Bernard Herrmann (born Max Herman; June 29, 1911 – December 24, 1975) was a… Read Full Bio ↴Bernard Herrmann (born Max Herman; June 29, 1911 – December 24, 1975) was an American composer best known for his work in composing for motion pictures. As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers.
An Academy Award-winner (for The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1941; later renamed All That Money Can Buy), Herrmann is particularly known for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, most famously Psycho, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo. He also composed scores for many other movies, including Citizen Kane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Cape Fear, and Taxi Driver. He worked extensively in radio drama (composing for Orson Welles), composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and many TV programs, including Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and Have Gun–Will Travel.
Herrmann, the son of a Jewish middle-class family of Russian origin, was born in New York City as Max Herman. His father, Abram Dardik, was from Ukraine and had changed the family name. Herrmann attended high school at DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys public school at that time on 10th Avenue and 59th Street in New York City. His father encouraged music activity, taking him to the opera, and encouraging him to learn the violin. After winning a composition prize at the age of thirteen, he decided to concentrate on music, and went to New York University where he studied with Percy Grainger and Philip James. He also studied at the Juilliard School and, at the age of twenty, formed his own orchestra, the New Chamber Orchestra of New York.
In 1934, he joined the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) as a staff conductor. Within two years he was appointed music director of the Columbia Workshop, an experimental radio drama series for which Herrmann composed or arranged music (one notable program was The Fall of the City). Within nine years, he had become Chief Conductor to the CBS Symphony Orchestra. He was responsible for introducing more new works to US audience than any other conductor — he was a particular champion of Charles Ives' music, which was virtually unknown at that time. Herrmann's radio programs of concert music, which were broadcast under such titles as Invitation to Music and Exploring Music, were planned in an unconventional way and featured rarely heard music, old and new, which was not heard in public concert halls. Examples include broadcasts devoted to music of famous amateurs or of notable royal personages, such as the music of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Henry VIII, Charles I, Louis XIII and so on.
Herrmann's many US broadcast premieres during the 1940s included Myaskovsky's 22nd Symphony, Gian Francesco Malipiero's 3rd Symphony, Richard Arnell's 1st Symphony, Edmund Rubbra's 3rd Symphony and Ives' 3rd Symphony. He performed the works of Hermann Goetz, Alexander Gretchaninov, Niels Gade and Franz Liszt, and received many outstanding American musical awards and grants for his unusual programming and championship of little-known composers. In Dictators of the Baton, David Ewen wrote that Herrmann was "one of the most invigorating influences in the radio music of the past decade". Also during the 1940s, Herrmann's own concert music was taken up and played by such celebrated maestri as Leopold Stokowski, Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Thomas Beecham and Eugene Ormandy.
Between two movies made by Orson Welles (see below), he wrote the score for William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), for which he won his only Oscar. In 1947, Herrmann scored the atmospheric music for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. In 1951 his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still featured the Theremin.
In 1934, Herrmann met a young CBS secretary and aspiring writer, Lucille Fletcher. Fletcher was impressed with Herrmann's work, and the two began a five-year courtship. Marriage was delayed by the objections of Fletcher's parents, who disliked the fact that Herrmann was a Jew and were put off by what they viewed as his abrasive personality. The couple finally married on October 2, 1939. They had two daughters: Dorothy (b. 1941) and Wendy (b. 1945). Fletcher was to become a noted radio scriptwriter, and she and Herrmann collaborated on several projects throughout their career. He contributed the score to the famed 1941 radio presentation of Fletcher's original story, The Hitch-Hiker, on the Orson Welles Show; and Fletcher helped to write the libretto for his operatic adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The couple divorced in 1948. The next year he married Lucille's cousin, Lucy (Kathy Lucille) Anderson. That marriage lasted 16 years, until 1964.
Herrmann's music is typified by frequent use of ostinati (short repeating patterns), novel orchestration and, in his film scores, an ability to portray character traits not altogether obvious from other elements of the film.
Early in his life, Herrmann committed himself to a creed of personal integrity at the price of unpopularity: the quintessential artist. His philosophy is summarized by a favorite Tolstoy quote: ‘Eagles fly alone and sparrows fly in flocks.' Thus, Herrmann would only compose music for films when he was allowed the artistic liberty to compose what he wished without the director getting in the way: the cause of the split with Hitchcock after over a decade of composing scores for the director's films.
His philosophy of orchestrating film was based on the assumption that the musicians were selected and hired for the recording session — that this music was not constrained to the musical forces of the concert hall. For example, his use of nine harps in Beneath the 12 Mile Reef created an extraordinary underwater-like sonic landscape; his use of four alto flutes in Citizen Kane contributed to the creepy opening, only matched by the use of 12 flutes in his unused Torn Curtain score; and his use of the serpent in White Witch Doctor is possibly the first use of that instrument in a film score.
