Bernard Herrmann

Bernard Herrmann (born Maximillian Herman; June 29, 1911 – December 24, 1975) was an American composer and conductor best known for his work in film scoring. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers of all time. Alex Ross writes that "Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary." As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers.

As a young man, Herrmann was the chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, which led him to become the composer for Orson Welles's radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. This led him to write his first film score, for Welles's directorial debut Citizen Kane (1941). That year, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Devil and Daniel Webster. He worked with Welles again on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Jane Eyre (1943). He is best known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he worked on nine films including The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) (where he makes a cameo as the conductor at Royal Albert Hall), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) (as "sound consultant"), and Marnie (1964).