Score, Dude

Jan Swafford has a fun article in Slate that attempts to pick the “greatest film composer of all time.” The article recognizes that it’s an impossible and foolhardy task, but goes on to try anyway, and for that I commend it. Especially nice is the section on Bernard Hermann:

A lot of people will declare, as I would have at one time, that the greatest film composer of all, hands-down, is Bernard Herrmann. His résumé starts spectacularly with Citizen Kane in 1939, and he died virtually in the saddle in 1976, hours after the last recording session for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. En route, Herrmann scored Hitchcock films including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. Herrmann's most famous moment is also, I submit, the quintessential movie-music cue: the shower scene in Psycho. It's one of those bits (the shark music in Jaws is another) that you only need to "sing," or rather, howl—as in Reeeek! Reeeek! Reeeek!—to conjure up the whole bloody affair. Psycho is as much state of mind as movie, and the shower scene embodies that. The music is utterly expressive of the action: The string glissandi make a nasty slicing sound that equally suggests female screams and the shrieks of predatory birds (recall Norman's little taxidermic hobby). Above all, the cue is perfect because it's nearly invisible, so imbedded in the moment that I suspect a lot of people don't realize there's "music" in the scene at all.

As Swafford points out, Hermann’s scores—like most great film scores—aren’t just great because of their compositional strengths, they’re great because they seem inextricable from their films, part of their nature on a cellular level. The score is the movie is the score, which is to say that on one hand, the score and the film are interchangeable: each could serve almost as a substitute for the other; you almost only need one. But on the other hand, to consider either the score or the film wholly apart from the other would be to do tremendous damage to both.

I bring this up in part because I witnessed another such film/score combo last night at an early preview of The Fountain. I can’t talk about the movie too much right now (though I’ll say that I was maybe a bit less enthusiastic than some of the early reviewers), but, like Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, the movie is textured and shaped by a remarkable Clint Mansell score performed by The Kronos Quartet. There’s nothing in the film quite as a staccato and percussive as the music and editing in Requiem, but the movie is affected just as much by the score. I always think it’s fascinating to see films like this and try to imagine them without the score, or with something different, and it’s a weird experience. In a way, the best scores seem perfect, as if no other combination of notes could possibly exist to serve this film, as if, somehow, the composer pulled the one perfect set of sounds out of the infinity of possibilities and found not just music that works, but the only music that possibly could have worked. The Fountain’s marvelous score is like that, and no matter what other issues the movie might have, it makes the movie worth seeing.