Herrmann said: "To orchestrate is like a thumbprint. I can't understand having someone else do it. It would be like someone putting color to your paintings."
Herrmann subscribed to the belief that the best film music should be able to stand on its own legs when detached from the film for which it was originally written. To this end, he made several well-known recordings for Decca of arrangements of his own film music as well as music of other prominent composers.
Herrmann is still a prominent figure in the world of film music today, despite his death in 1975. As such, his career has been studied extensively by biographers and documentarians. His string-only score for Psycho, for example, set the standard when it became a new way to write music for thrillers (rather than big fully orchestrated pieces). In 1992 a documentary, Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann, was made about him. Also in 1992 a 2½-hour-long National Public Radio documentary was produced on his life — Bernard Herrmann: a Celebration of his Life and Music (Bruce A. Crawford). In 1991, Steven C. Smith wrote a Herrmann biography titled A Heart at Fire's Center, a quotation from a favorite Stephen Spender poem of Herrmann's.
His music continues to be used in films and recordings after his death. "Georgie's Theme" from Herrmann's score for the 1968 film Twisted Nerve is whistled by one-eyed nurse Elle Driver in the hospital corridor scene in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). The opening theme from Vertigo was used in the prologue to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" video, and during a flashback sequence in the pilot episode of FX's American Horror Story, which also featured "Georgie's Theme" in later episodes as a recurring musical motif for the character of Tate. Vertigo's opening sequence was also copied for the opening sequence of the 1993 miniseries, "Tales Of The City", an adaptation of a series of books by Armistead Maupin. Fellow film composer Danny Elfman adapted Herrmann's music for Psycho for use in director Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake and borrowed from Herrmann's "Mountaintop/Sunrise" theme, from Journey to the Center of the Earth, for his main Batman theme. On its 1977 album Ra, American progressive rock group Utopia also adapted "Mountaintop/Sunrise," in a rock arrangement, as the introduction to the album's opening song, "Communion With The Sun." And most recently, Ludovic Bource used the love theme from Vertigo literally in the last reels of 2011's The Artist.
Herrmann's film music is well represented on disc. His friend, John Steven Lasher, has produced several albums featuring Urtext recordings, including Battle of Neretva, Citizen Kane, The Kentuckian, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Night Digger and Sisters, under various labels owned by Fifth Continent Australia Pty Ltd.
Herrmann was an early and enthusiastic proponent of the music of Charles Ives. He met Ives in the early 1930s, performed many of his works while conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, and conducted Ives' Second Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra on his first visit to London in 1956. Herrmann later made a recording of the work in 1972 and this reunion with the LSO, after more than a decade, was significant to him for several reasons - he had long hoped to record his own interpretation of the symphony, feeling that Leonard Bernstein's 1951 version was "overblown and inaccurate"; on a personal level, it also served to assuage Herrmann's long-held feeling that he had been snubbed by the orchestra after his first visit in 1956. The notoriously prickly composer had also been enraged by the recent appointment of the LSO's new chief conductor André Previn, who Herrmann detested, and deprecatingly referred to as "that jazz boy".[19]
Herrmann was also an ardent champion of the romantic-era composer Joachim Raff, whose music had fallen into near-oblivion by the 1960s. During the 1940s, Herrmann had played Raff's 3rd and 5th Symphonies in his CBS radio broadcasts. In May 1970, Herrmann conducted the world premiere recording of Raff's Fifth Symphony Lenore for the Unicorn label, which he mainly financed himself.[20] The recording did not attract much notice in its time, despite receiving excellent reviews, but is now considered a major turning-point in the rehabilitation of Raff as a composer.
In 1996, Sony Classical released a recording of Herrmann's music, The Film Scores, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. This disc received the 1998 Cannes Classical Music Award for "Best 20th-Century Orchestral Recording." It was also nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Engineered Album, Classical." In 2004 Sony Classical re-released this superb recording at a budget price in its "Great Performances" series (SNYC 92767SK).
Decca reissued on CD a series of Phase 4 Stereo recordings with Herrmann conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, mostly in excerpts from his various film scores, including one devoted to music from several of the Hitchcock films (including Psycho, Marnie and Vertigo). In the liner notes of the Hitchcock Phase 4 album, Herrmann said that the suite from The Trouble with Harry was a "portrait of Hitch". Another album was devoted to his fantasy film scores — a few of them being the films of the special effects animator Ray Harryhausen, including music from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and The Three Worlds of Gulliver. His other Phase 4 Stereo LPs of the 1970s included Music from the Great Film Classics (suites and excerpts from Jane Eyre, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Citizen Kane and The Devil and Daniel Webster); and "The Fantasy World of Bernard Herrmann" (Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Fahrenheit 451.)
