of the “mood” music approach of
many “B” pictures, where no effort
was expected on the part of the
composer to write a melody (let
alone a memorable hit tune), but
only dramatically effective music
to help the picture.
Though Herrmann explicitly
eschewed “purely decorative
music,” he admitted to sometimes
writing what he called “wallpa-
per” music, though it is not clear
how he valued it, or even if he
valued it as music.86 In one interview he talked about it only terms
of other film composers: “Film
music can be decorative. It’s a kind
of wallpaper they put on.”87
Stravinsky saw film music as having no other purpose or value than
its “wallpaper function”: “[F]ilm
could not get along without [music], just as I myself could not get
along without having the empty
spaces of my living room walls
covered with wall paper. But you
would not ask me, would you, to
regard my wall paper as I would
regard painting, or apply aesthetic
standards to it?”88 Lyn Murray,
who was a great admirer of
Herrmann’s work and spoke of
having been influenced by him,
once remarked that “Benny could
make a shower curtain look like a
tapestry.”89 By this Murray meant
that the musical material alone
might have been banal without its
orchestral dressing, and that
Herrmann elevated musical decoration to the status of an art form.
86
89
Fred Steiner, personal communication, 1987.
Steiner himself mentioned Hermann’s notion of
“wallpaper music” in connection with a cue he
(Steiner) scored for an episode of Star Trek—The
Next Generation that begins with a scene of a star
field in outer space.
87
Bernard Herrmann, “Bernard Herrmann: A
John Player Lecture,” Pro Musica Sana 3, no. 1
(Spring 1974), 12.
88
Ingolf Dahl, “Igor Stravinsky on Film Music as
Told to Ingolf Dahl,” Musical Digest 28, no.1
(1946), 4.
I
n this regard, countless
listeners have been dazzled by
Herrmann’s gift as an orchestrator, though among his colleagues it was sometimes with the
attitude that Ravel’s similar gift
was often praised in the past, viz.
that while Ravel was a great orchestrator he wasn’t much of a
composer.90 Herrmann’s colleague,
Lyn Murray, conversation with the author, n.d.
For example, Murray once noted that his main
title music for Fox’s On the Threshold of Space
(1956) was intentionally Herrmannesque.
90
One of my mentors, writer Roy William
Lundholm, who admired Herrmann’s music and
whose interest in film music began with Steiner’s
score for King Kong, once remarked in listening
to Herrmann’s score for Journey to the Center of
the Earth that it was just “beautiful orchestral
colors” but otherwise lacked musical substance.
Lundholm also found Herrmann’s work deriva-
135
David Raksin, recalled: “He had
this wonderful sense of orchestral
color which he got from all those
years of study and of conducting
the CBS Symphony. [H]e would
. . . use these marvelous sonorities
which were not exactly original
with him—that’s not important [italics added]—sometimes they were,
but it was the way in which he
used them in Citizen Kane . . . those
low things with the bass clarinets,
and the use of low trombones and
the tuba . . . . That dark color is
something very particular to
Benny, which has been copied a lot
by others.”91 Unfortunately
Raksin’s equivocation makes it
unclear whether or not the “dark
color” was something of Herrmann’s devising, but only that it
was closely associated with his
him.
In fact, the “dark color” of low
wind choirs and mixtures featuring the distinctive character of the
bass clarinet had already been
exploited extensively by Hollywood composers in the 1930s
before Herrmann came to Hollywood. It was used to great effect
by Max Steiner, Bernhard Kaun,
and Herbert Stothart, to name only
a few, who were influenced in this
regard by Wagner and post-Wagnerian orchestration, as was
Herrmann.92 In Herrmann’s case,
early radio may have been an influence as well, with the advent of
the so-called “microphone orchestra” that prominently featured
tive, pointing out to me the influence of “Neptune” from Holst’s Planets and also the influence
of Prokofiev in a more general way.
91
David Raksin in Music for the Movies: Bernard
Herrmann, VHS, directed by Josh Waletzky. (1992;
Sydney: ABC, 1994).
92
Cf. as representative examples of the use of low
winds, Steiner’s score for King Kong (1933) and
She (1935), Kaun’s for The Walking Dead (1936)
and The Black Legion (1936), and Stothart’s for
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and A Tale of Two
Cities (1935).
136
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
A
winds because early microphones
reproduced their tone much better
than string tone, something that
was typically altered beyond
recognition. This led to a whole
aesthetic of microphone instrumentation that in its most extreme form
used no strings. By an interesting
coincidence the wind instruments
that reproduced the best were
double reeds, and especially clarinets and trombones.93 With the
steady improvement of microphone and recording technology
there was eventually no longer a
practical need for the special
instrumentation, but the innovations of color and orchestration
that resulted from it continued to
be used as special orchestral effects
by composers. Commenting on
Herrmann’s distinctive use of
clarinets, veteran TV music editor
Robert A. Hoffman said it was a
characteristic “radio sound” and
one closely associated with the Hal
Kemp Orchestra in the 1930s.
Kemp had clarinets play through
megaphones, producing a very
mellow but intense tone that was
widely imitated in popular music
of that era.94
Discussing among other scores
Herrmann’s for Anna and the King
of Siam (1946), musicologist Robert
U. Nelson reiterated in 1947 the
general observation that “The difference in structure between a film
score and a symphony is so apparent as to cause some people to
conclude that film music has no
form. This is not true, yet the pre-
sentation of ideas in a film score is
undeniably loose and fragmentary.”95 Though Herrmann himself
noted that his score for Anna made
“no attempt to be a commentary or
an emotional counterpart of the
drama,” but intended it “rather as
musical scenery,” Nelson’s observations could just as readily apply
to much of Herrmann’s other film
music as well, then and later: “The
decorative intent of the music
emerges clearly in its repetitive,
nondevelopmental construction.
Themes and motifs are reiterated
with little change; ostinato patterns
are common. In music of this type,
color and texture must take the
place of development. Herrmann’s
novel color usage . . . [and] his
craftsmanship in creating textures
is . . . ingenious.”96
Along these same lines,
Friedhofer once remarked casually
but critically of Herrmann’s film
music, “The fact is that Benny
relies heavily on ostinati and
vamping” (as so did much music
for “B” films).97 Page Cook also
referred to Herrmann’s use of
“‘wallpaper’ music, i.e., ground
bass and con moto patterns which
are repeated, not necessarily by the
same instruments,”98 and Bruce to
his use of the moto perpetuo.99 Film
and TV composer John Morgan
observed that these characteristics
of Herrmann’s music recall accompaniments to vocal parts in
opera.100
ll these observations refer
to the structure of
Herrmann’s music apart
from orchestration. Specifically,
they likely point to a peculiarity of
his film and TV compositional
technique that has only partially
been elucidated in analyses of his
music. The peculiarity in question
is visually apparent on virtually
every page of score starting with
or at about the time of On Dangerous Ground (1951), following a
two-year hiatus in composing for
films. Veteran radio and TV composer, Fred Steiner, wrote of what
he called Herrmann’s “module
technique” in his analysis of
Psycho:
93
of the “low end” of the orchestra was undoubtedly related to the problem of early microphones
and sound recording not picking up this register,
especially strings. So the exploitation of low
wind sonorities in early sound films may have
stemmed in part from their reproducibility.
