The Big Score Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies

-Do you like music?

-Yes.

Why don't you put a record on.

Mozart.

MUSIC: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart

Funny, isn't it?

How adding music to a scene

can inform a whole story.

That's if it's the right music.

This Mozart isn't really working for me, Michael.

Let's try this instead.

HAPHAZARD PIANO MUSIC

For instance, when you hear music like this...

..you just know everything's going to end really badly.

Oh! Ow!

When you hear a soundtrack like this...

SLOW FUNKY GUITAR MUSIC

..you get a real sense of...

SOFT MOANING

Hang on, I don't like where this is going at all.

-RECORD PLAYER SCRATCHES

-Quite enough of that.

If, however, you're a film-scoring god, like John Barry,

then it may still be a bloke making a cup of coffee.

But the music's telling us a whole lot more.

ALARM CLOCK RINGS

MUSIC: Main Title Theme by John Barry

To my mind, John Barry's title music for the cold war thriller,

The Ipcress File, is one of the finest ever written.

In his hands, the music becomes another character,

reacting to what's on screen,

allowing space for dialogue, sound effects.

Even to the point of matching a note sounded by a coffee grinder

when it's working.

COFFEE GRINDER WHIRS

HE PLAYS PART OF THE TITLE THEME

COFFEE GRINDER WHIRS

That particular coffee grinder was being sold through a mail order firm

owned by the executive producer of the film.

Central to Barry's theme is this...

HE PLAYS SINISTER CHORDS

That is a cimbalom,

a Hungarian hammered dulcimer.

What it gives him is a way into the spy world. The Cold War.

HE PLAYS SINISTER CHORDS

That sound is full of threat.

Michael Caine may be waking up in his own apartment in London,

but Soviet Russia is just over the curve of the world.

However, being the master that he is,

Barry adds a counterpoint that's actually warm.

HE PLAYS WARMER CHORDS

It captures the appeal of Michael Caine's character,

and promises that the film will entertain us, as well as chill us.

John Barry set out to create a score that was simple,

and yet told us a huge amount, and in doing so

he raised the film to a whole new level,

as do all great film composers.

And then that became this...

MUSIC: Chariots Of Fire by Vangelis

I always see the job as not to do what the director tells you

to do, and good directors never tell you what to do.

Your job is to go and do the thing that they can't imagine.

DRAMATIC SCORE

In my films, the music is inextricably interwoven

with the drama, the dialogue, the sound effects, the moving camera

and the actors' faces.

It just... You can't have one without the other.

In this series, I'll tell the story of the film soundtrack.

How composers took the power of the orchestra and harnessed it

to a new medium.

And how they've embraced a rich, diverse range of music

to keep the sound of cinema fresh and exciting.

Some people say the best score is the one you don't hear.

I say the best score is the one you hear when you need to,

and after this series I want you to be able to hear more than you

ever thought possible.

Every week, millions of us go to the movies,

and whether we're seeing a drama, a rom-com, or a science-fiction film,

the chances are it'll be accompanied by an orchestral soundtrack.

As a composer myself, I love working with a grand ensemble of brass

and strings, woodwind and percussion.

But how is it that people who would never go to a symphony concert

continue to embrace and indeed expect that rich orchestral texture

with their movies?

How did the orchestral sound become the mainstay

of the cinema experience?

Our story begins in the 1920s.

Cinema is emerging as the most popular form of entertainment.

But even in this, the silent era,

music was a key element of any visit to the cinema

and it could be grand and sophisticated.

Picturehouses often had their own small orchestras to accompany films.

Ranging from a few musicians to much larger ensembles

in the biggest theatres.

And the sound was to grow even more, thanks to an exciting new arrival.

HE PLAYS CLIMACTIC SCORE

To enjoy the full silent film experience,

I've come to America and the Loews Theatre in Jersey City.

Built in the '20s, it could hold more than 3,000 people

enjoying a pristine picture and state-of-the-art

musical accompaniment.

HE PLAYS DRAMATIC SCORE

-That was astonishing.

-Thank you.

-Wonderful, wonderful sound.

-Thank you.

-Tell me about this extraordinary monster.

This is what is considered a theatre pipe organ.

It's 100% pipes, it's all acoustic.

There is no amplification in this instrument. It works 100% on air.

You know, you're seeing a 50-foot screen here,

not like you would in a multiplex nowadays.

-So you need to fill that scope.

-So it's basically a one-man orchestra.

It is. You have your drums, cymbals...

BASS DRUM SOUND

And then you have all your wonderful toys,

which are actually real sound effects.