Fellow composers Richard Band, Graeme Revell, Christopher Young, Danny Elfman and Brian Tyler consider Herrmann to be a major inspiration. In 1985, Richard Band's opening theme to Re-Animator borrows heavily from Herrmann's opening score to Psycho. In 1990, Graeme Revell had adapted Herrmann's music from Psycho for its television sequel-prequel Psycho IV: The Beginning. Revell's early orchestral music during the early nineties, such as Child's Play 2 (which its music score being a reminiscent of Herrmann's scores to the 1973 film Sisters, due to the synthesizers incorporated in the chilling parts of the orchestral score) as well as the 1963 The Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" (which inspired the Child's Play franchise), were very similar to Herrmann's work. Also, Revell's score for the video game Call of Duty 2 was very much a reminiscent of Herrmann's very rare WWII music scores such as The Naked and the Dead and Battle of Neretva. Young, who was a jazz drummer at first, listened to Herrmann's works which convinced him to be a film composer. Elfman has said he first became interested in film music upon seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still, and he paid homage to that score in his music for Mars Attacks! Tyler's score for Bill Paxton's film Frailty was greatly influenced by Herrmann's film music.
Sir George Martin, best known for producing and often adding orchestration to The Beatles music, cites Herrmann as an influence in his own work, particularly in Martin's scoring of the Beatles' song "Eleanor Rigby". Martin later expanded on this as an extended suite for McCartney's 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street, which features a very recognizable hommage to Herrmann's score for Psycho.
Avant-garde composer/saxophonist/producer John Zorn, in the biographical film A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky, cited Bernard Herrmann as one of his favorite composers and a major influence.
Elmer Bernstein adapted and arranged Herrmann's original score from J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962), and used it for the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake. After Bernstein realized there was not enough music in the score from the original film, he added sections from Herrmann's unused score for Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, including the music composed for the murder of the character "Gromek". The score for Cape Fear evokes both the gathering clouds of the destructive hurricane and the murderous intent of killer Max Cady. Bernstein also recorded Herrmann's score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which was released in 1975 on the Varese Sarabande label later reissued on CD in the 1990s.
Charles Gerhardt conducted a 1974 RCA recording entitled "The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann" with the National Philharmonic Orchestra. It featured Suites from Citizen Kane (with Kiri Te Kanawa singing Salammbo's Aria) and White Witch Doctor, along with music from On Dangerous Ground, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, and the Hangover Square Piano Concerto.
During his last years in England, between 1966 and 1975, Herrmann made several LPs of other composers' music for assorted record labels. These included Phase 4 Stereo recordings of Gustav Holst's The Planets and Charles Ives's 2nd Symphony, as well as an album entitled "The Impressionists" (music by Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré and Honegger) and another entitled "The Four Faces of Jazz" (works by Weill, Gershwin, Stravinsky and Milhaud). As well as recording his own film music in Phase 4 Stereo he made LPs of movie scores by others, such as "Great Shakespearean Films" (music by Shostakovich for Hamlet, Walton for Richard III and Rózsa for Julius Caesar), and "Great British Film Music" (movie scores by Lambert, Bax, Benjamin, Walton, Vaughan Williams, and Bliss).
For Unicorn Records, he recorded several of his own concert-hall works, including the cantata Moby Dick, his opera Wuthering Heights, his Symphony, and the suites Welles Raises Kane and The Devil and Daniel Webster.
Pristine Audio has released two CDs of Herrmann's radio broadcasts. One is devoted to a CBS programme from 1945 that features music by Handel, Vaughan Williams and Elgar; the other is devoted to works by Charles Ives, Robert Russell Bennett and Herrmann himself.
An Academy Award-winner (for The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1941; later renamed All That Money Can Buy), Herrmann is particularly known for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, most famously Psycho, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo. He also composed scores for many other movies, including Citizen Kane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Cape Fear, and Taxi Driver. He worked extensively in radio drama (composing for Orson Welles), composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and many TV programs, including Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and Have Gun–Will Travel.
Herrmann, the son of a Jewish middle-class family of Russian origin, was born in New York City as Max Herman. His father, Abram Dardik, was from Ukraine and had changed the family name. Herrmann attended high school at DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys public school at that time on 10th Avenue and 59th Street in New York City. His father encouraged music activity, taking him to the opera, and encouraging him to learn the violin. After winning a composition prize at the age of thirteen, he decided to concentrate on music, and went to New York University where he studied with Percy Grainger and Philip James. He also studied at the Juilliard School and, at the age of twenty, formed his own orchestra, the New Chamber Orchestra of New York.
