Agent film for orchestra
A score shows the quality of Bernard Herrmann's film music for "North by Northwest" down to the last detail.
Far too rarely do film scores make it into print. Yet such scores are extremely helpful for studying details of the composition, which is often acoustically relegated to the background, beyond freely compiled "suites". This is particularly rewarding when the music proves to be suggestive and independent. For example, the music composed by Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) for Alfred Hitchcock's ingenious agent thriller peppered with subtle irony North by Northwest (1959).
The very first bars are formative: a fandango rhythm in the timpani (readable as 6/8 in double time), answered by a syncopated alternating note in the low strings (double time as 3/4). The overture describes the pulsation of the big city, later the wild ride on a coastal road. Rhythms, themes, harmonic twists and timbres run through the entire film as leitmotifs - and thus unify the almost uninterrupted sequence of dramatic scenes, whose trigger in the film is ostensibly dated November 24, 1958 by the insertion of an issue of The Evening Star from the following day (incidentally, albeit graphically altered, with an authentic headline). The legendary scene in the cornfield is completely without music (and for a breathtaking stretch also without language).
The printed score also includes all those numbers that were (for good reasons) omitted or shortened in the film. A descriptive analysis on twenty pages makes the musical text comprehensible even for film buffs. A continuation with further legendary Herrmann settings would be desirable, for example of Vertigo or Psycho.
Bernard Herrmann: North by Northwest (1959), score, Omni 50791, XX+211 p., € 79.00, Omni Music Publishing/Schott, Los Angeles/Mainz 2022, ISBN 978-1-73450-791-1