Right. We have a car horn.

HORN BLARES

Actually, you got two.

HORN BLARES

HORN TOOTS

If you're doing something fast, like a car chase...

HE PLAYS THE ORGAN

It's kind of hard...

HORN BLARES

-It's kind of hard to get to that.

-May I have a go?

-Yeah, sure.

Absolutely.

HE PLAYS ORGAN

Whether an organist or an orchestra, the accompanists pretty much

had carte blanche over what they chose to play.

So, seeing a film in one cinema could be a very different experience

from seeing it in another,

and the wrong music could be hugely damaging.

The studios had absolutely no power over what music the audience heard,

and they were determined to take control.

Enter, Don Juan, the first full-length feature film

with pre-recorded sound, released in 1926.

There's no dialogue, just music,

and the occasional gimmicky sound effect, as in this scene...

KNOCKING

Its soundtrack came in the form of a disc, just like a record,

which was synchronised with the projector.

That same system, called Vitaphone,

was used for a film called The Jazz Singer the following year.

Only The Jazz Singer featured spoken dialogue as well as music.

Just a few extemporised lines, but the first talkie had arrived.

..And the silent era was over.

The coming of sound had one strange musical consequence.

The studios were convinced that audiences wouldn't accept music

on the soundtrack unless they could see the musicians

actually playing it onscreen.

# All the time in the tropical clime

# Where they do that funky, funky dance... #

Now, this was fine where musicals were concerned,

but it meant that dramas were pretty much reduced to opening

and closing credit music, and that's it.

What we might call an underscore,

music added to enhance the action and dialogue, was out.

And for that reason, if for no other,

those early talkies are pretty dull affairs.

KING KONG ROARS

Then, in 1933, something big arrived that changed everything.

WOMAN SCREAMS

Everyone knows King Kong for its pioneering visual effects.

But for me, its greatest achievement is what we hear -

that thrilling score.

This was the film that proved

where music truly belongs - at the heart of the drama.

King Kong was a huge risk for its studio, RKO.

Would anyone buy into a film featuring extended

dialogue-free scenes between actress Fay Wray and a model gorilla?

The producers at RKO took a gamble

and broke with tradition by commissioning a score

that would run right the way through the film, underscoring dialogue,

action, everything.

They did this because they believed it was the only way they could

get a modern audience to empathise with what was happening on screen.

To do it, they turned to their own in-house composer,

who was, thankfully, the best in the business.

His name was Max Steiner

and he wrote the first truly modern film score.

But its roots were very much in the 19th century,

and Steiner's own origins.

The real home of film music isn't Hollywood,

or anywhere else in America or Britain.

It's Vienna, Austria.

This is where Max Steiner was born,

and where he and many other major film composers of his generation

gained their musical grounding.

In the 19th century, Vienna had become a leading centre

of European opera and narrative music.

Here, the great Austrian and German composers

refined the art of setting action to rich, emotive music.

A child prodigy,

Steiner's early career took him to London's West End,

where he spent eight years composing and conducting stage musicals.

His reward was to be interned as an enemy alien

at the outbreak of World War I.

Steiner quickly relocated to New York.

It was on Broadway that Steiner honed his musical skills

in the face of ambitious producers and a demanding public.

He had to be quick and adaptable,

delivering rich scores for dramas, comedies and romances.

So when Hollywood started creating its own soundtracks,

Steiner was exactly the kind of man they needed.

Steiner had been a musical director with RKO for three years

when he was confronted with the challenge of Kong.

How would he get people to care about this big gorilla?

KING KONG ROARS

Steiner decided to draw on the musical techniques

he'd learned as a child in Vienna.

Perhaps the most significant of these had been perfected

by Richard Wagner in his epic operas - the leitmotif.

A leitmotif is a short, very memorable musical idea or theme

that fits to the central character in the story, in this case Kong.

Here's his leitmotif.

HE PLAYS DRAMATIC SCORE

KING KONG LEITMOTIF

Now, other leitmotifs that spin off from that,

will link back to it both musically and dramatically.

So in other words, they'll either start with that three-note drop...

-HE PLAYS START OF LEITMOTIF

-..or run a variation on it.

For instance, Fay Wray's leitmotif is this one.

HE PLAYS LIGHTER SCORE

FAY WRAY LEITMOTIF

Much more romantic.

And this simple technique would become a key element

of the musical language of cinema.

Now, how do we feel for King Kong? Let's look at this scene.

QUIET GENTLE SCORE

You can tell that there's actually a gentleness in the music

with Kong, which we haven't heard before.

