Bernie Herrmann, was unique as am American composer. I saw the Episode the other night. No one could have captured the conflicting emotion like Bernie. He is an American original. Long live his music.
I saw the episode recently (actually have seen it many times over my decades old life) -- and always the soundtrack stayed in my head. I should have known it was Bernard Herrmann.
I just bought this magnificent 5-disc CD collection. It was a tad pricey but worth owning for any fan of the composer, especially for The Jar suites. Absolutely amazing music. I love listening to this while I am walking around or in a mall or in supermarket. It makes me feel very cinematically creepy and removes me mentally from the mundane surroundings. Everything takes on a distinct sinister air. Highly recommended to all fans.
These scores for Alfred Hitchcock's show are the equal of his best feature films. If anything, they are more musically sophisticated than many of his scores for films.
Thank you for introducing me to a Bernard Herrmann score I've never heard before! His music can stir emotions like no one else's can. As for Debussy and Ravel influences--I was a fan of Herrmann scores before I'd heard most of Debussy or Ravel, and Herrmann's music taught me to love Debussy's and Ravel's!
Enjoyable change of pace in the music that I've been listening to; It might be excellent accompaniment to a reading of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher.
Simple orchestration...Strings, Harp and Clarinet (or oboe) and thats it...Love Herrmann's 'small' orchestra scores for television...to me they are all symphonies'..The best of the Hitchcock Hour scores is Herrmann's 'Body in the Barn'
Could it be a preference for the half-hour episodes from earlier seasons? Or, behind-the-scenes, differences in copyrights, e.g.? I am a fortunate owner of the multi-disc CD set. Love it. So, where does an American viewer purchase a 1964 - 65 season set of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour", i.e., the third and final year of the hour version of the anthology that began in 1955 as 30-minute episodes? The authorized, commercially available set from the UK does Americans no good (unless one invests in and "monkeys around" with transfers of the foreign (to the U.S. audience) formats. Four letters / five characters: H E L P !
Note the references to the MARNIE score, contemporary with this, tho it's unclear which came first (I assume the Marnie score came first).BH was esp. fond of that main theme & repeated it in other TV scores, tho it's reminiscent of Leonard Rosenman's theme for a James Dean movie.
This is a great score, but there's some other music in this episode I'm curious about... At the club the couple goes to, there's some jazzy rock 'n' roll playing... In this clip, it starts at about 26:20: dai.ly/x5yvvrz Does anybody have any idea who it is, or what it is? If that were on an album, I'd buy it...