94
Robert A. (“RAH”) Hoffman, Telephone conversations with the author, September 18, 1996
and August 23, 2003.
95
Robert U. Nelson, “The Craft of the Film
Score,” The Pacific Spectator 1 (1947): 435.
96
Ibid., 444-5.
97
Hugo Friedhofer, interview with the author,
n.d.
98
Cook, “Bernard Herrmann,” ibid., 411.
99
Bruce, 60 et passim.
100
John Morgan, personal communication, n.d.
101
Fred Steiner, “Herrmann’s ‘Black-and-White’
Music for Hitchcock’s Psycho,” (Part 1) Film
Music Notebook, Fall 1974, 34.
See the chapter “Orchestration problems of the
Sound-film” in London, 163-94. In a letter Steiner
wrote to administrators at RKO, he stated that
his score for The Fountain (1934) was like most of
his music “scored with an average of sixteen or
seventeen men . . . I always use two basses and
two cellos, and as many lows as possible with
even the smallest combination.” Steiner’s letter
was quoted in a letter from Clifford McCarty to
me 15 December 1973. Part of the reinforcement
One of the hallmarks of his
compositional style is a predilection for the use of short motives
which are often of an individual
rhythmic character. These motives are used as cells for the
construction of blocks, or musical modules, generally in two,
four, or six measure lengths.
These modules of musical material usually contrast from each
other in design and contour,
often in dynamics, and are continually juxtaposed in varying
tonalities and orchestral colors.
In my opinion the module technique described above is a
definite characteristic of his
musical style.101
Herrmann’s “module technique” as Steiner called it, almost
invariably resulted in eight-bar
phrases. A survey of Herrmann’s
scores from 1947 onward reveals
that at some point toward 1950 he
EDITORIAL
consciously adopted a structural
formula that superficially resembles the common eight-bar phrase
and approximates the old rule of
thumb that phrases should be
multiples of four bars. However in
Herrmann’s case the eight bars are
actually constructed from two-bar
increments: One bar is typically
but not always followed by a contrasting bar, then the two bars are
either repeated, or repeated with
slight variation, resulting in a fourbar unit which is repeated
(sometimes with slight variation),
yielding eight bars. The formula
could be expressed as (2+2)+ (2+2).
These eight-bar phrases were invariably constructed on a rhythmic
ostinato that served to unify the
structure, as exemplified in the cue
“Fire Engine” from his score for
Fahrenheit 451 (1966).102
Even the way Herrmann
notated “Fire Engine” is evidence
of the formula, as the upper parts
of the third, fourth, seventh, and
eighth bars are notated with repeat
signs, while the pitches (but not
the rhythm) of the pizzicato accompaniment in the bass are
varied in a simple manner (Example 1). This formula was
certainly not a complete break
with Herrmann’s previous practice
but rather seemed to be a kind of
crystallization of it, an effort on his
part to formalize his proclivity for
short phrases and ostinati into a
rule-governed compositional technique. Robert A. Hoffman noted
that Debussy frequently used fourbar phrases constructed from
repeating two-bar phrases (thinking as a music editor, Hoffman
facetiously suggested that one
could cut Debussy pieces in half
by omitting the repeated bars).
Closer inspection reveals, though,
that Debussy’s formula, like Herrmann’s, is actually eight bars, and
often very similar to the construc-
137
tion (2+2)+(2+2), noted above.103 It
seems quite possible then that
Debussy’s music was Herrmann’s
model for this practice (for that
matter, he is said to have regarded
Debussy as the greatest composer
of the 20th century).104
The myriad clever ways
Herrmann used the formula to
simultaneously sustain a dramatic
effect or mood yet vary the music
just enough to avoid monotony,
attests both to his skill and ingenuity as a composer. In the hands of a
lesser talent (or craftsman), such a
formula would quickly become
intolerably tedious. His departures
from the formula tend only to be
exceptions that prove the rule,
because the basic pattern is obviously something Herrmann
consciously employed as a kind of
specialized musical form. This
formula readily lent itself to
symmetry, since any part of a cue
was usually divisible by two. For
Example 1. “Fire Engine” from Fahrenheit 451 (1966).
102
The excerpt from “Fire Engine” was prepared
from Herrmann’s manuscript score for Fahrenheit
451 in the Bernard Herrmann Papers at the
University of California, Santa Barbara.
103
Robert A. Hoffman, telephone conversation
with the author, August 23, 2003. Hoffman
singled out Debussy’s three orchestral triptychs
as exemplifying his four-bar constructions built
on two-bar repetitions: La Mer, Trois Nocturnes,
and Images. It is also evident in some of his
earlier piano music (e.g., “Reverie”). Coincidentally Smith notes three instances where
Herrmann was likely influenced by La Mer (see
Smith, 58, 130, and 179).
104
Smith, 19.
138
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
that matter, in principle, once
Herrmann determined the duration of a cue (or part of one) and
its tempo, he could presumably
calculate how many bars it would
be, and how much time would be
required to compose each cue to
meet his composing deadline.
Veteran music editor Len Engel
observed, “From an editor’s standpoint, Benny was our idol because
of the way he composed. He had a
vertical form of four-bar phrases
that was so easy to cut.”105 Not
only would this prove expedient if
a scene had to be shortened (or
even lengthened), but also useful
in “tracking” TV shows, affording
greater flexibility and ease because
of the modular construction of the
music: Bars could either be cut or
repeated and the music would still
maintain a sense of structural integrity because of its “vertical
form,” whereas with music conceived in a more linear way, cuts
or extensions would be potentially
more disruptive to the sense of
line. Herrmann was a prolific composer of music for TV, and much of
that music was also used as stock
music that would be edited by
music editors to fit new episodes
of TV shows that were often
“tracked” rather than having
newly composed music. That
Engel noticed this characteristic
105
Smith, 179.
There is no trace of the formula in
Herrmann’s opera Wuthering Heights which,
co-incidentally, he completed in June 1951, the
same month he began composing the music for
The Day the Earth Stood Still. See Smith, 371.
107
See “Structures, techniques, and procedures”
in the entry “Jazz” in Grove Music online, and
the “History of musical analysis 1750-1840,”
ibid, http:/www.grovemusic.com.
108
Joseph Schillinger, The Schillinger System of
Musical Composition (New York: Carl Fischer,
1946). See Vol. 2, Part 3, “Semantic (Connotative) Composition.”
109
Ibid., 1332.