And now, as he begins to strip away her clothes,

we get something even more interesting.

We get this...

SLOW ROMANTIC TUNE

I think it's Kong discovering sex.

He's a red-blooded male and everybody in the auditorium

suddenly feels what he feels, which is that Fay Wray does look gorgeous.

And that's one of the things that Steiner has brought to this movie.

He's made us feel that a lump of plasticine actually is like us.

FAY WRAY LEITMOTIF

Fay Wray wakes up and we get her leitmotif again.

But we also get another ground-breaking aspect

of Steiner's score.

LOW WOODWIND SOUND

Look at how precisely the woodwinds fit the movement of Kong's fingers.

LOW WOODWIND SOUND

Such accuracy was unprecedented in film music.

How did Steiner pull if off?

This is a strip of 35 mil film, and this is the optical soundtrack.

It's the method they developed by the 1930s

to actually put sound onto film.

What Steiner did was to take the print of Kong he was going to use

for his recording sessions, and actually punch tiny holes

at regular intervals through that soundtrack area.

It gave him the tempo he needed for the music in the scene.

Then when he listened to the film through his headphones,

those holes made regular clicking sounds, like a metronome,

perfectly synchronised to the picture.

SOFT CLICKING

It became known as the click track, and it meant that Steiner

could conduct the orchestra exactly in time

with what was happening on screen.

The music bill came in at an eye-watering 50,000,

but audiences flocked to the picture.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

During the 1930s, Steiner's lead was followed by other European composers

who found a new life in Hollywood,

many fleeing political turmoil at home.

All brought a rich, orchestral style, formed in 19th-century Europe

to bear on their work, which was so prolific

that it quickly came to define the Hollywood sound.

They included Dimitri Tiomkin, composer of Lost Horizon

and It's A Wonderful Life.

And Franz Waxman, composer of Bride Of Frankenstein and Rebecca.

Steiner himself went on to compose Gone With The Wind

for David O Selznick, and Casablanca for Warner Bros,

in a career that would last another 30 years.

The scoring stage at Warner's, where Steiner and his colleagues

recorded many of their finest works, is still in use today.

Wow. When you think of the people who have worked in this space...

All the Warner Bros music was recorded here,

right through the '30s.

There's a suggestion that what made the Hollywood sound

was that they mixed together classical musicians

with big band horn players, and so the classical sound sounded rich

and full and symphonic, but the horn-playing was really punchy.

Can you imagine it...coming back off these walls?

That slap-back.

It's got power to it.

Everything into the mics very, very controllable.

Controlled through there with a range of guys, probably,

watching levels, keeping an eye on what's coming off

all these different instruments,

and locking to that picture there, which is the job of the conductor.

Orchestra sizes could range from 20 or so musicians,

to well over 80 - depending on the film.

Here...

Here's the control centre.

This is where the conductor would sit.

This is where he's watching the screen.

Straight there. His musicians here.

And he lifts the baton...

"Ladies and gentlemen, if you would."

In 1934, a man lifted a baton in this room

who'd been declared a genius by Gustav Mahler

while he was still in his teens,

who'd studied with Richard Strauss.

He was possibly one of Europe's greatest composers,

but now he was working for Hollywood.

His name was Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Up that rigging, you monkeys! Aloft!

There's no chains to hold you now!

Korngold's first original score for Warners was for swashbuckler

Captain Blood, and it showcases his signature style.

UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL SCORE

The music is romantic and richly layered,

stirring our spirits as Errol Flynn launches himself on the high seas,

yet nuanced enough to allow thoughtfulness and reflection.

ROMANTIC ORCHESTRAL SCORE

Korngold was another Viennese composer of operas

and concert works, regarded as one of the finest in Europe.

His reputation had already spread across the Atlantic

by the time he came to Hollywood to supervise

the music for a stage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Recognising the rich expressiveness of Korngold's music,

and his remarkable gift for melody,

Warners offered him an unprecedented deal.

This is Building 66,

which was the original music department at Warner Bros,

and it's amazing to think that all the composers

had their offices here.

Steiner was here, Waxman was here, and of course, Korngold was here.

But he was here under rather different circumstances

to the others.

Being the great catch that he was,

he'd been able to negotiate a contract for himself whereby

he had total control over how he wrote and what he wrote for.

He could choose which scenes he scored.

He could even ask for extra footage to be shot in those scenes

so that he could actually finish a piece at the point he wanted to.

The net result was that Korngold was able to write longer cues,

more complex and with more sheer musicality in them

than the movies had ever known before.