In 1934, he joined the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) as a staff conductor. Within two years he was appointed music director of the Columbia Workshop, an experimental radio drama series for which Herrmann composed or arranged music (one notable program was The Fall of the City). Within nine years, he had become Chief Conductor to the CBS Symphony Orchestra. He was responsible for introducing more new works to US audience than any other conductor — he was a particular champion of Charles Ives' music, which was virtually unknown at that time. Herrmann's radio programs of concert music, which were broadcast under such titles as Invitation to Music and Exploring Music, were planned in an unconventional way and featured rarely heard music, old and new, which was not heard in public concert halls. Examples include broadcasts devoted to music of famous amateurs or of notable royal personages, such as the music of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Henry VIII, Charles I, Louis XIII and so on.
Herrmann's many US broadcast premieres during the 1940s included Myaskovsky's 22nd Symphony, Gian Francesco Malipiero's 3rd Symphony, Richard Arnell's 1st Symphony, Edmund Rubbra's 3rd Symphony and Ives' 3rd Symphony. He performed the works of Hermann Goetz, Alexander Gretchaninov, Niels Gade and Franz Liszt, and received many outstanding American musical awards and grants for his unusual programming and championship of little-known composers. In Dictators of the Baton, David Ewen wrote that Herrmann was "one of the most invigorating influences in the radio music of the past decade". Also during the 1940s, Herrmann's own concert music was taken up and played by such celebrated maestri as Leopold Stokowski, Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Thomas Beecham and Eugene Ormandy.
Between two movies made by Orson Welles (see below), he wrote the score for William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), for which he won his only Oscar. In 1947, Herrmann scored the atmospheric music for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. In 1951 his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still featured the Theremin.
In 1934, Herrmann met a young CBS secretary and aspiring writer, Lucille Fletcher. Fletcher was impressed with Herrmann's work, and the two began a five-year courtship. Marriage was delayed by the objections of Fletcher's parents, who disliked the fact that Herrmann was a Jew and were put off by what they viewed as his abrasive personality. The couple finally married on October 2, 1939. They had two daughters: Dorothy (b. 1941) and Wendy (b. 1945). Fletcher was to become a noted radio scriptwriter, and she and Herrmann collaborated on several projects throughout their career. He contributed the score to the famed 1941 radio presentation of Fletcher's original story, The Hitch-Hiker, on the Orson Welles Show; and Fletcher helped to write the libretto for his operatic adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The couple divorced in 1948. The next year he married Lucille's cousin, Lucy (Kathy Lucille) Anderson. That marriage lasted 16 years, until 1964.
Herrmann's music is typified by frequent use of ostinati (short repeating patterns), novel orchestration and, in his film scores, an ability to portray character traits not altogether obvious from other elements of the film.
Early in his life, Herrmann committed himself to a creed of personal integrity at the price of unpopularity: the quintessential artist. His philosophy is summarized by a favorite Tolstoy quote: ‘Eagles fly alone and sparrows fly in flocks.' Thus, Herrmann would only compose music for films when he was allowed the artistic liberty to compose what he wished without the director getting in the way: the cause of the split with Hitchcock after over a decade of composing scores for the director's films.
His philosophy of orchestrating film was based on the assumption that the musicians were selected and hired for the recording session — that this music was not constrained to the musical forces of the concert hall. For example, his use of nine harps in Beneath the 12 Mile Reef created an extraordinary underwater-like sonic landscape; his use of four alto flutes in Citizen Kane contributed to the creepy opening, only matched by the use of 12 flutes in his unused Torn Curtain score; and his use of the serpent in White Witch Doctor is possibly the first use of that instrument in a film score.
Herrmann said: "To orchestrate is like a thumbprint. I can't understand having someone else do it. It would be like someone putting color to your paintings."
Herrmann subscribed to the belief that the best film music should be able to stand on its own legs when detached from the film for which it was originally written. To this end, he made several well-known recordings for Decca of arrangements of his own film music as well as music of other prominent composers.
Herrmann is still a prominent figure in the world of film music today, despite his death in 1975. As such, his career has been studied extensively by biographers and documentarians. His string-only score for Psycho, for example, set the standard when it became a new way to write music for thrillers (rather than big fully orchestrated pieces). In 1992 a documentary, Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann, was made about him. Also in 1992 a 2½-hour-long National Public Radio documentary was produced on his life — Bernard Herrmann: a Celebration of his Life and Music (Bruce A. Crawford). In 1991, Steven C. Smith wrote a Herrmann biography titled A Heart at Fire's Center, a quotation from a favorite Stephen Spender poem of Herrmann's.
