ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which was released by MGM in July 1959. Taking the apparent shared aesthetic understanding of Hitchcock’s core production team as its starting point, it reveals a number of resonances between the techniques employed in Herrmann’s score and the film’s narrative strategies. It opens by considering a particular cognitive dissonance that the composer establishes through the score’s contribution to the film’s semiosis, concentrating on the film’s ‘overture’. The chapter then proceeds to examine some of the formal, thematic, and rhythmic means (both progressive and conservative by the standards of contemporaneous Hollywood film music) by which the score affords musical continuity and coherence. Taking account of the influence of Herrmann’s repertoire as a prolific conductor on his material and its orchestration, it draws attention to examples of self-quotation from two earlier films. It is suggested that through the employment of these various resources Herrmann introduces a tangible freshness and novelty to his score.