For a perfect example of this musicality,

listen to this scene from The Adventures Of Robin Hood.

Underscoring romantic scenes with music

had become a Hollywood convention.

But Korngold adds a new level of depth.

In less than a minute and a half,

he gives us three notably beautiful tunes,

seamlessly emerging from each other,

all enriching the characters and dialogue.

SLOW ROMANTIC SCORE I'm sorry to have to show you that.

But once these poor people were all happy and contented.

Just simple villagers who never harmed a soul.

And now, tortured. Eyes put out.

Tongues slit. Ears hacked off.

They come to me for protection against your Norman friends.

He starts off with a little love theme...

HE PLAYS A ROMANTIC TUNE

But it's quite timid,

and you'll notice that beneath that melody,

the chords are shifting all the time,

as if the ground is shifting beneath Marion's feet.

She can't be sure of him.

Strange?

Because I can feel for beaten, helpless people?

Korngold now introduces a new theme,

answering Marion's doubts, as it were.

Played on a cello, it reveals the depth of Robin's integrity.

DREAMY SCORE Norman or Saxon. What's that matter?

It's injustice I hate, not the Normans.

But it's lost you your rank, your lands.

It's made you a hunted outlaw

when you might have lived in comfort and security.

What's your reward for all of this?

Reward?

You just don't understand, do you?

HE PLAYS DREAMY SCORE

There we have Robin, sacrificing without expecting a reward,

and that's the moment she falls in love with him,

and you can see it in her eyes.

I do begin to see, a little now.

And at that moment, the tune itself changes.

It's this rather beautiful little roundelay,

which has a kind of ancient folk song feel to it.

It's almost like Greensleeves.

MELLOW SCORE

And it suggests their love is very pure, very innocent,

very "of the forest".

Very timeless.

Even by Korngold's standards,

there's something especially heart-felt and optimistic

about his music for The Adventures Of Robin Hood.

Perhaps that's because the film saved his and his family's lives.

The Korngolds had been living in their house in Vienna.

They came back to Hollywood so that Korngold

could look at Robin Hood and decide if he wanted to score it.

Initially, Korngold was reluctant.

All those swashbuckling fight scenes looked a little bit too

much like hard work.

But events were overtaking him, and while he and his family

were in Hollywood, the Nazis annexed his homeland, Austria.

As a Jewish intellectual,

Korngold had only just had the narrowest of escapes.

But from now on, Robin Hood seemed to mean more to him.

It's as if he really responded to this idea of a single man

standing up against oppression,

fighting for the rights of the individual, and for his freedom.

Warner Bros kept copies of all the scores Korngold wrote for them,

and they reveal the quality and detail of his work,

as Joseph Bille from the studio's music library showed me.

Neil, I have for you the conductor's score

for The Adventures Of Robin Hood.

Oh! That is so brilliant.

-We didn't throw anything out.

-No.

-We saved it all.

Here I can see the violins are playing...

HE HUMS THE VIOLIN'S TUNE

I love it. That's so brilliant.

It's quite complex. The expectation was the musicians were pretty good.

Korngold elevated the quality when he came to the studio.

-He demanded good musicians.

-Mm-hm.

Here's the fight.

It's a big, long cue, this, isn't it? A lot of notes.

Yes.

Here the speed, agility and sheer flare of Korngold's music

more than augments the action.

It gives us the effort and exhilaration of the fighters.

FAST UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

I believe that Korngold didn't like scoring fights

because there was too much going on and it needed too many notes.

-And you can see why. This is a lot of work.

-Yeah.

There we go, that's the love theme.

HE HUMS THE LOVE THEME

That is beautiful.

And one of the many things that makes him such a great composer.

He's such a fine melodist.

And the library holds another treasure.

This is the original piano that was in the music library

-since before the Second World War.

-Wow.

And this piano was used by pretty much everybody, I should imagine.

Korngold, Steiner, Waxman, Tiomkin.

I note there is a memoir of Korngold sitting down

and playing part of, I believe it's Kings Row.

And everybody heard this wonderful opening theme.

I mean, this won't be the right key, but that...

HE PLAYS KINGS ROW MAIN TITLE

-Brilliant!

-Just... Isn't it?

-It just blows you away.

-It's incredible.

-Yeah.

-It's incredible.

-So strong.

Yeah. Neil, I've got one more thing to show you, if I may.

This is one of Mr Korngold's batons.

-May I?

-Yes.

-Thank you.

Wow! That is astonishing.

