Bernard Herrmann

Bernard Herrmann (born Maximillian Herman; June 29, 1911 – December 24, 1975) was an American composer and conductor best known for his work in film scoring. As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers. Alex Ross writes that "Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary." As a young man, Herrmann became the chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, which lead him to become the composer for Orson Welles's The Mercury Theater on the Air. This relationship lead him to write his first film score for Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music (Music Score of a Dramatic Picture). He was separately nominated for and won the award the same year for The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). Herrmann would also collaborate with Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Jane Eyre (1943). He is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he worked on nine films including The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) (where he makes a cameo as the conductor at Royal Albert Hall), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) (as "sound consultant") and Marnie (1964) . His other credits include Anna and the King of Siam (1946), for which he was nominated for his third Academy Award, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Cape Fear (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Twisted Nerve (1968). Towards the end of his career, Herrmann scored films that were inspired by his work with Hitchcock, such as François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Brian De Palma's Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976), for which he received another Academy Award nomination. He composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and composed for television, including Have Gun – Will Travel and Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. His last score, recorded shortly before his death, was his Oscar-nominated work for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).