One of my favorite film composers has always been Bernard Herrmann, whose legendary career spanned from the 1940s to the ‘70s. If you’re a fan of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, François Truffaut, or Martin Scorsese (just to name four major film directors he worked with), chances are you’ve heard his amazing work. For instance, Herrmann had a long and fruitful association with Alfred Hitchcock. When watching iconic films like Vertigo, North by Northwest, or Psycho, try to imagine the film without Herrmann’s music, especially sequences like the shower scene from Psycho or James Stewart’s nightmare from Vertigo.

Herrmann also experimented with electronic music. One example is his use of the theremin, an early electronic instrument, in the 1951 Robert Wise film The Day the Earth Stood Still. Herrmann also created something to the effect of musique concrète when utilizing electronically altered bird sounds in Hitchcock’s The Birds in lieu of a musical score.

Another interesting, if not outright bizarre, project was François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, based on the Ray Bradbury novella. Although the dystopian story is set in the near future, the sets in the French New Wave director’s film are an odd juxtaposition of futuristic architecture mixed with archaic touches. Although the “hero” of the story, Montag the Fireman, can ascend a fire station pole by merely touching it, the building’s telephone is styled like an early 20th-century wall unit with separate mouth and earpieces. Herrmann’s score for this film accentuates this visual quirkiness by mixing string instruments with the xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, and glockenspiel.

It came as a surprise to me when I first saw Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and realized the dark, somber jazz score was created by Herrmann. It was also the final score of his career as he died of heart disease shortly after the recording was finished. Again, who can watch this dark masterpiece without appreciating the extra dimension of Herrmann’s music?

So it will come as no surprise that KCME often features music by Mr. Herrmann, especially during those programs devoted to movie music – Dinner and a Movie, Thursday evenings at 6pm, The Score with Edmund Stone, Saturday mornings at 9am, and Morning Matinee, weekdays at 9am.