His music continues to be used in films and recordings after his death. "Georgie's Theme" from Herrmann's score for the 1968 film Twisted Nerve is whistled by one-eyed nurse Elle Driver in the hospital corridor scene in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). The opening theme from Vertigo was used in the prologue to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" video, and during a flashback sequence in the pilot episode of FX's American Horror Story, which also featured "Georgie's Theme" in later episodes as a recurring musical motif for the character of Tate. Vertigo's opening sequence was also copied for the opening sequence of the 1993 miniseries, "Tales Of The City", an adaptation of a series of books by Armistead Maupin. Fellow film composer Danny Elfman adapted Herrmann's music for Psycho for use in director Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake and borrowed from Herrmann's "Mountaintop/Sunrise" theme, from Journey to the Center of the Earth, for his main Batman theme. On its 1977 album Ra, American progressive rock group Utopia also adapted "Mountaintop/Sunrise," in a rock arrangement, as the introduction to the album's opening song, "Communion With The Sun." And most recently, Ludovic Bource used the love theme from Vertigo literally in the last reels of 2011's The Artist.
Herrmann's film music is well represented on disc. His friend, John Steven Lasher, has produced several albums featuring Urtext recordings, including Battle of Neretva, Citizen Kane, The Kentuckian, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Night Digger and Sisters, under various labels owned by Fifth Continent Australia Pty Ltd.
Herrmann was an early and enthusiastic proponent of the music of Charles Ives. He met Ives in the early 1930s, performed many of his works while conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, and conducted Ives' Second Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra on his first visit to London in 1956. Herrmann later made a recording of the work in 1972 and this reunion with the LSO, after more than a decade, was significant to him for several reasons - he had long hoped to record his own interpretation of the symphony, feeling that Leonard Bernstein's 1951 version was "overblown and inaccurate"; on a personal level, it also served to assuage Herrmann's long-held feeling that he had been snubbed by the orchestra after his first visit in 1956. The notoriously prickly composer had also been enraged by the recent appointment of the LSO's new chief conductor André Previn, who Herrmann detested, and deprecatingly referred to as "that jazz boy".[19]
Herrmann was also an ardent champion of the romantic-era composer Joachim Raff, whose music had fallen into near-oblivion by the 1960s. During the 1940s, Herrmann had played Raff's 3rd and 5th Symphonies in his CBS radio broadcasts. In May 1970, Herrmann conducted the world premiere recording of Raff's Fifth Symphony Lenore for the Unicorn label, which he mainly financed himself.[20] The recording did not attract much notice in its time, despite receiving excellent reviews, but is now considered a major turning-point in the rehabilitation of Raff as a composer.
In 1996, Sony Classical released a recording of Herrmann's music, The Film Scores, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. This disc received the 1998 Cannes Classical Music Award for "Best 20th-Century Orchestral Recording." It was also nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Engineered Album, Classical." In 2004 Sony Classical re-released this superb recording at a budget price in its "Great Performances" series (SNYC 92767SK).
Decca reissued on CD a series of Phase 4 Stereo recordings with Herrmann conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, mostly in excerpts from his various film scores, including one devoted to music from several of the Hitchcock films (including Psycho, Marnie and Vertigo). In the liner notes of the Hitchcock Phase 4 album, Herrmann said that the suite from The Trouble with Harry was a "portrait of Hitch". Another album was devoted to his fantasy film scores — a few of them being the films of the special effects animator Ray Harryhausen, including music from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and The Three Worlds of Gulliver. His other Phase 4 Stereo LPs of the 1970s included Music from the Great Film Classics (suites and excerpts from Jane Eyre, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Citizen Kane and The Devil and Daniel Webster); and "The Fantasy World of Bernard Herrmann" (Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Fahrenheit 451.)
Fellow composers Richard Band, Graeme Revell, Christopher Young, Danny Elfman and Brian Tyler consider Herrmann to be a major inspiration. In 1985, Richard Band's opening theme to Re-Animator borrows heavily from Herrmann's opening score to Psycho. In 1990, Graeme Revell had adapted Herrmann's music from Psycho for its television sequel-prequel Psycho IV: The Beginning. Revell's early orchestral music during the early nineties, such as Child's Play 2 (which its music score being a reminiscent of Herrmann's scores to the 1973 film Sisters, due to the synthesizers incorporated in the chilling parts of the orchestral score) as well as the 1963 The Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" (which inspired the Child's Play franchise), were very similar to Herrmann's work. Also, Revell's score for the video game Call of Duty 2 was very much a reminiscent of Herrmann's very rare WWII music scores such as The Naked and the Dead and Battle of Neretva. Young, who was a jazz drummer at first, listened to Herrmann's works which convinced him to be a film composer. Elfman has said he first became interested in film music upon seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still, and he paid homage to that score in his music for Mars Attacks! Tyler's score for Bill Paxton's film Frailty was greatly influenced by Herrmann's film music.
Sir George Martin, best known for producing and often adding orchestration to The Beatles music, cites Herrmann as an influence in his own work, particularly in Martin's scoring of the Beatles' song "Eleanor Rigby". Martin later expanded on this as an extended suite for McCartney's 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street, which features a very recognizable hommage to Herrmann's score for Psycho.
