North by Northwest, film score
AMG AllMusic Guide to Classical Music :
Top
North by Northwest, film score
- Date: 1959
- Composer: Bernard Herrmann
- Period: Modern (1910-1949)
Review
Bernard Herrmann's scores for such films as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Mysterious Island defined the sound of fantasy, but those were almost the least of his achievements. He also worked with Orson Wells on Citizen Kane, with Francois Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, and, above all, with Alfred Hitchcock in his series of masterpieces from the 1950s. Among these were The Trouble With Harry, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest (1959). Aside from snippets of incidental music, Herrmann composed three types of music for North by Northwest: chase music, suspense music, and love music. All three types of music are tonally based. The chase music's use of whole-tone scale melodies and augmented triads, the suspense music's dissonant harmonic suspensions, and the love music's yearning appoggiaturas à la Tristan und Isolde all have their origins in late nineteenth century Romanticism. But Herrmann's use of brilliantly syncopated rhythms and a vastly expanded percussion section gives his essentially Romantic music the coloring of conservative modernism. Each of the film's three types of music is clearly distinct. The chase music that serves as the film's Overture under the Saul Bass opening-title sequence is in nervously fast triple time with slashing strings, wailing winds, blasting trombones, and thundering tympani. The suspense music is in slow triple time, with slowly rising harmonic sequences in the low winds and strings. The love music is in Herrmann's beloved Lento amoroso tempo with long-breathed melodies for intertwining winds above throbbing cellos and basses. Herrmann rarely repeated music exactly, but rather developed the music over the course of the movie. Thus, the love music for Grant and Saint is at first tentative in the dining car sequence, more passionate in the first sleeping car sequence, and finally ecstatic in the second sleeping car sequence that closes the film. As with all of his film scores, the score for North by Northwest enhanced the action (chase music for the pursuit across the faces on Mount Rushmore), defined the situations (suspense music for the mutual suspicion of Grant and Mason's characters in the scene in the mansion at Glen Cove), established the relationships between the characters (the blossoming love music in the dining sequence between Grant and Saint), and often revealed the hidden feelings of the characters toward each other (the uneasy mixture of love and suspense in the scene in the Ambassador East between Grant and Saint). But Herrmann (and, of course, Hitchcock) also knew when music should be silent: the entire crop-dusting sequence was filmed almost entirely without dialogue and entirely without music. ~ James Leonard, RoviAlbums with Complete Performances of the Work
| Title | Date |
| North by Northwest [Unicorn-Kanchana] | 1980 |
| The Incredible Film Music Box | 2005 |
| Vintage Cinema | 2008 |
| Vintage Cinema [Hybrid SACD] | 2008 |
Albums with Excerpt Performances of the Work
| North and South: Six Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, for mezzo-soprano & chamber ensemble | |
| North, film score |
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
AMG AllMusic Guide to Classical Music
Copyright © 2012 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.
Read more