Herrmann/Horner: two Hollywood giants in the service of the emotional?
Herrmann / Horner : deux géants d’Hollywood au service de l’émotionnel ?
Published on Monday, July 29, 2024
Abstract
This international symposium pays tribute to two Hollywood giants, Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), who died on December 24, 1975 during post-production of Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver, and James Horner (1953-2015), who was accidentally killed on June 22, 2015 while piloting one of his jets. This singular way of arousing visceral emotion or probing affects offers a possible convergence between these two Hollywood giants. Following the example of the emotional register, we could examine the various aspects of Bernard Herrmann's work that have received little attention, or focus in depth on the constituent elements of James Horner's style. These are just a few of the avenues open to us, but as this is first and foremost a tribute, the paths to be taken are multiple, depending on what the participants wish to highlight.
Announcement
Thursday March 27 and Friday March 28, 2025, Université Rouen Normandie (CÉRÉdI / ERIAC)
Argument
This international symposium pays tribute to two Hollywood giants, Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), who died on December 24, 1975 (fifty years ago) during post-production of Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver, and James Horner (1953-2015), who was accidentally killed on June 22, 2015 (ten years ago) while piloting one of his jets.
Bernard Herrmann, born in New York in 1911, studied at the Julliard School, focusing on conducting and composition. He wrote music for radio dramas, notably Rebecca with Orson Welles, for whom he later composed his first film score, Citizen Kane, in 1941. Herrmann has worked with such iconic filmmakers as Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Robert Wise, Nicholas Ray, François Truffaut, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorcese. He is known for having created the codes of suspense cinema and the psychological thriller during his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most influential in the history of cinema. If he systematized the suspense chord (minor perfect chord with major seventh) or the love chord (major ninth of species) in several of Hitchcock's darkly romantic psychological thrillers (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, Marnie) to symbolize “rational/irrational ambivalence” (Brown), he also used these two harmonic colors in the concerto macabre he composed for the psychopathic pianist hero of Hangover Square (John Bram) in 1944. The suspense chord, which has become an indelible mark of psychological fissure, is concealed in Pierre Jansen's main theme for Claude Chabrol's Noces Rouges (1973) (Carayol/Rossi, 2021), or in Ennio Morricone's score for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015) (Carayol, 2022). Herrmann's particular way of arranging short melodies (“twonote motive” according to Randall D. Larson), and his harmonic (Lehman, 2018) and orchestral inventiveness, particularly in science-fiction films (Bruce, 1988; Wissner, 2013), have contributed to the recognition of his style. His concert works often maintain a porous relationship with those he wrote for the cinema: his opera Wuthering Heights resonates closely with the main theme of The Ghost and Mrs Muir (Mankiewicz, 1947), and many passages from his Sinfonietta for Strings (1936) are distilled into Psycho (1960). Above all, Herrmann has a matrix-like impact (Carayol 2023): the macabre convolutions of celesta, harp and bass clarinet in Living Doll (episode of Twilight Zone, 1963) initiate the music-box effect (use of crystalline sonorities in a dissonant harmonic-sonorous context) widely systematized to express, for example, horrific childhood; the five notes of Danny Elfman's “Batman Theme” (Burton, 1989) are rooted in the seven notes of one of the emblematic themes (“Mountain Top”) of Journey to the Center of the Earth (Levin, 1959) ; the characteristics of the main theme of The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise, 1951) - a major progression at the distance of Tritone (Murphy, 2006) and the Zarathustra phenomenon - permeate space opera music right up to Interstellar (Nolan, Zimmer, 2014). Herrmann has thus established himself as an essential pillar of the language of film music.