And the idea that the man who had come up with what

we think of as film music,

cos that's my feeling about him,

is that he brought film music to a peak

of artistic invention,

even more so than Steiner did.

And this was the baton he used to conduct his own music.

Just magnificent.

The composers of golden age Hollywood mostly came from

the old world. They brought with them

a form of orchestration which thousands of people knew,

but when they got their hands on it,

they turned it into something that millions of people would hear.

America, for them, was a land of freedom,

and the celebrational feel

and the sense of embracing their new country,

went into their orchestration.

They turned that music into something

they could offer to all of us - what we think of as film music.

But the American experience isn't all about freedom and celebration.

There's a darker psychological side,

and by the 1940s, Hollywood was increasingly prepared to explore it.

A new kind of film emerged,

and it needed a soundtrack that was forged not in the old world

of the 19th century, but the new world of the 20th.

This is film noir,

a genre of cinema that took basic moralities -

good and bad, black and white -

and mixed them up together into the grey areas of human experience.

And I think that ambiguity is best captured in the title theme

of Double Indemnity,

perhaps the definitive film noir.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY THEME PLAYS

Listen to these chords.

They feel neither entirely major nor minor.

Neither entirely good, nor entirely bad.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY THEME PLAYS

Refusing to resolve, or reassure,

the music marches on relentlessly,

taking us towards an uncertain fate.

Double Indemnity was scored by Miklos Rozsa,

a Hungarian by birth who'd begun his career as a film composer in London.

An early disciple of the 20th-century modernists,

Rozsa experimented with complex tonalities

which were unusual to the ears of film audiences.

Double Indemnity has a classic noir plot in which a regular guy,

an insurance salesman - Walter Neff -

falls for a dangerously alluring married woman.

Together they hatch a scheme to murder her husband.

The actual killing is a brilliant example of less being more.

With just Barbara Stanwyck's expression

and Rozsa's score feeding our imagination.

CAR HORN BLARES

What are you doing that for?

CAR HORN BLARES

What are you honking the horn for?

STRANGLED GROAN

CLIMACTIC MUSIC DIMS

So, the murder is done.

But for Neff's plan to work...

the alibi has to be watertight.

Neff has to impersonate the husband

and make it look like he fell off a train.

And it's at this point that Rozsa does something very interesting.

He gives us that striking opening music again,

only this time in a completely different way.

SOFTER MUSIC PLAYS

It's the classic symphonic device of a variation on a theme.

Rozsa has softened that music down to something much more human.

We are being invited to go along on the journey

these characters are taking,

even to empathise with them.

As such, Rozsa's music is giving us

the underlying message of film noir...

this could be you.

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

Rozsa had shown that even composers trained in Europe

were starting to embrace a much more contemporary sound.

But the man who would become America's preeminent

modern film composer was very much a home-grown talent.

It's here on New York's East Side

that Bernard Herrmann was born and raised.

It's hard to imagine somewhere more different

to the 19th-century elegance of Steiner

and Korngold's Vienna.

Instead Herrmann grew up in the greatest metropolis

of the 20th century.

Cacophonous, clashing, contradictory,

the city would shape his character and his innate musical gift.

From being a small child,

he just devoured any music.

He used to read scores the way you and I read a paperback book.

He used to have them under the desk at school in a maths lesson

and things and get into trouble for it.

Herrmann honed his talents

at the most creative broadcaster in America -

CBS Radio.

At their Madison Avenue studios,

he created music for innovative radio dramas

including perhaps the most daring ever broadcast -

Orson Welles' War Of The Worlds.

It made Welles a national sensation.

Hollywood quickly came knocking.

And when Welles agreed to direct his debut picture for RKO,

he insisted that Herrmann should do the score.

Welles planned to depict the rise

and fall of a fictional great American figure

with unprecedented psychological depth and insight.

He needed a score from Herrmann that could take the audience

inside the mind and world of this character from the outset.

And that's what Herrmann delivers in Citizen Kane's celebrated

dialogue-free opening sequence.

Herrmann, trained in radio, has learnt about economy.

Both economy of time -

you haven't got very much time

to make the statement you want to make -

but also the economy of music.

Making that statement in as few notes and as few chords as possible.

BROODING MUSIC PLAYS

The opening image is accompanied by brooding, mysterious,

Wagneresque chords.

There's a strength and a size to them,

but then Herrmann brings in a strange,

ambiguous leitmotif of just five notes.

CITIZEN KANE LEITMOTIF PLAYS

HE PLAYS CITIZEN KANE LEITMOTIF

Now, they're very memorable.

