Notes from a Composer

Phantom Thread – Psycho – Cloud Atlas – Platoon – Lorenzo’s Oil – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – American Crime Story: Versace – The Club – Schindler’s List – Jesus Christ Superstar – Moonlight – Jackie – Under the Skin – A Single Man – The Red Violin

Johnny Greenwood’s score for P. T. Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” may win the Oscar this Sunday (although most Oscar pundits peg it as runner up to Alexandre Desplat’s lovely waltzes for “The Shape of Water”).  It is my favorite movie score of the year, deftly evoking both unabashed romanticism and prickly modernism reminiscent of mid 20th century music.  (A great part of “Phantom Thread’s” extraordinary achievement resides in how every element of the film, story, cinematography, acting etc. feels unusual as well as rooted in the era it takes place, as if this original love story could have been made in the 1950s, minus a few cuss words.)

Greenwood’s lush score favors strings, in a small chamber configuration and full string orchestra, joined by harp, percussion, piano and celeste.  Some of the more overtly romantic tracks feature the piano prominently, but the first time the main theme is played, it is the string orchestra on its own, sighing away in the upper registers, in close harmonies and polyphonic echoes of the main motif:

Phantom Thread – Phantom Thread I – Johnny Greenwood

The Phantom Thread theme is played four times in the score, each time in a musical and instrumental variation; a piano/violin duet, an extravagantly double-stopped solo violin version, and another, more stately, heavy version for the string orchestra, accompanied by timpani:

Phantom Thread – Phantom Thread III – Johnny Greenwood

It is however the first version that struck me the most, and reignited an ongoing fascination I have with what I call the “sighing strings of cinema”, movie score pieces that exclusively utilize string orchestra in gorgeously heart-tugging, soul-stirring ways.  There is a purity as well as a richness of tones in a string orchestra, and a variety of expression, even when limiting the parameters to what one may call “sighing strings”.   Turns out there are a quite a few accomplished examples of that extremely particular subset of movie music, so I will try to keep my examples limited to the pure variety exemplified by Phantom Thread I and not the “impure” accompanied-by-one-or-more-non-string-instruments options as exemplified by Phantom Thread III … except for one or two can’t-help-myself exceptions.

John Gavin and Janet Leigh in “Psycho”, both well worth sighing about

My fascination with string orchestra music begins with one of the all time great scores ever composed for a movie, Bernard Herrman’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”.  One of the great composers of classic Hollywood (“Vertigo”, “North by Northwest”, also for Hitchcock) who also defines the modern era with his score for “Taxi Driver”, Herrmann chose to match Hitchcock’s stark black and white aesthetics with the stripped down palette of the string orchestra.  Everybody knows “Psycho’s” most famous musical cue of the shrieking string glissandos that nerve janglingly accent the knife slashes of each murder – arguably the most famous musical cue in all of movie history, but Herrmann’s complete score for “Psycho” deserves recognition as one of the most accomplished scores for string orchestra in the 20th century, inside and outside the cinema.

Beyond the screaming shower strokes, Herrmann’s “Psycho” music masterfully sustains an overall mood of unnerving tension through jagged, propulsive syncopation, in its main title “Pursuit” theme, as well as eerie motifs that rise and fall up and down scales, long held notes of foreboding, and nagging pizzicatos. Yet there are also themes of intense longing and melancholy, which may be less remembered aspects of the score but which are in part the most beautifully haunting tracks, and great examples for this post’s sighing strings.  So while most of us may recall the strings of “Psycho” as messengers of horror and unease, I’d like you to also take in the sweet sorrow in the theme of the heroine, doomed because of a mistake she will make out of love:

Psycho – Marion and Sam – Bernard Herrmann

Deep yearning is also the root of this next piece, but it reflects the longing in Norman Bates’ twisted soul, as he tells Marion perhaps a little too much about life with his mother, and finds himself a little too much attracted to Marion.

Psycho – The Madhouse – Bernard Herrmann

Both these tracks exemplify the emotional, yearning, sighing strings that are as much a part of Hermann’s “Psycho” score as those murderous harpy string slashes.

But, fine, I’ll throw in those for kicks too.  It’d be silly to leave them out of any discussion of “Psycho”, I suppose:

Psycho – The Murder – Bernard Herrmann

Alrighty then…

My second most favorite cinematic string orchestra piece comes from “Cloud Atlas”.  It is the Cloud Atlas Sextet arranged for string orchestra.  In the storie(s) of “Cloud Atlas” the sextet is composed by one of the time-hopping movie’s 1930’s era characters; it’s music that, though forgotten in its own time, will resonate in a variety of ways in future ages to come.   This concert version is discovered by another character in the the 1970s on one of  only six vinyl copies believed to remain of that recording:

Cloud Atlas – The Cloud Atlas Sextet for Orchestra – Tow Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil, Gene Prisker

I love this theme and this arrangement.  How it sighs and pulls and enraptures.  It sounds perfectly like what a classical composer in the 1930s might have composed for string orchestra, which is of course exactly what it is supposed to be, not a soundtrack cue in a movie.

And speaking of classical music from the 1930’s, one can’t discuss the sighing strings of cinema without this most famously cinematically incorporated string orchestra piece from the classical concert repertoire:

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