Psycho (Bernard Herrman)

Bernard Herrmann, Psycho Suite program note
 
Countless movie-goers who have never heard of Bernard Herrmann nevertheless are quite capable of immediately recognizing his most famous motion picture score -- the score for the 1960 Paramount film Psycho. Director Alfred Hitchcock's budget for Psycho was not very large, and Herrmann was forced to restrict himself to a relatively small instrumental ensemble. The result is a score composed entirely for string instruments that perfectly suits the stark black and white cinematography of the film. Although many feel that Herrmann crafted scores intrinsically superior to it, the Psycho score has been, and likely will remain, his most widely admired and often-imitated film score.
 
Melody as we normally think of it is altogether absent in Psycho; even theme, in the proper sense of the word, only occasionally sneaks onto the scene. Instead, the music is built around strings of fragmentary motives, stacked around one another in often very dissonant ways, and raised up into a musical whole that manages to create a state of near-perpetual suspense, unresolved, unremitting, and yet, never tired or worn thin.
 
Some of Psycho's music is active and physical. For example, the famous opening credits music, which is reused as the character of Marion Crane flees with stolen money, her face dispassionate but her mind frenzied and burning, and, of course, the infamous shower scene music, with its shrieking jabs in the uppermost register of the violins. Some of the music, on the other hand, simmers quietly to itself, tension and insanity woven by layers of agonized counterpoints (e.g. a cue called "The Madhouse," in which Norman Bates first begins to seem to us a man off his rocker). And then there is music like "Temptation" (which underscores Marion's growing desire to steal the money from her boss at the start of the film) and "The Peephole" (which underscores Norman spying on Marion), in which a kind of steady, pulsating music seems to go nowhere and yet boils inside. Even -- indeed, especially -- in the last bars of the score there is no resolution of the psychological or harmonic dissonance: inhuman strands of counterpoint in the high violins and violas, con sordino and pianissimo, dissolve and are replaced by a dense final sonority as Marion's car is dragged out of the swamp behind the Bates Motel.
 
There is a brief suite comprising the major moments of the score, plus the resolution of the film's concluding music. It is variously known as Psycho: A Narrative for Orchestra and Psycho: Suite for Strings.
 
- Blair Johnston