We could hear those again and again and again.

They might be in a very slightly different pattern...

HE PLAYS LEITMOTIF IN DIFFERENT PATTERN

..but it's plain and it must have a meaning,

and we don't know what that meaning is yet.

As we move beyond the fence,

Herrmann introduces a striking new element.

VIBRAPHONE PLAYS

HE PLAYS CHORDS THAT VIBRATE

Beautiful, shimmering,

strange little discord across the vibraphone, which he uses a lot,

vibraphone at the top giving that shimmer, brooding chords underneath.

You'll hear that later on in his career as well.

HE PLAYS CHORDS

It just deepens the mystery.

The five-note theme accompanies us

as we finally see inside the building.

It's bringing us closer to something,

but we don't know what.

Rosebud.

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

Kane has died, but the five notes return.

HE PLAYS THE FIVE NOTES

Only now they resolve.

SOFT MUSIC PLAYS

Until now, the whole of that sequence has been

a lack of resolution stretching like elastic,

and we've been aware that it hasn't resolved

until the moment it does.

Then suddenly this man's important to us.

We care about him.

And Herrmann has done that with the minimum number of chords

and the minimum number of notes.

The potency of that music is pure Bernard Herrmann.

Herrmann provided the music for Welles' ill-fated

follow-up to Citizen Kane - The Magnificent Ambersons -

before embarking on a round of diverse and acclaimed scores.

But it was more than a decade before he found a similarly brilliant

collaborator when he became Alfred Hitchcock's composer of choice.

1958 saw them working on a film whose reputation is now

rivalled only by Citizen Kane

as the greatest American picture ever made.

It's in Bernard Herrmann's contrary nature

that his most haunting lyrical score

and his personal favourite amongst the scores he wrote for Hitchcock,

should be inspired by a dark,

morbid tale in which the hero falls in love with a dead woman.

In Vertigo, James Stewart plays a detective

who is asked to protect a woman, played by Kim Novak,

who believes she's possessed by the spirit of her suicidal ancestor.

But this is a film in which nothing is as it seems,

and Herrmann's score reflects this.

One sequence in particular, he pulls off a clever musical double bluff.

Stewart has tailed Novak to an art gallery

which contains a portrait of her dead ancestor.

The music here is eerie and disturbing.

DISTURBING MUSIC PLAYS

But when the scene shifts as Stewart follows Novak

to the Golden Gate Bridge,

the score also shifts almost imperceptibly.

A tune begins to emerge.

SOFTER MUSIC PLAYS

By Hitchcock standards, this is a very long travelling scene,

and it's unusual for him,

except that of course the music's telling us more than we can see.

What's happening is that there's a warmth growing in the music.

A sense that these two people in their separate cars have got a link.

Slowly, but surely, James Stewart's compassion for

the Kim Novak character is becoming love.

The cars arrive at the Bridge,

and the score too comes to some sort of a rest.

But it maintains a neutral, quizzical feel.

PIERCING NOTES

That jump is a complete shock.

The music had done nothing to warn us that was coming,

but it goes further -

it sounds like the score didn't know she was going to jump.

Those high horn arpeggios are screaming for help,

for someone, preferably James Stewart, to dive in and get her out.

Herrmann's remarkable gift for expressing our most primal emotions

in orchestral form would result in his best-known piece of music.

But it very nearly didn't happen.

Because during the production of Psycho in 1960,

Alfred Hitchcock was insistent that there should be no music

for the murder in the shower.

Herrmann ignored Hitchcock's instruction and went ahead

and scored the shower scene -

a brave decision that really only a talented

and trusted collaborator could make.

And this is the result.

This is Bernard Herrmann's own copy of the original score for Psycho.

It's one of the most famous pieces of music in film history,

and you can see the notes stabbing down through the page,

going lower and lower, deeper and deeper strings,

as if the knife is going in deeper and deeper each time.

SHOWER SCENE MUSIC PLAYS

Perhaps more than any other scene in cinema,

the Psycho shower sequence goes to prove that of all

the directors' collaborators,

it's the composer who's most able to raise a film to new heights.

However, I also feel that in this case, Herrmann's success led him

directly to making what he called, "the biggest mistake of my life."

Shocking and sensational,

Psycho felt like a film for the 1960s,

appealing to a younger audience with less conventional tastes.

But this new generation was also embracing TV and pop music

at the expense of cinema.

Hollywood and Hitchcock struggled to keep up.

In 1964, Hitchcock and Herrmann's winning streak

came to a sudden end with Marnie.

