（电影音乐史作业，可参考，禁抄袭。）
Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) was a great American composer and a pioneer film composer in the earlier golden age of film music. He wrote music for a long list of famous movies, which started with Citizen Kane (1941) and ended with Taxi Driver (1976). With his creativity composing and his orchestrating talents, he created lots of distinctive scores for films. This revolutionary creativity made his pieces different from conventional Hollywood composers’ works, and in a sense redefined the status of music in films and also exerted a far-reaching impact on later age.
Herrmann’s great composing and orchestrating skills owes a lot to the professional music education he received. After he finished his study at the New York University and the Juilliard School, he started his career in 1934, when he joined the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) as a composer for radio dramas. He had become chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra within several years. In 1939, he started to work with Orson Wells, who brought Herrmann to Hollywood to score his film Citizen Kane in 1941. In the meantime, Herrmann won his only Oscar by writing scores for The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). Because of Citizen Kane, Herrmann acquired an Academy Award nomination for Best Score of Dramatic Picture, and started to stand out in Hollywood.
1955 was an important point in Herman’s career. In this year, he began his association with the famous director Alfred Hitchcock. Herrmann composed the scores for seven Hitchcock films, starting with The Trouble with Harry (1955) and ending in Marnie (1964). During this phase, Herrmann’s early experience of radio dramas composing helped him create scores which perfectly fitted the dramatic plot fragments of Hitchcock’s thrillers, and this collaboration experience helped him developed his musical language and left lots of masterpieces as well. He scored a main title theme in the style of a Spanish Dance for North by Northwest (1959), and only used the string section of the orchestra to create the atmosphere and fearful feeling to fit the emotions for Psycho (1960). However, their relationship was severed when they had a big disagreement on the score of Torn Curtain (1966). After his music was replaced by John Addison, Herrmann transferred his working field from Hollywood to England.
In Herrmann’s later career, he still continuously wrote music for many fantastic films and TV shows. He had been working on film composing for over 20 years even when he settled down in London. Taxi Driver (1976) was his last film. He died on December 24, 1975, when he prepared to finish the recording session for this film.
Bernard Herrmann, of course, was not a typical Hollywood composer. Throughout his life of film composing, his creative features of music can be categorized in several phases. First is his creative orchestration. He always did his own orchestration and preferred to use different, unorthodox orchestration to create music by separated textures. Sometimes he only used a few instruments to create music and very short chords cues to replace the long melodies. He also preferred to use the lower part of the instruments, which gives his work a kind of dark sonority. What’s more, he always used a lot of non-resolving harmony in his work. He was a pioneer of using music to show a kind of independent narrative effect, which was no longer based on motif.
Herrmann was an innovative and controversial composer. Even though his personality and temperament were very abrasive and his colleagues found him difficult to work with, he was a talented and innovative film score composer.