Avant-garde composer/saxophonist/producer John Zorn, in the biographical film A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky, cited Bernard Herrmann as one of his favorite composers and a major influence.
Elmer Bernstein adapted and arranged Herrmann's original score from J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962), and used it for the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake. After Bernstein realized there was not enough music in the score from the original film, he added sections from Herrmann's unused score for Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, including the music composed for the murder of the character "Gromek". The score for Cape Fear evokes both the gathering clouds of the destructive hurricane and the murderous intent of killer Max Cady. Bernstein also recorded Herrmann's score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which was released in 1975 on the Varese Sarabande label later reissued on CD in the 1990s.
Charles Gerhardt conducted a 1974 RCA recording entitled "The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann" with the National Philharmonic Orchestra. It featured Suites from Citizen Kane (with Kiri Te Kanawa singing Salammbo's Aria) and White Witch Doctor, along with music from On Dangerous Ground, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, and the Hangover Square Piano Concerto.
During his last years in England, between 1966 and 1975, Herrmann made several LPs of other composers' music for assorted record labels. These included Phase 4 Stereo recordings of Gustav Holst's The Planets and Charles Ives's 2nd Symphony, as well as an album entitled "The Impressionists" (music by Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré and Honegger) and another entitled "The Four Faces of Jazz" (works by Weill, Gershwin, Stravinsky and Milhaud). As well as recording his own film music in Phase 4 Stereo he made LPs of movie scores by others, such as "Great Shakespearean Films" (music by Shostakovich for Hamlet, Walton for Richard III and Rózsa for Julius Caesar), and "Great British Film Music" (movie scores by Lambert, Bax, Benjamin, Walton, Vaughan Williams, and Bliss).
For Unicorn Records, he recorded several of his own concert-hall works, including the cantata Moby Dick, his opera Wuthering Heights, his Symphony, and the suites Welles Raises Kane and The Devil and Daniel Webster.
Pristine Audio has released two CDs of Herrmann's radio broadcasts. One is devoted to a CBS programme from 1945 that features music by Handel, Vaughan Williams and Elgar; the other is devoted to works by Charles Ives, Robert Russell Bennett and Herrmann himself.
The Fire
Bernard Herrmann Lyrics
We have lyrics for 'The Fire' by these artists:
50 Cent feat. Nicole Scherzinger Fire! I make it hotter friction turns to fire You're what I…
A Swift Farewell It's hard to cope With the weather around here I either chok…
Abide & U-Mount We’re driving around the lakefront Where I grew up We’re fal…
Akissforjersey From the top of my tree I thought I could see…
Al L. Kirk Jr. Fire Away Ouuu Fire away I've been waiting for so long It's …
Alpha Town I was just a joker, only a simple joker I was…
Amanda Wilson Alright Even when you don't know I'll be by your side Even …
Amarante Coming down the hill to bathe the fire Coming down the…
American Me Come back to me. I was your everything... Everything plus…
ANIMA! This is one for the endless air Every breath that I…
Apokalyptischen Reiter Die Destroyed what once burned so great and glorious inside me T…
ariel.lavi They say that part of growing up is Getting a job Well,…
B.o.B. Feat. John Legend David walked into the valley With a stone clutched in his…
Badi Badi get a grip... don't let em see you like…
Ben Hazlewood Fighting against this tide That's pulling me under Abandon m…
Ben Howard Lie here till your world stops spinning round Lie near me…
Blood & Fire Take all of my dreams Take off both your wings And set…
Brownie Oh, he know the way that I take And when he…
C. Layne Rob C Bhagat Yeah पूरी रात मैं studio में लिखू, call it fir…
Caithlin De Marrais We don't have much to lose tonight And what we got,…
Cathubodua Cathuboduae augustae spiriti silvae votum solvit libens meri…
Celine Cairo trouble war in my mind I march on no stars in my eyes cold…
Chely Wright He's dating a lawyer with a gentle nature Says she ain't…
Chris Stapleton I watch your light In the dark of night Your shadow moves Ac…
Cirith Ungol I am the God of Hell Fire and I'll bring…
Cold Showers Step away from the fire Take your last breath with ease Is…
Cosmovision You ignite The fire in this heart It's so dry is…
Cris The world's on fire...i don't care It won't touch the world…