This so-called sex mystery

singularly failed to arouse the public.

So, the following year,

as he set about making the Cold War thriller Torn Curtain,

Hitchcock was under unprecedented pressure to deliver a hit.

He told Herrmann he wanted to break away from old-fashioned music

because today's younger audiences required a beat and a rhythm.

Herrmann said he'd be happy to comply,

but he too was under pressure.

His second marriage had come to and end.

Holed up in this hotel,

well-known as a haven for divorced Hollywood creative types,

Herrmann wasn't in an ideal frame of mind.

Herrmann cracked on for the score of Torn Curtain.

But he wasn't giving Hitch the score that Hitch had asked for.

He was giving him a Bernard Herrmann score.

Dark, tough, ruthless,

angry.

It included 12 flutes which Herrmann thought would sound terrifying.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS

I think he thought he could somehow shock Hitchcock

back into being a great director

by giving him a great Bernard Herrmann score.

The problem was this wasn't Psycho.

He couldn't just ignore Hitchcock's demands

because Hitch himself was in trouble with the studio.

Hitchcock turned up at the recording sessions unaware that Herrmann

had been less than scrupulous in following his instructions.

Hitch listened to the first cue,

then furious,

he fired Herrmann on the spot.

Possibly the greatest partnership of director

and composer in Hollywood history

had been irreparably sundered.

I think he wished that they could be friends again.

I think he deeply wished they could.

But they couldn't make up after all that.

He didn't ever regret writing a piece of music that wasn't

what Hitchcock had specified?

He never regretted doing what he did on Torn Curtain.

He was right.

Hitchcock was wrong.

Herrmann scored just three more films during the rest of the decade,

none of them for Hollywood.

But in the 1970s,

he found himself back in demand.

Ironically, from a younger generation of American directors

who had grown up with his work and admired it.

In 1975, Herrmann was asked to score a film by one of the rising stars

of this generation - Martin Scorsese -

who was forging a new kind of cinema -

tough, streetwise, yet at times, poetic.

But Herrmann still took a little persuading.

I called him and said, "I'd like you to do the score in my picture."

He said, "What's it called?"

I said, "It's called Taxi Driver."

He said, "I don't do pictures about cabbies."

I said, "Actually, it's not a film about a cabby...

"Let me just send you the script."

"Well, all right, send the script."

TAXI DRIVER THEME PLAYS

Menacing, building percussion beats,

ushering edgy, unsettling, horn chords.

It's an attention grabber.

Bernard Herrmann's classic opening to Taxi Driver,

setting the scene for everything that's to come.

And then the surprise.

A beautiful, wistful,

romantic saxophone tune just as the shot cuts to

the eyes and the perspective of the film's protagonist Travis Bickle.

SAXOPHONE PLAYS

That duality in the music perfectly captures

the contradictions in Robert DeNiro's character.

Is Travis an everyman, or a madman?

Someone yearning for love and warmth,

or a psychopath?

It's possibly the finest example of Bernard Herrmann's ability to

get inside a character's head since Vertigo.

I don't know what's going on inside him,

except that it's disturbing and dangerous.

And at the same time empathetic in a way, so the only person who

could bring this on music I thought would be Bernard Herrmann.

But I hadn't imagined the power that he would bring to it.

He also told me he wanted to play with jazz for one of the first times.

There was an element of noir-ish '40s in that...

which I liked.

Travis' nocturnal monologues are accompanied by

a looming underscore that constantly suggests

the potential for violence lurking beneath his angry thoughts.

Only animals come out at night.

Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers,

junkies...

sick, venal.

Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.

Herrmann, though unwell,

had insisted on flying to Los Angeles for the final

Taxi Driver recording sessions.

He also planned to meet several other directors keen to work

with him now his reputation was firmly re-established.

But early on Christmas Eve, 1975,

just hours after supervising the final cues for Taxi Driver,

Herrmann died in his sleep.

Do you think he would be pleased at the way he's now seen

as such a major figure?

He would think...

"Quite right too. How long it took them to get there.

"Damn it," is what he'd think.

Dark and realistic,

Taxi Driver had seemed to capture the mood of America towards

the end of the Vietnam era.

Yet after the war, and the Bicentennial Celebrations in 1976,

the country seemed hungry for more optimistic,

carefree cinema.

And the sound of golden age Hollywood experienced

a surprising rebirth.

STAR WARS THEME PLAYS

HE PLAYS SAME THEME

Now, just a minute.

That's reminding me of something.

How about this...