106
out of all the composers’ music he
had worked with at Fox may serve
as one defining attribute of Herrmann’s post-1950 film and TV
music (there is no indication that
he used the formula in his art music).106
From a purely musical standpoint Herrmann’s “vertical form”
is interesting in that it both resembles the common practice of
using eight-bar phrases built on
ostinati in popular music and also
harks back to the ideas of 18th century music theorists who proposed
a principle of phrase extension, in
which eight bar phrases were constructed in two four-bar
increments (Riepel, Koch, et al).107
The main difference—and it is
significant one—is that
Herrmann’s eight-bar phrases
were not usually melodic, if lyrical.
Herrmann’s formula also recalls, at least in a rudimentary
way, the “mathematical” system of
composition developed by Joseph
Schillinger, in which the planning
of a composition begins by devising its rhythmic structure, and
from that the durations of musical
ideas to then be worked out arithmetically according to certain
numerical formulas. Though
Herrmann did not study with
Schillinger, he was virtually surrounded by Schillinger pupils at
CBS in New York, as so many of
his colleagues there had studied
with him—Lyn Murray, Nathan
Van Cleave, Leith Stevens, and
others. Schillinger himself wrote
about the problems of composing
music for film and radio especially
with respect to temporal organization and structure.108 Some of
Herrmann’s CBS colleagues from
CBS came to Hollywood and used
the Schillinger system in composing and arranging for films. In
writing about musical form, Schil-
linger made an interesting summary observation:
The manifold forms of thematic
sequence in European musical
civilization range from continuous repetition of brief thematic
structures, which remind one of
the repeat-patterns of visual
arts, like tiles or wallpaper
(Chopin wrote much ‘wallpaper’ music); through
continuously flowing broad
linear design, constantly varied
and syntactically dissociated by
cadences, like the Gregorian
Chant; to the temporal schemes
containing no repetitions and
embodying no syntactical cadencing before the end, devised
by contemporary Germans
(Schoenberg and Hindemith),
recognized as a type of
durchkomponierte Musik
(through-composed music) and
adopted by contemporaries of
other nationalities
(Shostakovich).109
Herrmann’s music, on the
whole, obviously tended towards
the “wallpaper” end of the formal
continuum. That Herrmann presumably deliberately modified his
composing technique for films and
TV circa 1950 may relate to something George Auric told him:
Georges Auric once explained to
me very acutely the disadvantage
of using pop music dramatically
in films. He said, “The trouble is
that all popular songs are based
on an eight-bar phrase, so once
they start the melody, they’ve
got to finish it. It has to last that
long.” Ideally, film music should
be based on phrases no longer
than a second or two, but a
popular song needs a certain
span and this is partly why so
many film scores today [circa
1970] are disappointing. You go
to a pop concert, not a film
score. It goes along with the
picture; it doesn’t go with it. It
often has no relationship to the
picture. Sometimes the people
who write it never see the film.
Most music today is no longer
EDITORIAL
used for any purpose except to
sell gramophone records. Now
you make pictures with the
commercial record in mind.110
The difference in Herrmann’s
music is that his eight-bar “modules” don’t have to last eight bars,
but can readily be cut, as Engel
noted. After a decade of film work,
during his two-year hiatus from
composing for films (1948-1950)
perhaps Herrmann consciously
sought a musical form for film
music (at least for his own writing)
that would have organic unity,
inasmuch as film music had
largely abandoned traditional
musical forms altogether.
Because of the precise timings
and duration of cues, it would
seem that this form had to be devised at the level of the single bar,
rather than in terms of a melody or
theme. At the same time, we can
see that the formula also embodies
Herrmann’s whole aesthetic philosophy of film and TV scoring,
and actually does hark back to
music of the silent period, when
musicians and composers had
already realized that there was a
problem of fitting traditional musical forms to film action. As Kurt
London observed in 1936, “[The]
connection between the dramatic
line and the flow of the music . . .
raised various questions in regard
to the formal construction of the
music.111 [E]ven the simplest of
musical forms, the song form,
could not always be recommended, because, in the tripartite
110
Bernard Herrmann, “An Interview with
Bernard Herrmann: The Colour of the Music,”
Sight and Sound 41(1), 1971-72, 39.
111
London, 71.
112
Ibid., 57.
113
Ibid., 57.
114
The excerpt from “Fight Theme” was
prepared from the conductor part in the
Music Division of the Library of Congress.
scheme A-B-A, the middle part
differs in character from the first
and last parts.112 [T]raditional musical forms . . . with the sole
exception of the ‘theme and variations’, did not lend themselves to
film music.”
The short pieces of library music composed specifically for use
in silent film accompaniment (the
so-called Kinothek music) represented an attempt to come to grips
with the problem of musical form,
as London noted: “The musical
form of these Kinotheks was very
elementary. Since it had to be recognized that their use was
confined to short episodes, the
music had to be quite simple in
form, so that a division into its
musical components could be
made without loss of its original
characteristics. The most useful
form was a continuous piece lasting about two or three minutes, of
a uniform character, where possible with a single theme running
through it . . . and of homogeneous
tonality and structure.”113
London’s analysis could well
apply to most of Herrmann’s film
and TV music from the time of On
Dangerous Ground forward and
clearly relates to Len Engel’s observation, providing as it does the
probable raison d’être for the fourbar “vertical form” he observed in
Herrmann’s work that was analyzed by Steiner and Bruce. Herrmann’s formula can be seen as an
art of microvariation, where often
two bars are simply a variation
rather than an extension or develop-
The orchestral annotations are mine from
listening to the film’s sound track, as the full
score does not survive.
115
Cf. “The Balloon” in Mysterious Island and
“The Hunt” in Marnie, only to cite two of
many examples.
116
Roemheld, interview by the author, ibid.
139
ment of two preceding bars, or four
bars are a variation of four bars
preceding them, for all intents and
purposes a refinement of the technique of Kinothek composition. So
perhaps Herschel Burke Gilbert’s
ears were not deceiving him in
thinking that Herrmann’s music
sounded like “very old film music,” though he meant this more in
terms of musical style than form.
Compare the “Fight Theme” from
Heinz Roemheld’s score for The
White Hell of Pitz Palu, a German
silent film bought by Carl
Laemmle in 1930 for which
Roemheld wrote a full-length
score that was recorded for the
American release of the film
(Example 2). 114
The “Fight Theme” sounds like
a typical Herrmann agitato, its
ostinati and repeated phrases
closely resembling his “module
technique.”115 In essence, Roemheld’s cue reflects a continuation
of Kinothek music, as does the
work of most of his contemporaries in the early days of sound
films. Even as late as 1943, when
Roemheld was music director on
The North Star (Goldwyn), he
coached Copland who composed
the score on the functional utility
and myriad time-saving advantages of the come sopra in writing
film music.116
Recalling Lyn Murray’s remark
about the shower curtain and the
tapestry, Roemheld’s rather conventional orchestral style, both
then and later, could not hold a
candle to Herrmann’s brilliant
sense of orchestral color and
orchestral effects. This difference
alone may in part be responsible
for the tendency to set Herrmann’s
work apart from others, whereas if
its colorful dressing be removed,
the structure and much of the musical substance of Herrmann’s film
and TV oeuvre is essentially
140
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
Example 2. “Fight Theme” from White Hell of Pitz Palu (1930).
