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 was the chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, which led him to become the composer for Orson Welles's The Mercury Theater on the Air. This led him to write his first film score, for Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). That year, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Devil and Daniel Webster. He worked with Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Jane Eyre (1943). He is best known for his work 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), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Cape Fear (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Twisted Nerve (1968). 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. Towards the end of his career, Herrmann scored films that were inspired by Hitchcock, such as François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Brian De Palma's Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976). His last score, recorded shortly before his death, was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).