HE PLAYS THEME IN A ROMANTIC TUNE

Erich Wolfgang Korngold's theme to Kings Row.

Coincidence?

Well, maybe not entirely.

To bring emotional resonance to the Star Wars films,

full of alien characters and worlds,

director George Lucas wanted composer John Williams

to write in a traditional, romantic, symphonic style that echoed

the 1930s serials and adventure films that had inspired him.

PRINCESS LEIA: Here they come.

Here, Luke and Leia could be Robin Hood and Marian

as they swing across the chasm to a cool, goldesque accompaniment.

Good luck.

But where Williams really lives up to his golden age forebears

is in extended cues like this one that switch back

and forth between different characters and situations

without ever sacrificing the unity and flow of the music,

thus making the visual action all the more seamless.

-C3PO:

-Where could they be?

-R2-D2 CHIRPS

Close the blast doors.

Open the blast doors!

Open the blast doors!

The huge success of the Star Wars films showed that the

classical orchestral score, pioneered by the likes of

Korngold and Steiner no longer belong to the past...

I love you.

I know.

..but have acquired a timeless archetypal quality.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS THEME

And that sound has continued to grace cinema

since Williams put it back on the map.

The question today is

whether it's still possible to work within that orchestral tradition

without letting it become a straightjacket or indeed a cliche.

It's a challenge faced by most leading film composers,

whether they're following in the footsteps of the great golden-age

figures or the more modern, complex sounds of Herrmann and Rozsa.

German-born Hans Zimmer is one of the kings of the kind of big

Hollywood studio score that would have been given to Steiner

or Korngold 80 years ago.

Working closely with powerful directors

like Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan and Terrence Malick,

Zimmer's enjoyed an unusual degree of involvement in their films

from a very early stage of production.

In the case of Scott's Gladiator,

in 2000,

he influenced not only the sound, but even the shape of the film.

I read the script, and it used to be the title Gladiator,

and then you'd go into this battle.

And...

one of the things I always felt really strongly about with Ridley,

he's very poetic, and this structure wasn't allowing any poetry.

We needed to figure out a way of...

doing a really poetic move right at the beginning

so that it will allow you later on to go and take chances.

The idea of holding a shot of the hand caressing the wheat,

if you had put that into the script,

that's the first thing that would have come out.

It needed the music to validate this idea,

and I do think it made it a different movie.

It's important to set up the tone at an early stage.

SOFT MUSIC PLAYS

After the opening image of the hand on the wheat,

Zimmer still had to score the huge battle scene

which directly follows it.

It required more than ten minutes of continuous music

matched to the action.

If one's being very formulaic about it,

a battle scene feels like, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four...

-But I didn't want to do a march.

-No.

-Exactly.

I did not want to do militaristic music.

And I thought,

"What if I did the whole action thing as a Viennese waltz?",

make this dance into the savage feast.

DRAMATIC BATTLE MUSIC PLAYS

And something happens

when you have...

..I don't care how many people -

string quartet up to a 100-piece orchestra -

directing their emotion.

Other than music, there are very few places on Earth where you get that.

Zimmer would again draw on the power of the orchestra for Inception,

director Christopher Nolan's film about characters who can build

and manipulate entire dream worlds.

Facing the same challenge that Max Steiner did with King Kong,

Zimmer had to make the unbelievable believable.

Here, these simple orchestral chords feel both huge

and restrained,

feeding our awe while at the same time playing the scene

entirely straight.

ORCHESTRAL CHORDS PLAY

That big chord motif occurs

throughout the film's complex twists.

People were going, "Oh, this might be a little bit hard to understand."

This is where I can help.

When I thought, "If I can somehow make the audience feel that

"they're in a little boat on this river,

"and the music is a river, and it will just take you on a journey.

"Sometimes it will get a bit rocky.

"Sometimes it gets a little exciting and then sometimes it becomes calm."

It is a journey, and just trust the music.

CLIMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

By the climax of Inception,

the narrative cutting between multiple characters, dream worlds

and a barrage of explosive action,

Zimmer's power chords are binding everything together.

And incredibly, they make an already enormous spectacular

feel even bigger.

ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC PLAYS

The orchestra is a wonderfully flexible tool,

enabling us to go from the smallest piano motif

to the most sweeping epic gesture.

But what's really kept it alive as the sound of cinema is

the brilliance of composers who've understood how to

adapt its language,

how to keep it fresh

and relevant for the changing needs of audiences and films.

Next time - from The Beatles to Tarantino,

how popular music rocked the film soundtrack.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd