Hitchcock's Music (review)

Halfway through his survey of music in the films and television programs of Alfred Hitchcock, in the chapter devoted to Rear Window (1954), Jack Sullivan observes that while Hitchcock at heart may have been "a grudging Romantic with the methods of a painstaking classicist," this particular film "in its use of music . . . is profoundly modern. Indeed, Rear Window is a return to the modernity Hitchcock pioneered in Rich and Strange almost exactly twenty years earlier. In both, he eschewed symphonic tradition for pop source music, giving these dark comedies a sharp contemporary edge" (180–81). Commenting later on North by Northwest (1959), Sullivan notes that the accompanying music—an orchestral score by Bernard Herrmann that is very much in the symphonic tradition—"has a modernist objectivity, its melodies refusing to attach themselves to specific characters or settings" (239). And earlier, near the start of a brief discussion of Rope (1948), which features no underscore but, rather, piano music played by one of the characters, he offers that "this is a modernist film, cool and ruthlessly objective, with music by a renowned modern composer, Francis Poulenc, who, like Hitchcock, created enduring art from popular culture (in his case, tunes from music halls)." Making one of the book's larger points, Sullivan writes: " . . . Hitchcock veered toward classical composers who based their art on popular motifs. Their definition of modernism, like his, fit Baudelaire's: a conjunction of the ephemeral and the eternal" (144–45).

These and other opinions, just as bold, result from what seems to have been a sincere effort to sort through the entirety of Hitchcock's output and identify, vis-à-vis the director's use of music, just a few stylistic trends and overriding aesthetic principles. While some of the generalizations will likely raise eyebrows among persons steeped in Hitchcock, it remains that Sullivan makes his arguments—and tells his stories about how certain scores came to be—elegantly as well as colorfully. And whether the topic at hand is music "borrowed" from pre-existing sources or music originally composed, whether in a film well-known or obscure, the writing is charged with enthusiasm of the sort one associates not with idolatrous fans but with serious-minded persons who have thought long and hard about a subject. Focused on a single aspect of a large and diverse body of work, this is less an effort at criticism than an intelligent celebration. And that makes it, on the whole, a stimulating read.

Hitchcock's Music is not, Sullivan makes clear in his introduction, a book about film composers. Nor in any technical sense is this a book about music; as his scattered references to Melville and Poe suggest, Sullivan is a professor of English, not a musicologist, and the closest he gets to musical analysis is the comparison of film score passages to the overall styles of familiar concert-hall composers (he is fond, it seems, of adjectives such as "Ivesian," "Coplandesque," and "pseudo-Gershwin"). Still another thing that Hitchcock's Music is not, it should be strongly noted, is a disciplined scholarly text.

Persons interested in Hitchcock can be grateful for Sullivan's summaries of archival data (from the Hitchcock papers at the Margaret Herrick library in Beverly Hills, for example, and from the David O. Selznick collection at the University of Texas) and for his fresh interviews with such persons as John Williams (composer for Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot) and Joseph Stefano (screenwriter for Psycho [1962]). But most of Sullivan's information comes either from loosely documented secondary sources or—distressingly—from casual conversations with persons who may or may not be reliable (I am flattered to be included in the endnotes affixed to one of the chapters, but in truth I would feel more comfortable had Sullivan cited my 2004 refereed article instead of something I said off the top of my head while standing hungrily in line at a buffet table in 2006). Engaging though Sullivan inevitably is in terms of "appreciation" of the...