Film music, as the composer David Raksin (1912–2004) put it, "makes the difference. There's no doubt about that. All you have to do to get the point of film music across to the skeptical is to make them sit though the picture without the music"(quoted in Kalinak, p.xvii). This is exactly what Herrmann did during the production of Psycho . Hitchcock did not think the shower sequence should be accompanied by music; Herrmann thought otherwise and asked for the opportunity to score it. Hitchcock, not entirely satisfied with the shower sequence himself, was open to the experiment. Later, Herrmann screened two versions: one accompanied only by sound effects, the other, accompanied only by music. Hitchcock chose the latter, resulting in one of cinema's most powerful and arresting moments, a grisly murder made even more horrific by the shrieking violins that accompany it. Not all films use music, but the vast majority of films from every corner of the globe from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first have exploited it. All evidence points to its persistence well into the future.
SEE ALSO Animation ; Ideology ; Musicals ; Silent Cinema ; Sound ; Studio System ; Technology
Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound . New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Brown, Royal S. Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Dickinson, Kay, ed. Movie Music: The Film Reader . London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Donnelly, Kevin J. The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television . London: British Film Institute, 2005.
Duncan, Dean. Charms That Soothe: Classical Music and Narrative Film . New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Eisler, Hanns, and Theodor Adorno (uncredited). Composing for the Films . New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
Flinn, Caryl. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Gabbard, Krin. Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema . Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Goldmark, Daniel. Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music . Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Kalinak, Kathryn. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film Music: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Film Music . New York and London: Routledge, 2001.
Marks, Martin. Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies 1895–1924 . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music . New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Wojcik, Pamela Robertson, and Arthur Knight, eds. Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Kathryn Kalinak
Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: