by Matthew Raley I've given several examples of Alfred Hitchcock's abstract visuals in Vertigo (here and here). But Hitchcock also created a sound-world to match, and he found a collaborator in Bernard Herrmann. Together, they raised the score to the level of co-narrator with the camera.

The term “Wagnerian” is often used to characterize Herrmann’s score for Vertigo, and for good reason. But the variety of composers who influenced Herrmann hints at a more complex musical imagination.

He was famous for loving English composers such as Edward Elgar[1] and Ralph Vaughan Williams.[2] Vertigo’s frequent similarity to music by Claude Debussy is mentioned by critics.[3] Less well-known is Herrmann’s study as a thirteen-year-old of Hector Berlioz’s Treatise on Orchestration. The influence this Romantic maverick had on Herrmann was life-long.[4] Nor was Berlioz the only musical outsider with whom Herrmann identified. Though Herrmann spent his student years in New York close to such American icons as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, Herrmann also developed relationships with young radical composers in a group modeled on Les Six.

Most significantly, Steven Smith documents Herrmann’s long association with Charles Ives, the ultimate outsider, noting Herrmann’s early study of Ives’s 114 Songs and his habitual visits with Ives until Ives died in 1954.[5]

With such a background, there should be no surprise that Herrmann’s score is one of the more abstract elements of Vertigo.

It is not explicitly tonal—that is, the harmonies are not organized around a triad that specifies a key, but around the pitch-class structures and intervallic relationships that occur in the first bars of the prelude. Such harmonies, while not expressionistic, are at the outer reaches of the common practice era.

Herrmann, further, employs a modular phrase structure that permits the extension of a line, but is not intrinsically melodic, alluding to but not identical with the traditional eight- or sixteen-bar phrase.

Moreover, Herrmann blurs the classic distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music at various points in the score. Diegetic music comes from a source within the film, like the record-player in Midge's apartment that annoys Scottie. Nondiegetic music comes from outside the story's action: the audience hears it, but the characters don't.

As we will explore over the next posts, the abstraction of Vertigo’s music allows it to operate with subtlety, concision, and force. The score is a large part of the greatness of this film.

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 [1]Bernard Herrmann, “Elgar: A Constant Source of Joy,” in Edward Johnson, Bernard Herrmann: Hollywood’s Music-Dramatist, Bibliographical Series 6 (Rickmansworth: Triad Press, 1977), 29–31.

 [2]Bernard Herrmann, “Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony,” The Musical Times 100, no. 1391 (1959): 24.

 [3]William H. Rosar, “Bernard Herrmann: The Beethoven of Film Music?,” The Journal of Film Music 1, no. 2 (2003): 137; Royal S. Brown, “Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the Music of the Irrational,” Cinema Journal 21, no. 2 (April 1, 1982): 20.

 [4]Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 14–15.

 [5]Ibid., 21–23, 38–39.

By Matthew Raley

Each year, I have the privilege of performing with many excellent student musicians at Chico State. Michael Beale, a fine tenor who graduated last spring, is one of them. We performed the song cycle Along the Field by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) at Michael's senior recital a year ago. The cycle contains eight poems by A. E. Housman.

Vaughan Williams is famous for his lush string writing and folk melodies. While Along the Field shows the folk influence, it is unusual for Vaughan Williams and for art song literature in general. The piece calls for voice and violin only. Its harmonies are spare to the point of austerity.

Here are mp3 tracks of the last three songs from our performance. I hope you enjoy them!

Good-Bye

Fancy's Knell

With Rue My Heart Is Laden

by Matthew Raley Let’s assume a congregation today gathers to sing in a space that will enliven their sound. They won’t be singing into a dead zone, but creating a corporate resonance. They will feel from the first notes that they are not in the iPod worship mode, but that they are being called out of their own heads to participate.

So far, so good. A fundamental element in the dynamic of folk singing is present: participation is physically possible. But there’s the question of what to sing.

Folk singing is an expression of shared memory. People sing together because they remember the same songs. They’ve acquired those songs because they've lived together for a long time, sharing the same way of life in the same region, city, or neighborhood.

Local memory is powerful.

The British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was notorious as a folk song collector. One of the tunes he investigated was "Dives and Lazarus," a ballad based on a parable of Jesus. He found five different versions of the tune in different regions of Britain, with various titles, and using each version he composed a string orchestra piece called, Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus.

What happened with this tune is pretty common. It traveled from one region to the next, but within the long life of each place it was remembered differently. The same phenomenon played havoc with colonial American worship, in which the hymnals often contained words without music. Congregations were known to sing variants of the same tune all at once, to general annoyance.

If you want to recover the next fundamental of the folk singing dynamic, you have to sing what can be shared. You have to build up local memory.

And in order to do that, you have to think of your church not as an outlet for Christian pop culture, but as a local community with a life of its own. The unique character of place, time, heritage, work, and cultural mix needs to drive the way a congregation sings, not the most popular Jesus-as-boyfriend ballads on the radio.

Worship leaders need to ask, "Who are we as believers in this place?"

In this connection, there are two cultural reasons why folk singing has been replaced by iPod worship.

In the first place, people move around more today than ever before in history. The suburban population is especially transient, so that the natural process of building a shared memory doesn't have much time to work. This movement isn't inherently bad. The book of Acts narrates the movement of believers from place to place, and I would argue that the mingling of the cultures from different city states strengthened all the churches.

But our moving around does elevate one thing that is shared from sea to shining sea, namely Christian radio. From FM stations, it's easy to find songs that people recognize and use the hits in worship. (More about the problems with this practice next week.)

Secondly, people have little sense of history. This is catastrophic for worship.

The fact that hymnals are arranged according to doctrinal content is an outworking of history, and it is full of significance. Certain songs came from Reformation Germany (frequently composed by Martin Luther himself), or from immigrant groups ("How Great Thou Art"), or from specific theological movements (hymns by the Wesley brothers).

American evangelicalism did not sprout in the suburbs, and we're blind when we act as though it did. The past can reprioritize the present, set our troubles in context, and give us a much-needed sense of proportion. The consequences of ignoring the past are pride and folly.

Christian radio, like all mass media, is an endless Now, and that is the mind of illiteracy.

The recovery of this part of the folk singing dynamic depends on a simple but radical shift in leadership. People can learn tunes. Shared memory can be built up, and relatively quickly. But only if pastors stop using music as a way to attract the people they want, and start thinking of it as an expression of a local church's unique identity in Christ.