Cris Cab Just take a second let your problems go Wipe the sweat…
D. A. R. Sorry that we took so long You probably thought we forgot…
Dan Griffin You be the motive And I'll be the gun that we…
Dare We're standing alone inside the night Listen the wind is cal…
Devil May Care Ten thousand years we stood alone Out in the darkness -…
Die Apokalyptischen Reiter Destroyed what once burned so great and glorious inside me T…
DJ Noize & B.o.B Yeah, Ignite the fire 澄み切った空気全部蹂躙して ブチ込むアクロバット ほらもっとバンボーバンボー…
DOPING PANDA The fire, the fire from the glory tower And search my…
Dubba Jonny feat. R.J. Duke We got the power We don't observe We are the action We got…
DURINGTHETYME UV rays through the blinds wake up son its morning time gott…
Eldritch It starts inside and burns away your faith The fire coming…
Elii That life is all fake I made a mistake Do me a…
Elin Bergman Come and follow Eh, eh Come and follow, Come and follow C…
End of Green Fell into the fire Fell into the fire I was led by…
Farnham John T kimmel, and s lynch Last rites first blood Maybe a dream…
Felix Cartal & Clockwork feat. Madame Buttons Say goodbye as I'm walking on a wire Close your eyes Yo…
Former Vandal Take me home There's smoke inside my lungs I miss the one'…
French Horn Rebellion Hey, fight for a rainy day Never even stays…
G-Soul Yes, burn out, yes, burn out, yes, burn out Turn it…
Garrett Kato You and I used to dance to the moon With no…
Gibson Laura Are you carried by a restless wind? Does it saddle you…
Gold & Gunmetal Way down in the water Way down in the hole Way down…
Grey Matters I will not lay down and just go to sleep,…
Griffinilla Deep in the woods, there was a fire. That burned with…
Heaven Shall Burn The grass is green today, here where my brothers lay.…
J.P. Rose We got the power We don't observe We are the action We got…
J.S.H He is the flame He draws me in That burns within It's a…
Jan A.P. Kaczmarek Stop drop and roll Baby you on fire Everybody else is cold Y…
Jenny Don't & The Spurs As the day is long and the night is dark…
Jesse and the Dandelions I got a feeling I cant hold back anymore This disbelieving I…
John Farnham T kimmel, and s lynch Last rites first blood Maybe a dream…
John Legend The Roots Oh, the fire, the fire Oh, the fire, the fire There's so…
John Legend/The Roots Oh, the fire, the fire Oh, the fire, the fire There's somet…
Jon Shaban Let's shake hands Let's shake hands Let's agree on a deal wh…
K i T Fire flames I spit fire flames Black hoodie aint hear…
Kate Havnevik & Schiller Sometimes somewhere It's so dark we don't go there Somewhere…
Kideko Baby, don't leave Sweet darling, don't leave Baby, don't lea…
Kina Granni You let the fire out, and it's right in front…
King of Limbs Pt. 2 This is the main event Uh huh Ye ye ye Oh weee Yea Talk to…
Kodak Black I don't need nobody sayin' I went and changed on…
Kvassheim A liquid dream Casting shadows on the waking world I am the…
Kwesta Lord have mercy on me, I'm fire (I'm fire) Run it up…
LA & Mr. Music Rum ba ba ba bam Rum ba ba ba bam Rum ba…
Laura Gibson Are you carried by a restless wind? Does it saddle you…
LIVING ROOM - The Roots Last night was the first night I saw you Standing in…
Loretta "Believe in God" Said the man behind the wheel "May the Sun…
Lydmor This night we’re gonna dream of fire This night the sky…
M. M. Keeravani Wa wa wa wa O lord So me muna I go call you…
M.M. Keeravaani Yeah, Ignite the fire 澄み切った空気全部蹂躙して ブチ込むアクロバット ほらもっとバンボーバンボー…
Major & The Fire Fire-FIRE 专辑:Fire LRC Produced By william王子 词曲:林岑芳/庄景云 编曲:林岑…
Markus With the love and the fire It started long ago With the…
Matt Cardle You held me over the fire Why d'you have to prove…
Menace & Borderline Never bite the hand that feeds you unless it is…
Mercury & the Architects Do you, do you feel it shot up in your…
MiMi FIRE FIRE Takes me even higher I never asked for water You`r…
Mindy McCready Was datin' a lawyer with a gentleman nature Says "She ain't…
Nada (Ha ha) (K-Nada) (Yeah) (The beatmaker) Tell em Nada I'm on…
Natalie Prass We're glints of light Oh, we keep filling up the space Betwe…
Neil Russell Turn and look It seems there is nowhere left to run In…
Neko A chill ran though me And I grabbed on tight That was…
Nicki Minaj Mmm, you shoulda left the other day You let me beg…
Non-Functional Harmony I watched the news in the mirror today of fantasy They…
Olmeca [feat. Shantilly Tuazon] ""Breath in my insanity get a taste of my kingdom.…
Outer World Catching Fire I would dream about the end of the world I…
Papa Roach Die a little everyday Break the silence when you say You don…
Places Never broken a bone trying to hold on to something…
Pressure Working all night I ain't staying this tired Bring all the…
