Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time. One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered. He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last). But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.
Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho. The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels: with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s. Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so. Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily. He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way. Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score: the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.
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