Bernard Herrmann: Music as a Measurement of Time

This film composer’s forte was the shaping of time in music to complement the director’s visual shaping of time on the screen.

Orson Welles (L) and Bernard Herrmann (center, back) rehearse for "The Mercury Theatre on the Air," a show that performed the infamous "War of the Worlds" prank on radio listeners in 1938. Public Domain

In 1952, “Sight and Sound,” a prominent British journal of film criticism, named “Citizen Kane” the best film ever made. Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece held to that position for six decades until, in 2012, the No. 1 slot was turned over to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958).

The two films had only one thing in common: Both boasted scores by composer Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975).