Psycho

Bernard Herrmann

Royal Scottish National Orchestra (Joel McNeely, cond.)

album cover

The Score that Showed Everyone How to Heighten Horror

The opening moments of Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho are defined by two contrasting musical entities: The slightly ominous staccato pulsing of cellos and basses, and the serene lyrical swirls of the upper strings as they play a simple scale-like theme. When these ideas intersect, late in the "Prelude" that serves as the music for the opening titles, the effect is stunning: It's the moment before panic totally sets in, when there's still the possibility of some clarity of thought. Our sensory awareness is heightened, but the "terror" button has not yet been pushed.

This canny extended setting is just the first example of Herrmann's genius in Psycho, one of the many instances where the new york composer adds something profound to Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic marvel. A conductor with the CBS Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s, Herrmann began his film career with Citizen Kane, scored many of Hitchcock's thrillers, and died the night he completed work on Taxi Driver (1976). For Psycho, he uses only strings—a move that forces him to embrace multiple styles of composition and juggle several divergent musical personalities. Some of the music is typical mad-man-lurking-in-the-shadows stuff, with the murmuring sustained notes and desperate yelps from the violins used to death in less imaginative slasher fare. But there are only a few such gratuitous moments in a score that virtually defined horror-film music. Whenever the pace needs to quicken, Herrmann snaps into a different gear, dashing off short repeating patterns and themes that scamper furtively around, defined by the shivering chill that runs through them.

Unlike many orchestral "adaptations" of film music, this version follows Herrmann's original score to the note. It's the rare film music experience that is engrossing all the way through on its own, from the elaborate tension-mounting trickery of the opening moments to that dizzyingly intense shower scene, where it sounds like a thousand violins are each screaming at a slightly different pitch. According to the lore surrounding Psycho, Hitchcock wanted the action in the shower to stand alone, without music. Herrmann defied him, conjuring an accompaniment so suited to one of filmdom's most unforgettable scenes, it's impossible to imagine the visuals without it.

Genre: Classical
Released: 1997, Varese Sarabande
Key Tracks: "The Shower," "The Rainstorm," "Prelude/The City"
Buyer Beware: Danny Elfman's reworking of Psycho adds nothing to, and in fact detracts from, Herrmann's score.
Catalog Choice: The scores to Vertigo; Taxi Driver; Fahrenheit 451
Next Stop: Alfred Newman: The Razor's Edge, Original Motion Picture Score
Book Pages: 358–359