North by Northwest Overture

An Academy Award-winner (for The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1941; later renamed All That Money Can Buy), Herrmann mainly is known for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, most famously Psycho, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo. He also composed scores for many other films, including Citizen Kane, Anna and the King of Siam, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Cape Fear, Fahrenheit 451, and Taxi Driver.

One of Herrmann’s most celebrated scores is North by Northwest (which Hitchcock had wanted to call "The Man in Lincoln's Nose"). The Overture is a driving toccata for symphony orchestra that provides a propulsive prelude to one of Hitchcock’s most virtuosic and entertaining films. The entire piece is scored in 6/8 but, like Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story, the rhythm constantly alternates between measures of standard 6/8 (123-456) and 6/8 with a 3/4 (1&-2&-3&) pattern. This rhythmic alternation gives the entire piece an exciting, if slightly off-kilter feel appropriate to the constantly shifting “wrong man” machinations of the involved plot itself.

Though the overture serves memorably as accompaniment to Saul Bass’s credit sequence, it was originally written for the film’s first extended chase sequence, where a drunken Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) tries to flee his would-be killers at high speed through Long Island country roads in a Mercedes sports car. In a typical gesture for Herrmann, the Overture reappears — in a marvellously sinister adaption — in the film’s last extended chase sequence, across the President’s faces carved into the living rock at Mount Rushmore. In a droll touch, Herrmann, recalling the drunkenness of the first chase, titled the overture’s return at the end of the film "On the Rocks!"

North by Northwest Overture by Bernard Hermann

Arr. S Schultz

[lindawarren]

Makes you just want to get up and dance! 💃