Kinothek music in its design,
perhaps even more so than some
of his contemporaries, whose work
was primarily melodic, using the
“big theme” approach.117
T
his is not to suggest that
through orchestration
Herrmann was merely
trying to turn a sow’s ear into a
silk purse, seeking to transform
something musically inferior into
something artful, because Kinothek
music had no pretensions of being
comparable to art music. But given
the obviously self-imposed
structural limitation Herrmann
followed almost slavishly in his
“module technique,” he was intentionally striving to make
often-meager musical content
more interesting and dramatically
effective through his imaginative
and often highly novel use of instrumental color, textures, and
coloristic use of harmony. But
117
“Big theme” was a term used in Hollywood
for the main themes that dominated most
Hollywood scores from the 1930s through the
1960s. See Marlin Skiles, Music Scoring for TV
& Motion Pictures (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Tab
Books, 1976), 241, 247-248, and 250.
more than that, it is perhaps the
case that the “module technique”
is indicative of Herrmann’s own
peculiar musical sensibility, him
seeming to possess a certain
fascination with what Monfried
called “snatches of effective
obliggato” and what Rosenman
called “truncated little phrases,” or
put simply, musical minutiae.
In 1958, following the death of
English composer Ralph Vaughan
Williams, Herrmann wrote a letter
to The Musical Times in which he
related what the late composer’s
second symphony (A London Symphony) had meant to him ever
since he had heard the first two
movements as a youngster in New
York. Reproduced here is part of
what he had written in his first
draft of the letter, rather than the
final version that was published:
In reading the warm and affectionate tributes paid to the late
Vaughan Williams by his many
friends, I began to think about
the personal enrichment that his
great art brought to my musical
life, and it is concerned mostly
with six miraculous bars of
music that occurred in the original version . . . . The slow
movement at that time possessed six remarkable bars at the
letter K . . . . It has always been
my intense reaction, and of
course a subjective one, that
these bars were one of the most
original poetic moments in the
entire symphony. It is at this
moment as though, when the
hush and quietness have settled
over Bloomsbury of November
twilight, that a wet, damp
drizzle of rain slowly falls, and
it is the descending chromatic
ponticello of the violins that so
graphically depict it. I, for one,
shall always regret this deletion
for it will always remain in my
memory as one of the miraculous moments in music—one
that meant so much to me as a
young boy—and its absence in
the present version is like that of
a dear, departed friend. It will
always be an enigma to me why
these bars were removed, for in
their magic and beauty they had
caught something of London
which Whistler saw in his
Nocturnes.
In the published version of the
letter that had apparently been
edited by Herrmann himself, the
phrase “and it is concerned mostly
with” was omitted in the first sentence, obviously diminishing
somewhat the impression that out
of the whole symphony—if not
Vaughan Williams’ oeuvre—
Herrmann had an almost myopic
EDITORIAL
141
Example 3. A London Symphony (1920 edition), second movement.
fixation on that passage, as further
indicated by the phrase in the last
sentence “meant so much to me as
a young boy” that he also omitted.118 In his book The Works of
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Michael
Kennedy includes a reduction of
the “six miraculous bars” (Example 3) in connection with
Herrmann’s letter.
Herrmann obviously realized
that in a short span of time these
bars were able to evoke a whole
mood and atmosphere, as he so
eloquently described. Were they
Herrmann’s, doubtless through his
technique of microvariation and
“module technique” he could have
spun out at length the musical
material in those bars to construct
an entire musical cue (indeed, it
would be interesting to check his
scores to see if somewhere in them
he borrowed this passage). My
own listening has prompted me to
wonder if Herrmann did not mentally collect such passages as he
discovered them, like musical
“specimens”—much as one might
collect colorful butterflies—especially ones that would readily lend
themselves as source material for
elaborations as cues. From listening to his music it is hard to escape
the impression that he often collected the choicest bits, too. For
example, Fred Steiner pointed out
how Herrmann got a good deal of
mileage out of the “Tarnhelm”
motif in Wagner’s Ring (Example
4).119
Steiner once admitted having
done much the same thing himself,
for example, in music he wrote for
the film Sea Gypsies (1978), where a
passage from Debussy’s Pelleas et
Melisande served as the kernel for a
whole cue he wrote derived from
it.120 This modus operandi recalls
Johann Mattheson’s 1739 treatise,
Der vollkommene Capellmeister (The
Complete Music Director), especially
his chapter on “melodic invention.” Frederick Dorian
commented, “A term occurs in
Mattheson’s treatise which characterizes a whole trend in
composition. This term is, in its
original Latin, ars inveniendi. Yet
what it actually connotes is less an
Example 4. Tarnhelm motif from Der Ring des Niebelungens.
118
Manuscript dated 10/31/58 entitled “1st draft
paper on Vaughan Williams” in the Herrmann
collection at UC Santa Barbara. The published
version appeared in Letters to the Editor in The
Musical Times, January 1959, 24.
119
Steiner, personal communication, n.d. It is
perhaps no coincidence that Wagner’s
“Tarnhelm” motif serves as a musical example
illustrating the use of muted horns in Richard
Strauss’s revision of Berlioz’s Treatise upon
Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration (Traité
d’instru-mentation et d’orchestration modernes; see
the English translation by Theodore Front,
Treatise on Instrumentation (New York: E. F.
Kalmus, 1948), 279. Herrmann claimed that it
was his discovery of Berlioz’s Treatise that in-
spired him to be a composer (Smith, 14). It seems
likely that he must have known the Strauss
edition as well, it having been published already
in the early 1900s.
120
In Act II, scene 1, Melisande is playing with a
ring and drops it in a well. Steiner’s remarks
were made to John Morgan, who related them
to me.
142
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
inspirational art than a specific
craft of invention . . . . [Der
vollkommmene Capellmeister] demonstrates . . . how without the aid
of inspiration, the tools of workmanship must assist the composer.
