Psycho in Concert

SYMPHONIC NIGHT AT THE MOVIES PSYCHO in CONCERT featuring Sinfonia Gulf Coast

Saturday, October 23, 2021 | 7:30 PM Mattie Kelly Arts Foundation Amphitheater

Feel the suspense as Sinfonia Gulf Coast plays Bernard Hermann’s spine-tingling score to Hitchcock’s classic thriller with the original screenplay projected above.

This al fresco performance at the Mattie Kelly Foundation’s Amphitheater will feature reserved table seating as well as general lawn seating where you can bring your own chairs and blankets. Bar and food items will be available for purchase on site.

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PROgRAM NOTES

Bernard Herrmann (1911 -1975) Psycho Projected

Born in New York City in 1911, Bernard Herrmann began his career as a composer and conductor in the late 1920s. Early associations with Charles Ives, Percy Grainger, Philip James and Aaron Copland’s Young Composers Group were the drivers of his musical development. In 1934 he began a long association with CBS Radio. The experimental bent of CBS programming greatly encouraged his development as a musician. He excelled at incidental music for both poetry readings (La belle dame sans merci, A Shropshire Lad) and for radio dramas by Orson Welles (Mercury Theatre of the Air), Norman Corwin (Columbia Presents Corwin) and Irving Reis (Columbia Workshop).

Herrmann honed his conducting skills in many novel programs of his own devising for the CBS Symphony Orchestra, and served as its principal conductor from 1943-1950. Ready access to this orchestra – and the many world-class soloists who performed with it – elicited a steady stream of concert music from him, including his Nocturne and Scherzo (1936), a Symphony (1939-41), and a song cycle on Nicholas Breton’s The Fantasticks (1941- 43). He also wrote a dramatic cantata on Melville’s Moby Dick (1937-38), and an opera on Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1943-51).

Herrmann’s collaboration with Orson Welles

on the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast of Halloween 1938 provoked the spectacular opening

of film careers for both men, beginning with Citizen Kane in 1941, and followed by The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942. A long association with 20th Century-Fox (Jane Eyre, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Day the Earth Stood Still) ensued before his decadelong association with Alfred Hitchcock began in

1954 with The Trouble with Harry, followed by The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo. By the late 1960s the influence of his work with Hitchcock and Welles led, in turn, to important work with François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451, The Bride Wore Black); Brian DePalma (Sisters, Obsession) and Martin Scorcese (Taxi Driver). Years of chronic, heavy smoking conspired to ruin his health just as a new generation of film makers turned to him: he died at the Sheraton Universal Hotel on Christmas Eve 1975, just hours after the last

recording session of Scorcese’s film.

The music for Psycho is unique in Hollywood film music. Scored only for strings, it mixes the austere simplicity of his later style (ostinatos, sequential sequences of closely-voiced chords, mosaic forms) with freely atonal counterpoint borrowed from his Sinfonietta for Strings (1935-36). He felt the sound of strings alone mirrored the film’s black-andwhite cinematography. Written in the first two months of 1960, his score is comprised of 50 minutes of music – nearly all of which was used – amounting to less than half the film’s total running time.

It is not uncommon for Herrmann’s films to involve less music than would be the case for other composers of his time; he was very conscious of the dramatic impact music had – while just as conscious of how music could detract from the drama of a scene. This is an important part of his success in working with Hitchcock, though – ironically – the composer and the director disagreed over just this

issue while working at several sequences in Psycho. Hitchcock’s original conception of the famed shower scene was that it should be unscored; Herrmann disagreed, but didn’t tell Hitchcock what he had in mind. Hitchcock was on vacation while the music was recorded in mid-March, so Herrmann was able to surprise Hitchcock while dubbing the final mix of the soundtrack. When Herrmann played the sequence with his famous murder music, Hitchcock immediately agreed that it was exactly right.

There was another instance, however, where Herrmann’s original idea was not followed. He intended for the scene, where Norman (Anthony Perkins) sinks Marion’s (Janet Leigh) car in the swamp, to be scored with a short movement from his Sinfonietta for Strings – a hushed atonal counterpoint called “Interlude” – while the preceding scene, where Norman puts his final touches on the cleaning of the cabin where she was killed, had music very similar to that heard in the scene just before it, where Norman mops the bathroom of Marion’s blood. Instead, the music for the swamp scene was not used as intended: it is heard while Norman puts the final touches on the cabin, replacing the music originally written for that scene. The scene at the swamp then played without music... with a different – though compelling – effectiveness. Another important disagreement emerged over the music heard when Norman corners Lila (Vera Miles) in the

Psycho Program Notes cont. on Pg. 55

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