Latest Release
- 5 APR 2024
- 38 Songs
- North By Northwest (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 1959
- Kill Bill Vol. 1 Original Soundtrack (PA Version) · 1969
- Taxi Driver (Original Soundtrack Recording) · 1975
- Taxi Driver (Original Soundtrack Recording) · 1976
- Psycho (The Complete Original Motion Picture Score) · 1975
- The Egyptian (Motion Picture Soundtrack) · 2011
- Endless Night (Music from the Motion Picture) · 2024
- Endless Night (Music from the Motion Picture) · 2024
- Endless Night (Music from the Motion Picture) · 2024
- Endless Night (Music from the Motion Picture) · 2024
Essential Albums
- Bernard Herrmann made Alfred Hitchcock and Hitch made Herrmann. Each pushed the other to the limit with Psycho. The main theme still has the ability to make neck hairs stand to attention; dizzying and menacing, yet wickedly seductive, it is the perfect accompaniment to Norman Bates. In signature style, Hermann’s score combines a gentle, sensitive touch with bursts of sudden violence. While variations on the main theme recur throughout, the orchestral melodies always retreat toward the same stabbing climax until finally attaining the atonal gasps of “The Knife”.
Artist Playlists
- A legendary composer wrote for the greats, from Welles to Scorsese.
Singles & EPs
About Bernard Herrmann
The name Bernard Herrmann is synonymous with film music. Few moments are as iconic and revolutionary as the Bates Motel shower murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; Herrmann’s shrieking violins are inextricable from the frenzied effect of the scene. Known as a soundtrack innovator who scored some 50 movies, Herrmann nevertheless rejected the title of film composer, styling himself instead as a neo-Romantic. Born in 1911 in New York, he grew up playing his father’s gramophone and attending concerts at Carnegie Hall. In 1934, CBS Radio hired Herrmann as a composer, arranger and conductor. One of the radio shows he scored was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, and when its maverick director, Orson Welles, embarked on a film career, he enlisted Herrmann as composer. Years after working on Welles' Citizen Kane, Herrmann was recruited by Hitchcock to score The Trouble with Harry, giving rise to one of the great director–composer partnerships, highlighted by Vertigo and North by Northwest. Although the scores overshadow Herrmann’s music for the concert hall and the stage, his lush 1951 opera, Wuthering Heights, with self-standing arias like “I Have Dreamt”, is worth exploring. Herrmann died in 1975, a day after completing the score for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
- HOMETOWN
- New York, NY, United States
- BORN
- 29 June 1911
- GENRE
- Soundtrack