He must resort to a reservoir of
‘specialties such as modulations,
small phrases, turns, skillful and
agreeable tunes, melodic leaps—
all of which are to be collected
through much experience and
through intense listening to good
music.’ Whatever pleases the composer by way of sentences and
modulations, he should write
down, in order to have them at his
disposal for future reference.”121
With Herrmann at times it is
though he fastens on a single musical gesture, whether a melodic
turn, a chord progression, or a
rhythmic pattern, and varies it to
create a cue. This is exemplified by
his main title for The Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit (1956) that
constitutes a veritable etude in
appoggiaturas, fairly obviously
collected from Wagner, Mahler,
Debussy, Ravel, and Holst.122
Thanks to his encyclopedic mind
he seemed to have a knack for
juxtaposing similar-sounding devices from different composers (a
typical such juxtaposition would
be combining musical elements
from Wagner with Holst). The
distraction, though, is that in borrowing the choicest bits they were
also usually the most distinctive
and thus recognizable musical
gestures from other composers’
work. It would be like borrowing
121
Frederick Dorian, The Musical Workshop
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), 190.
122
Lyn Murray would do the same thing: He
once pointed out to me that one cue in his
score for Signpost to Murder (1964) was sort of
a “study in trills.”
123
Irving Kolodin, The Continuity of Music: A
Scriabin’s “mystic chord” for
which he was so famous. Because
the bits were so distinctive even in
varying them they still often bear
the mark of the original source.
T
he thesis of The Continuity
of Music: A History of Influence, a book by
Herrmann’s friend Irving Kolodin,
is that far from being unusual,
such small-scale borrowing (or
influence) is how new musical
styles have evolved out of previous ones: “I am not referring to the
facile, superficial resemblances
that might be described as model
and imitation . . . . I refer to something deeper, more fundamental:
the ways in which turns of
thought or flashes of thought or
flashes of ideas thrown out by one
composer . . . became the impulse
from which in large measure, the
style of another . . . evolved.”123
For example, Robin Holloway
showed through comparative
analysis of musical minutiae how
Debussy was influenced by certain
works of Wagner. As a method of
procedure, Holloway used as his
point of departure a notion of art
historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s, who
proposed basing comparative investigations in art on “single
formal details, with comparison of
designs of hands, of clouds, of
branches, down to the design of
the grain of wood—an art history
of the smallest parts.”124 It was
Wölfflin’s contention that “in the
small, decorative arts, in the lines
of ornament, lettering etc.,” that
History of Influence (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1969), 3.
124
H. Wölfflin, The Sense of Form in Art: A
Comparative Psychological Study, trans. Alice
Muehsam and Norma A. Shatan (New York:
Chelsea Pub-lishing Co., 1958), 3-4.
125
Wölfflin quoted by Edgar Wind, Art and
Anarchy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 127,
n. 45.
“the feeling of form satisfies itself
in the purest way, and it is here
that the birthplace of a new style
must be sought.”125
In the case of Herrmann’s post1949 film music, the process of
stylistic evolution may have not
progressed as it might have otherwise—or even been retarded—due
to the self-imposed formal constraints of his “module technique”
which would tend to minimize
formal development therefore
inhibit stylistic growth. This may
explain the perception of Herrmann critics who contend that he
used the same musical devices
over and over again in his film and
TV music, at times ad nauseam.
F
rom all reports, as a young
composer Herrmann never
expressed an interest in
composing film music. Rather his
main ambition was from an early
age to be a conductor, though he
had composed orchestral works
from his early teens. Before composing for films, his art music met
with only modest success in New
York even though, as noted above,
one of his large-scale works, Moby
Dick, had been performed by the
New York Philharmonic in 1939.
Instead Herrmann had made a
name for himself in the world of
radio as a conductor and composer
at CBS.
Perhaps even before he had
been brought to Hollywood in
1939 by Orson Welles to score
Welles’ first film, Herrmann was
cognizant of the realities faced by
film composers. James G. Stewart,
the RKO sound editor who had
been assigned to work on Citizen
Kane, recalled that at the beginning
Herrmann rather belittled film
music, much in the way others
had, quoted above. Herrmann
would say to Stewart, “It isn’t
music—it’s just sound effects. You
EDITORIAL
get the orchestra together and you
put sound effects in. It’s not music,
it’s not music at all.”126 This was
the same man, however, who
would later say that “We have had
a few people that created cinema
music that was the same as the
music of the art world. I don’t, for
instance, feel that Copland’s music
for The Red Pony is any the less
than the music of his symphonies.”127
After Citizen Kane Herrmann
wrote in The New York Times, “I
had heard of the many handicaps
that exist for a composer in Hollywood. One was the great speed
with which scores often had to be
written—sometimes in as little as
two or three weeks. Another was
that the composer seldom had
time to do his own orchestration.
And again—that once the music
was written and conducted, the
composer had little say about the
sound levels or dynamics of the
score in the finished film. Not one
of these conditions prevailed during the production of Citizen
Kane.”128 Of course the reason for
this was in no small part due to
the close working relationship he
had enjoyed already with Welles at
CBS in New York, and because of
that, worked with Welles in a
collaborative way on Kane from its
inception.129
As a result of the almost ideal
working conditions he experienced working on Kane, from the
start Herrmann always sought to
work under the same conditions
afterwards in scoring films: To
choose the films he scored, to be
involved in a film before production, to do his own orchestrations,
and to control how his music was
used in a film—the very things
that eluded most of his contemporaries then working in Hollywood.
Because of these four conditions,
Herrmann scored relatively few
films, not infrequently declining
ones offered him, since his goal
was to score only one film a year.
It was mainly only in his association with Alfred Hitchcock
where Herrmann was brought into
a film project at its inception,
though. While Hitchcock’s Marnie
(1964) was in production, and
having worked with Hitchcock on
nine films already, Herrmann said
with a certain aplomb: “I’m brought
in at the very beginning of the idea
of the film, and by the time it has
gone through all its stages of being
written and rewritten and the final
process of photographing it, I’m so
much a part of the whole thing
that we’ve all begun to think one
way.”130
Herrmann was both a staunch
advocate and, not infrequently, an
apologist for film music as an art.
Characteristically he replied to a
piece in the New York Times in 1945
by Erich Leinsdorf, then conductor
of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, : “Erich Leinsdorf [has]
indulged in a favorite sport current among many of our
interpretive concert musicians—
that of belittling film music.”131
Nonetheless, even though his
own personal and professional
standards as a conductor and
composer were the highest, he did
not believe that it was valid to
compare film music with concert
music: “Obviously few film scores
could bear the scrutiny of the concert audience without being
radically rewritten. But, similarly,
even the Wagnerian excerpts
126
James G. Stewart, interview by Craig
Reardon, tape recording, Hollywood, CA,
February 3, 1977.
127
Herrmann, interview by Pat Gray, in
Bazelon, 235.
128
Bernard Herrmann, “Score for a Film,” The
New York Times, May 25, 1941.
129
See Smith, Chapter 5, ibid.
130
Bernard Herrmann, interview by Fletcher
143
which are performed by our symphony orchestras seem amputated
when they are torn from their
rightful places on the stage.”132
This was not to depreciate film
music, for as Herrmann also said,
“I don’t think there is a difference
between being a film composer
and any other kind of composer.
Cinema is a great opportunity to
write a remarkable kind of music
in the sense that it is music of theater, and at the same time, it is
music that becomes part of a
whole new artistic phenomenon
which is known as cinema, which is
a combination of all the arts—and
music is cinema.”133 (Herrmann’s
remarks again recall the comparison of the use of music in film to
Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.)
While Herrmann in his way
championed the art of film music
and was not ashamed of himself
for being a composer of it, he was
no particular defender of his colleagues in Hollywood: “America is
the only country in the world that
has so-called ‘film composers.’
Every other country has composers who sometimes do films. You
have to be a good composer before
you can be a ‘film composer,’ and I
wouldn’t call most of my colleagues composers. If there weren’t
any money in films they wouldn’t
do it.”134 It was certainly true that
established concert hall composers
occasionally or even regularly
composed for films, but Europe
also had its specialists (as
Sabaneev indicated already in
1935) who for all intents and pur-
Markle in “A Talk with Hitchcock” (Pt. 1), a 2part episode of the CBC Television series,
Telescope (1964).
131
Bernard Herrmann, “Music in Motion
Pictures—A Reply to Mr. Leinsdorf,” The New
York Times, June 24, 1945.
132
Ibid.
133
Interview by Pat Gray, in Bazelon, 232.
134
Smith, 295.
144
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
poses composed exclusively for
films, and were known for that,
even if they were not actually
called “film composers” by the
European music world.
Even if he knew otherwise
Herrmann was unwilling to
concede that there could be composers who, if not of world class
stature, were nonetheless talented
and skilled, and felt content if not
fulfilled to compose film music so
as to earn a steady living composing. Dimitri Tiomkin was such a
composer, who in his day became
the most successful and highly
paid of his Hollywood colleagues,
and was the first to have his name
appear on a movie theater marquee in 1958 on The Old Man and
the Sea. As he would write in his
memoirs, “An apotheosis, when a
composer gets his name on the
marquee” (note that Tiomkin did
not write film composer).135
In this regard there are some
striking points of correspondence
between Tiomkin’s and Herrmann’s views about film music
(and, for that matter, those of other
film composers) as evident in an
article by music critic C. Sharpless
Hickman, who wrote about
Tiomkin in the 1950s:
[Tiomkin] is . . . one of the few
top people in his specialized
profession who has made absolutely no effort to ‘double’ as a
concert hall composer. [He] has
solidly shut the door on his
period as a concert pianist, composer and member of the
avant-garde musical circles of
135
Photo caption in Please Don’t Hate Me by
Dimitri Tiomkin and Prosper Buranelli (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).
136
C. Sharpless Hickman, “Movies and Music,”
Music Journal April, 1955, 46. For extended
discussion of these same issues, see “The Film
Composer in Concert and the Concert Composer
in Film” by film and TV composer Eddy
Lawrence Manson, in Clifford McCarty, ed., Film
Music 1 (New York: Garland Publishing Co.,
Paris in the Twenties. Tiomkin
does not feel he can play both
ends against the middle. To him,
film music is a highly specialized technique in which the
composer does not create his
own architectonic form, but
instead adapts his music to fit
and exploit the dramatic or
emotional potentialities of an
entirely different medium—the
cinematic form. The adaptation
to concert-hall performances of
music created in such a way and
to such a form does not, he
thinks, represent a valid creative
entity.
He believes that many of his
confreres [sic] are guilty of writing some of their film music
with either a tongue-in-cheek
attitude, or with the idea of
‘lifting’ them to the concert-hall
later on—or perhaps both. Even
worse, he says, is that many of
them create for the films with
thoughts of concert-hall and
theatre performance which serve
to rein their best cinematic expressiveness. Tiomkin asked me,
‘Can you think of one truly great
piece of music which has ever
come from the film sound track?
Why do they (other composers)
have the idea that what is designed for film form should fit
the symphonic program?’
Though he admits great
music has not come from the
films (and perhaps should not
be expected to), Tiomkin insists
the film composer should be an
inherently good composer, with
a far wider musicological and
dramatic knowledge than the
concert-hall composer.”136
T
here is another reality, and
that is a composer could be
very good at writing film
music but not other kinds of music.
1989), 255-270 and the study by sociologist,
Robert R. Faulkner, Music on Demand: Composers
& Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1980).
Herrmann admired Tiomkin’s score for Duel in
the Sun (see Herrmann, “Music in Motion Pictures—A Reply to Mr. Leindorf, ibid.) and for The
Well (Christopher Palmer, personal communication, n.d.)
Friedhofer felt that there were two
distinct talents in film composing,
a talent for composing and a talent
for drama. Once when asked if one
has to be a composer to write film
music, Herrmann replied simply,
“Well, it helps! I would say that
you do have to be a composer to
write good music for films.”137 But
he also noted, “Puccini was a great
opera composer, but he couldn’t
write a symphony. Or at least his
mind didn’t think that way. You
have to have a dramatic sense to
be a good cinema composer.”138
Today, as in Herrmann’s time, not
all composers, regardless of how
accomplished, necessarily possess
a good dramatic sense, while
others who do, lack talent or craft
as composers. To show that these
talents could to some extent be
judged separately, even by nonmusicians, James G. Stewart said
of Herrmann that he was “a tremendous talent . . . in terms of
motion pictures.” Even though
being “no judge of musicianship,”
Stewart added, “[I] wouldn’t care
to even attempt to judge whether
he was a great musician or great
composer in a musical sense, but
I’m a good judge of showmen. Not
only was he personally a good
showman, but he was also a great
showman with his music, and he
had an instinctive feeling from the
very beginning of where music
should and should not go in
motion pictures, which is a rare
thing.”139
As Moross summed up
137
Bazelon, 232.
Bernard Herrmann, “A Conversation with
Bernard Herrmann” interview by Leslie T. Zador
and Gregory Rose in Film Music 1, Clifford
McCarty, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing,
1989), 219.
139
James G. Stewart, interview by Craig Reardon,
ibid.
138
EDITORIAL
Herrmann’s career, “Benny got
entranced with film. When he hit
film that was his métier. It was a
love affair. His concert music was
so-so. But suddenly he found in
the form of film music that he
really could express himself—he’s
one of the few composers who did.
He wanted nothing better for the
rest of his life than to alternate that
and conducting. His writing
would be for films and he would
conduct.”140
I
n a recent edited volume on
music in film, David
Neumeyer and James Buhler
state that by the end of the nineteenth century musicology was
“moving down to two divergent
paths, both of which had their
source in an unending obsession
with Beethoven.”141 Though without offering any evidence or
argument to support their contention/diagnosis that musicologists
have been obsessed with Beethoven, they proffer that “To judge
from some classics of the film literature, from the appearance of
Steven Smith’s book (the first comprehensive modern biography of a
film composer), and from the fan
literature, the favored candidate
for the job of film music’s
‘Beethoven’ is Bernard
Herrmann.”142
140
Moross, ibid.
