Imagine Psycho without the murder in the shower. Then imagine that scene without its music. Finally, try imagining any Hitchcock thriller without its score. The composer who created Hitchcock's eerie sonic atmospheres was Bernard Herrmann, whose centenary falls this year, and selections from his magnificent scores, including North by Northwest and Psycho, opened last night's celebration of film music at the Proms.
Music for the movies deserves a little time in the spotlight. Too often it is viewed as a secondary art. It is not only composers who lose out because of this, but audiences too. Film scores have frequently been regarded as unfit for concert consumption, pushed into a ghetto and left there to moulder. Yet the truth is that compositions for the cinema form a sizeable chunk of the best-known and best-loved music of the 20th century.
The Prom is paying tribute to just a few such works. Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Shakespeare's Henry V lives on, thanks in part to its music, by William Walton. James Bond would arguably be nowhere without the themes composed by John Barry. The 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express features a score by Richard Rodney Bennett that turns a luxury train journey into a terrifically catchy waltz. John Williams is pre-eminent, for superlative scores to films including Star Wars, Schindler's List and the Harry Potter series. And don't forget the Mediterranean gorgeousness of Ennio Morricone's music for Cinema Paradiso.
There is, however, a historic problem around film scores: a suggestion that to create a score primarily to serve another artform somehow detracts from the dignity and integrity of music. In the guise of "pure music" versus "programme music", this argument has been around for nearly 200 years. It is the issue that split musical Romanticism in two and it has more or less continued to divide attitudes ever since. On the whole, composers are a practical and pragmatic bunch, writing for the stage, the church, teaching, learning, firework displays and eating.
- THE INDEPENDENT