Born in 1953 in Los Angeles, Horner began his doctoral studies and taught at the University of California (UCLA), but after composing several scores for the American Film Institute in the 1970s, he decided to enter the film world, first as a musical advisor (Lewis Teague's Red for a Hoodlum, 1979) and then composing his first original score for Jimmy T. Murakami's Space Mercenaries (Battle Beyond the Stars) in 1980. Horner is a neo-Hollywood composer (post-John Williams), whose style came of age in the 1990s with Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995), epic lyrical masterpieces such as Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995), Legends of the Fall (Edward Swick, 1995), The Mask of Zorro (Martin Campbell, 1998), and James Cameron's Aliens, the Return (1986), Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009). He followed in Danny Elfman's footsteps with his contribution to the Spiderman franchise (The Amazing Spiderman in 2012), and Jerry Goldsmith's with the music for the second Alien and Star Trek films. Horner's writing is tonalmodal, and he explains that he has “ethnicized” his music (Cinefonia n°15, p. 50): he Hispanicizes his theme for Zorro, adds Celtic colors to the Titanic score (tin-whistle or bagpipe melodies), and he uses several modes (Aeolian, Thrygian, Dorian, Lydian) in the peplum Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004). Horner is also known for his alchemical blend of orchestra, metallic noises that clash with action scenes, and a singular hybridization of solo female vocalists (Enya in Legends of the Fall / Sissel and Céline Dion in Titanic) with synthetic voices. Horner is also known for his art of quotation: the Achilles theme in Troy comes from the last movement of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, while the melodic line of the cue “The Ride” from Mask of Zorro seems to be an Hispanic variant of John Williams' Force theme. Horner also signs his music with the four notes “ta, da, da, daaa”... If he didn't invent the formula (it's already found, for example, in the theme of Michael Small's Marathon Man), he systematized it. These four notes, raw and incisive or insidious and sly - a kind of musical cameo - symbolize death in all the composer's soundtracks.
A great deal has already been written about Bernard Herrmann. Smith, who sheds light on all aspects of Herrmann's work in relation to biographical elements; chapters and articles by Royal S. Brown focusing on the Hitchcock period; analyses by Claudia Gorbman and Kathryn Kalinak; Graham Bruce's book, which sheds precise light on the composer's entire narrative language; and Tom Schneller's article on the eros-thanatos scheme. Works on James Horner are much rarer, with the exception of the French magazine Cinéfonia Magazine (Didier Leprêtre, Jean-Christophe Arlon and Vivien Lejeune), which has conducted a number of interviews with the composer. Currently, a biography of James Horner: the emotionalist by Jean Baptiste Martin (augmented by analytical passages by French orchestrator Jehan Stefan) is forthcoming.
This singular way of arousing visceral emotion or probing affects offers a possible convergence between these two Hollywood giants.
Following the example of the emotional register (Joubert/Merlier, 2015), we could, for example, examine the various aspects of Bernard Herrmann's work that have received little attention (radio dramas, concert music, the link between music and cinema, impact on the younger generation of composers), or focus in depth on the constituent elements of James Horner's style. These are just a few of the avenues open to us, but as this is first and foremost a tribute, the paths to be taken are multiple, depending on what the participants - scientists (musicology, film aesthetics, literature, English studies), orchestrators or specialized journalists - wish to highlight in the respective works of these two Hollywood composers.
Submission guidelines
Proposals (250 words including spaces), accompanied by a short biography, should be sent to Cécile Carayol (ce.carayol@gmail.com) and Sylvaine Bataille (sylvaine.bataillebrennetot@univ-rouen.fr)
by October 30, 2024.
Scientific committee
Cécile Carayol, Sylvaine Bataille, Kathryn Kalinak, Pierre Berthomieu, Tom Schneller, Chloé Huvet, Jérôme Rossi, Jérémy Michot.
Subjects
- Modern (Main category)
- Zones and regions > America > United States
- Mind and language > Representation > History of art
- Periods > Modern > Twentieth century
- Mind and language > Representation > Visual studies
Places
- Salle de conférences - Maison de l'Université, Place Emile Blondel
Mont-Saint-Aignan, France (76)
Date(s)
- Wednesday, October 30, 2024
- Friday, March 28, 2025
Attached files
Keywords
- musique de film, musique, cinéma, Herrmann, Horner
Contact(s)
- Cécile CARAYOL
courriel : cecile [dot] carayol [at] univ-rouen [dot] fr
Information source
- Cécile CARAYOL
courriel : cecile [dot] carayol [at] univ-rouen [dot] fr
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Herrmann/Horner: two Hollywood giants in the service of the emotional? », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Monday, July 29, 2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/123s1