David Neumeyer and James Buhler, “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music
(I): Analyzing the Music,” in Film Music: Critical
Approaches, ed. K.J. Donnelly (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2001), 18.
142
James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, “Introduction,” in Music and Cinema, eds.
James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000),
21.
143
Steven D. Wescott, A Comprehensive Bibliography of Music for Film and Television. (Detroit:
Information Coordinators, 1985).
144
The Max Steiner Music Society (1965-81) was
founded by Albert K. Bender; the Miklós Rózsa
Society (1972-) by John Fitzpatrick, and the
Bernard Herrmann Society (1981-89) by Kevin
141
145
Snide though it was obviously
intended to be, this pronouncement is telling. Even before
academia began to examine
Herrmann’s work—let alone that
of Hollywood film composers in
general—a sizeable journalistic
and fan literature existed that
reflected a substantial and growing following of Herrmann
devotees. As Buhler, Neumeyer,
and film scholar Caryl Flinn have
suggested, though, the enthusiasm
for Herrmann’s music was closely
tied to the popularity of the films
he scored—especially the two
Welles films and Hitchcock films—
and the film genres with which he
came to be closely associated:
fantasy, horror, and science-fiction.
Doubtless this was responsible for
the new recordings of music from
these films under Herrmann’s
baton beginning in 1969, and by no
coincidence, that featured music
from the Welles films, the
Hitchcock films, and fantasy,
horror, and science fiction films.
In Steven Wescott’s Comprehensive Bibliography of Music for Film
and Television (1985), of the citations grouped by composer (84
composers in all), the number of
Herrmann citations (107) is only
exceeded by Rozsa (152) with Max
Steiner coming in third (94).143
Interestingly, these three compos-
ers were at that time the only Hollywood composers to also have or
have had fan clubs devoted to
them before 1985.144 Eventually
interest in Herrmann’s work
reached a point in the mid-1970s
that Fred Steiner, one of Herrmann’s intimates, planned to write
his dissertation in musicology on
Herrmann’s film music, what
would have been the first dissertation devoted to a film composer.145
Since then two dissertations and
one D.M.A. paper have been written on Herrmann.146 His score for
Vertigo has been one of only two
film scores to be the subject of a
book-length monograph.147 It
could almost be said that Herrmann studies emerged as a field of
academic inquiry prior to film
music studies as a whole.
If an explanation be sought for
the reasons Herrmann has received the attention and acclaim
he has, it might be more productive to seek its source(s) in something other than psychopathology
(obsession), whether it be on the
part of the movie going public or
scholars who have studied his
work. Though it is not clear how
literally Neumeyer and Buhler
meant to be in comparing Herrmann to Beethoven, not only have
composers modeled their music
and/or careers on the music and/
Fahey. A new Bernard Herrmann Society was
founded in 2000 by Günther Kögebehn and Kurt
George Gjerde.
145
See “Herrmann’s ‘Black-and-White’ Music for
Hitchcock’s Psycho,” Part 1, Film Music Notebook
1, no. 1 (1974), 35, where Steiner alludes to his
planned dissertation: “Some of the material in
these pages will be incorporated in a monograph
which I have planned, on Herrmann’s film
music. For unknown reasons Steiner changed his
dissertation topic to Alfred Newman after
Herrmann’s sudden death in 1975: Frederick
Steiner, “The Making of an American Film
Composer: A Study of Alfred Newman’s Music
in the first Decade of the Sound Era” (Ph.D. diss,
University of Southern California, 1981).
Steiner’s was the second dissertation devoted to
a film composer, James Clifford Hamilton’s on
Leith Stevens being completed in the interim:
“Leith Stevens: A Critical Analysis of His Works”
(D.M.A. Dissertation, University of Missouri,
Kansas City, 1976). Steiner’s was, however, the
first dissertation on a film composer in musicology.
146
Graham Donald Bruce, “Bernard Herrmann:
Film Music and Film Narrative” (Ph.D. diss.,
New York University, 1982); Kosovsky, ibid.,
Edward Todd Fiegel, “The Day the Earth Stood
Still: An Analysis of the Score by Bernard
Herrmann” (Accompanying Document to Dissertation Lecture Recital, University of Colorado,
1986). Bruce’s dissertation was subsequently
revised and published as a book under the same
title in 1985 by UMI Research Press.
147
David Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A
Film Score Handbook (Westport: Greenwood Press,
2001).
146
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
or careers of others’, but
musicologists as well compare
composers’ music and lives as a
means of seeking parallels and
gaining insight.148
While one phase of a
composer’s work and life may be
compared (or contrasted) with
another phase, it is well nigh impossible to compare anything as a
whole with itself. Were Herrmann
seriously to be compared with
another composer outside the
sphere (and time) of cinema, a
more apt comparison might be to
Mahler than to Beethoven. In this
regard Leonard Bernstein again
serves as a basis for comparison,
illuminating a tertium
comparationis, namely, a temperamental similarity and similar
musical sensibility, beyond the
obvious factual correspondences
between the three men:
Not only feeling a deep affinity
for Mahler’s music, being one of
the 20th century’s greatest champions of it in the concert hall and
on recordings, Bernstein thought
he understood “Mahler’s problem.” He said, “It’s like being two
different men locked up in the
same body.”149 Have all composerconductors felt that way?
Certainly he, Mahler, and
Herrmann did. (However, when
someone told Bernstein that he
was the reincarnation of Mahler
and Wagner both, he was only
prepared to believe that he “could
148
At this writing there are 576 entries in the
Beethoven Bibliography Database (http://
mill1.sjlibrary.org:83/) comparing Beethoven
and his works to other composers. I wish to
thank Bill Meredith, director of the Ira F.
Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San
José State University, for this information.
149
Bernstein quoted in Peyser, 307.
150
Peyser, 470.
151
Smith 16, 26, 52, 245 and 315.
152
Smith, 38.
153
London, 162.
be” the reincarnation of Wagner.
) The sense of peak experience
achieved through music transcending personal inner turmoil,
the Jewish angst, the flair for
showmanship and for intense
drama; the ceaseless self criticism
and lack of self satisfaction in their
lives as men and artists—all are
contained in their work, and by
their own confession. Almost
symbolically all three men were
assailed by heart conditions:
Mahler had a serious heart condition but died from an infection,
and both Bernstein and Herrmann
died from heart attacks.