Puppet Where do bad folks go when they die? They don't go…
Puppet & EDEN We saw a lady, she was looking fine So we were…
Puppet & The Eden Project I can't be alone here I can't be the only one…
Puppet feat. The Eden Project Where do bad folks go when they die? They don't go…
Rag 'N' Bone Man I had a dream, to wash myself Of this great affliction So…
Reel Big Fish I'm gonna say it like I mean it, We've let this…
Regen I've got my eyes on you Mind on you Drunk on disappointment,…
Rev Theory Hey, I want a taste You're a black heart devil and…
RevTheory Hey, I want a taste You're a black heart devil and…
Rheostatics Dave Bidini and Martin Tielli Do you recall the fire? The…
Rick Wakeman Just yesterday mornin', they let me know you were gone Suzan…
Rotersand Frightened souls rushing underground Sirens wailing again …
Savanna Brooks Mmmmm mmmmm Knocking on your heart again, Its dark out here …
Savoir Adore Keep your head up and your eyes open wide Up above…
Schiller & Kate Havnevik I′m on My own My heart feels old Still I get myself…
Schiller Feat. Kate Havnevik I'm on my own My heart feels old Still I give myself…
Senses Fail I'll light the fuse and I'll set that dam to…
Seryn Keeping an eye on the brighter skies We were all carved…
Silva Hound Take me to hell And wish me well Woah, inside us There's a…
Simon Brown We keep on dreaming, we keep on dreaming Though times are…
Smackola Sh psycho over there Here he comes, here he comes Hey James …
Sons of Midnight Send out an SOS, come save me from this mess...…
Sound I feel fine, if I feel at all. I Feel…
St. Paul Slim/Last Triumph I remember how You told me That life may not be…
Stan Love is a burnin' thing And it makes a fiery ring I…
Tae Brooks Cut the music up Li'l loud Yeah You had a lot of crooks…
Tallhart I think a trip out to Mesa would do me…
Television Storms all that summer we lived in the wind, out…
Tertia May Money moves yeh that’s where you’ll find me, I just wanna…
The Avett Brothers A young child sits quiet, the forest is dark Possibilities o…
The Blackout Give me fire It's time to explode One solution, I want to ge…
The Blackout/The Blackout I hate what you are and every word that you…
The Collector If I don't come home before midnight And I call out…
The Damn Truth You are so heavy you're driving me crazy And I…
The Dear Hunter For so long have my teeth held my tongue from…
The Eden Project & Puppet Where do bad folks go when they die? They don't go…
The Flu Night falls, as the sun disappears and illuminates the moon …
The Forest Fire child sing Fire child dance Fire child you'll be mine L…
the half jeffersons Don't be so bitter my princess Put out the fire Put out…
The Hearts You know, you know I've been looking at you And, I know,…
The Illustrated Watching the fire Free but trapped as never before On this s…
The Last Bison People get attention with a swinging fist Still can't get at…
The Lemon Twigs One day in spring, it was gym class That was the…
The Names That night with you Was the best night I ever Can't…
The Orange Strips Dying on the screen Switch the lights on back again I'd ra…
The Racer Be my guide and show the way I'm in the…
The Roots Oh, the fire, the fire Oh, the fire, the fire There's somet…
The Roots (feat. John Legend) I don't know why I keep moving my body I don't…
The Roots feat. John Legend Oh, the fire, the fire Oh, the fire, the fire There's somet…
The Roots Legend John Oh, the fire, the fire Oh, the fire, the fire There's so…
The Shills Stack the pyre Stoke the fire Do what's required For this ma…
The Silence When she comes everyone runs to her She'll get you just…
The Sound On your way Your way out You'll burn it down Just burn it…
The Strumbellas Lyrics to The FireI'll never know if you loved who…
Third and Main God, I'm running for Your heart I'm running for Your heart T…
Thomas/Richard There is a fire... I'm in a fight with flawless So, I've…
Token Entry We're still here here and now you're gone What's the…
Tonight Alive Patiently I was waiting Just waiting for this day to come To…
Tyne-James Organ Oh, c′mon lover, c'mon lover, can′t you see it all? We…
wh0 vs. sllash & doppe Soy un dragon soy un dragon Me confunden con shenglong…
Whale and the Village No one sees it coming No one could have know An island…
♪♫Papa Roach Die a little everyday Break the silence when you say You don…
라포엠 Rum ba ba ba bam Rum ba ba ba bam Rum ba…
Rev Theory Hey, I want a taste You're a black heart devil and…
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Jermster_91
I always loved this theme from Fahrenheit 451
FM MARCIANO
VERY GOOD ----- THANK YOU
Arnaud FAUCHERE
🎬🎥🎼J'ADORE🎼🎥🎬😀👍MERCI👍😀
TheNewNumberTw0
I LIKE THE XYLOPHONES