Two Notes

Music is the only part of a soundtrack a general audience notices as a choice. It is also the part most likely to be argued about while the film is being made, and the two best-known arguments in American cinema both ended with the director being wrong.

Psycho first. Hitchcock was financing the film himself after Paramount declined, shooting on a reduced budget with his television crew, and Bernard Herrmann wrote for strings alone. Herrmann described the result as a black and white sound, written to sit with black and white photography, and the economy of the arrangement and the idea behind it happen to point the same way, which is why the story is told both as thrift and as aesthetics.

Hitchcock's instruction for the shower murder was that it should carry no music. Herrmann wrote the shrieking strings anyway and played them for him, and Hitchcock reversed himself.

It is worth noticing the detail that makes the cue work, because it is not the famous notes. The early part of the scene has no music at all: Marion undresses, gets into the shower, and the only sound is water. The strings arrive with the attack. The sequence is also, by Herrmann's design, the one place in the score where the strings play without mutes, which is why the sound is so much harsher than everything around it.

Jaws second. John Williams played Spielberg the shark motif on a piano: two notes alternating, rising in tempo. Spielberg thought he was joking, and asked for the real theme.

In Williams's own telling the piano is the problem. Two adjacent notes on a keyboard sound comic. The same figure in low strings and brass, accelerating, reads as something large and unhurried approaching, and Williams has described wanting it to be instinctual, relentless and unstoppable, which is a fair description of what it does to an audience.

There is also a temp track in the story, which makes it more useful than it first looks.

Spielberg had been cutting the film against existing music, including a Williams score from another picture, and had grown attached to it. This is the temp track problem, and it is structural rather than anecdotal. An editing room needs music to cut to, so it borrows some. Everybody then watches the film with that music for months, learns the rhythm of every scene against it, and by the time the composer arrives the film has effectively been scored by somebody else, with the new music judged by how closely it resembles the thing everybody got used to. Many composers regard it as the single worst habit in the modern process.

Now the moral, and the reason to be careful with it.

The lesson usually drawn is that directors should trust their composers. That may be good advice, but these two stories cannot establish it, because we only hear the cases that ended famously. Nobody tells the story of a director who refused a cue and was right, or of the score that would have ruined a film and never got recorded, so the evidence we have access to is selected for the composer being vindicated. That is survivorship, and it is doing most of the rhetorical work in nearly every anecdote about artistic courage.

What does survive examination is narrower and genuinely useful. A motif can be as simple as two notes if it is used sparingly. Both of these are used sparingly. And in both cases the thing that makes the music land is the silence immediately before it, which is a choice about the soundtrack as a whole rather than about the music, and therefore belongs to the person this book has been circling: whoever is deciding what the film sounds like.