Smith recounts Herrmann’s
early love of Mahler as well as his
later disenchantment with him.151
If Mahler was the last of the Romantic composers Herrmann
affiliated himself with the neoRomantic movement. What Henry
Cowell observed of Herrmann’s
early forays into symphonic music,
has been said to characterize
Mahler, viz. “an experimenter in
the direction of making the orchestra into a more satisfying medium
for polyphony, in which he is primarily interested as a composition
medium. He attempts varied melodic line and long flowing curves
of counterpoint.”152 But unlike
Mahler and Bernstein, Herrmann’s
music is not songful, if often lyrical—a major difference—and there
is little polyphony in his film music (especially later). However,
Herrmann’s overall sense of the
orchestra, his paradoxical liking of
the broad palette of post-Wagnerian orchestral forces while often
within the same work reducing to
chamber-like groupings (if unusual ones), a preference for pure
orchestral colors rather than
doublings, his use of instruments
in their extreme registers, yet encompassing the full instrumental
range of the orchestra in his or150
chestration, all point to Mahler’s
influence—so much so, in fact, that
it may not be an exaggeration to
say that Mahler informs every
page of Herrmann’s music.
Whether all these considerations
might justify calling Herrmann the
“Mahler of film music” I shall
leave to others to judge.
But more than likening Herrmann to famous precursors of the
concert hall perhaps he might better be seen to exemplify the ‘type
of future artist’ Kurt London envisioned in 1936:
Technical contact changes the
style of music, just as material
influences, above all in the films,
have already changed it in various respects. The film composer
of the future will, with his all
but inexhaustible technical
means of expression, be able to
allow his imagination the fullest
scope, by virtue of mixing, cutting, and sound-manipulation of
every kind. But he will not be in
a position to develop that personal style which great masters
of music have always had. In
spite of the presupposed originality of his manuscript, he will
for better or for worse be forced
to bow to realities. A Proteus in
modern guise, he will have to
know how to do everything, to
command every style, to adapt
himself in spite of every kind of
complication to the musical
form demanded of him in each
particular case and, in short, be
possessed of an enormous
mental mobility.153
The historian in Herrmann saw
film music as a continuation of the
ancient Greek idea of melodram,
which he defined simply as “drama
with accompanying music.” Only
two years before his death he
spoke with obvious passion about
Debussy’s role in the development
of melodrama as a genre. In the
early part of the 20th century
Claude Debussy became fascinated by the concept of melodram.
EDITORIAL
He faced the same problem as the
Greeks, but he, of course, created
the form of his kind of vocal music—as evidenced in “Pelleas”—
which is practically spoken drama
with music. Debussy’s dream was
to write pure melodram, and he
lived long enough to see some
early examples of the cinema! He
saw early experiments in the cinema in which an orchestra sat
behind the screen and played specially composed music. He felt that
this was the art of the future.
Debussy said that the cinema
would allow the perfect creation of
poetry, vision, and dreams. If
Debussy had lived long enough
into the era of the sound film, who
knows what he would have created. Who knows what we’ve
lost.154
A
ll this being said, what
might Herbert Stothart
and the composers of his
generation think if they knew that
by the 21st century one of their
younger colleagues would be con-
sidered by academics as a ‘job
candidate’ for the “Beethoven of
film music”? We can only wonder—and, for that matter, wonder
what Herrmann himself might
think of being singled out for the
distinction of “fulfilling a destiny”
that Stothart had so long before
predicted, of a Beethoven emerging from the field of film music.
Early in his career Herrmann was
quick to point out that films give a
composer “the largest audience in
the world—an audience whose
interest and appreciation should
not be underestimated. A good
film score receives thousands of
‘fan letters’ from intelligent music
lovers everywhere.”155 Yet privately plagued by self doubt, and
full of contempt for the film industry, near the end of his life Herrmann lamented the harsh reality
that in the movie business ‘you’re
only as good as your last film.’
Nevertheless, his defiant response
was, “Every director is entitled to
make bad films. Everybody does
sometimes. Even Beethoven had
bad music.”156
147
* * * *
At his eighty-second birthday
party, May 10, 1970, [Max]
Steiner bedecked himself in all
his ribbons and medals and
donned a Beethoven wig to
greet his guests. One of the
guests, Albert K. Bender, who
organized the Steiner Music
Society (an international league
of admirers), responded, “Max,
you look better than Beethoven.” To which Steiner
replied, “I should hope so— he’s
dead.”157
154
Bernard Herrmann, “Bernard Herrmann,
Composer,” in Evan William Cameron, ed.,
Sound and the Cinema: The Coming of Sound
to American Film (Pleasantville, NY:
Redgrave Publishing Co., 1980), 118.
155
Herrmann, “Music in Motion Pictures—
A Reply to Mr. Leinsdorf,” 69.
156
Gilling, “The Colour of Music,” 139.
157
Thomas, 122.
With gratitude I acknowledge an intellectual debt to Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. Though acquainted
with his work since the early 1990s, it has not so much been an influence on my own as it has provided
copious validation for the types of historical inquiries and the methods used to study them now widely
known as microhistory. Though I did not know that such types of inquiries and methods had been dubbed
microstoria (“a historical science of the individual and the concrete”) by Italian historians in the mid-1970s,
I was engaged in them during the same period and since, relative to my research variously on the following topics: The scores to Universal’s horror films of the 1930s (see “Music for the Monsters—Universal
Pictures’ Horror Film Scores of the Thirties,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress (1983) 40:391421); aspects of Dimitri Tiomkin’s musical style as a Russian Jewish composer and his compositional
methods (see “Lost Horizon—An Account of the Composition of the Score,” Film Music Notebook 4, no. 2
[1978]: 40-52); also other musicological and psychomusicological studies (see “Stravinsky and MGM,” in
Clifford McCarty ed., Film Music 1 [New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989], 108-22; “Letter to the Editor—William H. Rosar on ‘Theory and Practice in Porgy and Bess: The Gershwin-Schillinger Connection,’
by Paul Nauert,” The Musical Quarterly 80 [1996]: 182-84, and “Film Music and Heinz Werner’s Theory of
Physiognomic Perception,” Psychomusicology 13 [1994]: 154-165); also my psychoepistemological studies on
perceptual space and spatial localization (e.g. “Visual Space as Physical Geometry,” Perception 14 [1985]:
148
THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
403-425). Ginzburg’s morphological method, deriving partly from Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances
(formalized by other writers as polythetic classification), in conjunction with the critical use of dialogic texts
such as oral histories and interviews, is usefully applicable to virtually every aspect of film music studies.
My own parallel approach grew out of C.G. Jung’s hermeneutic “synthetic/constructive” method of dream
analysis (and specifically his technique of amplification and directed association as distinguished from
Freud’s free association). It no doubt approximates Ginzburg’s evidential paradigm largely because of the
common influence of Freud on Ginzburg, and Freud’s adaptation of medical semiotics to dream analysis
that influenced his erstwhile heir apparent, Jung. In this regard, see my chapter “The Dies Irae in Citizen
Kane: Musical Hermeneutics Applied to Film Music” in Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K.J. Donnelly
(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2001), 103-116. Of Ginzburg’s writings, see particularly
“Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” in his Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and
Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) and “Microhistory: Two or Three
Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 10-35.
EDITORIAL
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