Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook (review)

Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook. By David Cooper. (Film Score Guides, 2.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. [xviii, 157 p. ISBN 0-313-31490-X. $52.] Music examples, illustrations, index.

The history of film music studies has been marked by its slow acceptance within the scholarly community. Though there have been rumblings of scholarly attention as far back as the 1940s, it is in the last thirty years that a continuous thread of high quality work has emerged and matured from within the academy. Hence, Greenwood Press's series Film Score Guides in which an entire monograph is devoted to a single film score (the second issue is under review here) heralds a notable step in the development of the field. Approaching this body of music with scholarly apparatus and analytical rigor will doubtless go far in moving film music studies further within the mainstream of musicology.

In lieu of a series introduction or explanation (I could not find any statement of aims in either the books or on the publisher's Web site), speculation arises as to why Greenwood has selected the designation "handbook" for the Film Score Guides. Devoting an entire book to one film score suggests an investigative depth rarely found for this kind of music. In this context, the word "handbook" evokes a welcoming format akin to the familiar Cambridge Music Handbooks (from Cambridge University Press), allaying fears that the writing would be inaccessible to professionals and laypersons alike. The Cambridge series usually deals with very well-known works and can draw upon a large body of literature combined with original thinking on the part of the authors. In the case of this Greenwood series, the lack of a prodigious body of literature (let alone scholarly writings) obliges the authors to lean heavily on originality in offering analyses and meaningful discussions.

But there is a particular difference that marks the Film Score Guides series. Complete scores to the films discussed are generally unavailable, unless one is either willing to travel to the libraries where they are located, or go through the arduous procedure of obtaining permissions and reproductions. Scholars can hope for a favorable response from copyright holders when asking for permission to reproduce scores for personal study, but this is by no means a guaranteed right. (Imagine the difficulties faced by those who are unaffiliated with academic institutions.) Though there are numerous music examples in the book (mostly in piano reduction or short score), even for those who have memorized the sound of the music from recordings or repeated screenings of the films, having the full score at hand is a prerequisite for serious study. (It does seem odd that Cooper mentions having seen only a microfilm copy of Vertigo's score, and never mentions the manuscript's actual location, among the Bernard Herrmann papers in the Arts Library of the University of California, Santa Barbara.)

Thus, readers of this Greenwood series are faced with the peculiar paradox of having thorough discussions of works whose scores are unavailable. In spite of the user-friendly handbook designation, those who will want to truly benefit from film score study will have to obtain scores, a preparatory task which may discourage many. I urge Greenwood and the series advisor Kate Daubney (author of the first handbook in the series, a discussion of Max Steiner's score for Now Voyager) to do all they can to ease the reader's burden and include extensive (if not complete) reproductions of full scores under discussion.

Cooper sets the stage for his discussion by providing an overview of Herrmann's career up to 1958, the year of Vertigo's release. He relies heavily on Steven Smith's biography A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), but is able to flesh out details of the composer's life. Unlike Smith, who eschewed discussion of music, Cooper writes briefly about the musical...