Musical Analysis Of Vertigo

Yu Li

Group 5: Alexander Deris, Kellen Gan, Yu Li Gregory Loden

Musc 1113

Soundtrack report: Vertigo(1958)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Music by Bernard Herrmann

In Hitchcock's great movie, “Vertigo”, I chose the dressing scene from 117 mins. The movie talked about a former police detective who had acrophobia became a private detective of a supernatural events. In this scene, the detective, John Ferguson, realized that his new lover supposed to be the dead Madeleine. Ferguson had been shocked and confused. However, he already thought that his new lover, Judy, could be Madeleine. He still trusted Judy’s denial. When the moment he saw the cursed necklace, he thought about possibilities. Those possibilities scared Ferguson and scared the

audiences which Herrmann’s intensive music. In this dressing scene and the next several scenes, Herrmann changed the music style dramatically.

The whole film is consisted of two leitmotifs. One is suspense theme usually with horn to express suspense and thrill, the other is romantic theme mainly with violin to describe love story and romantic scene. The dressing scene consists of the two themes as well. When Judy is dressing up and making up her face, the suspense theme comes along with the image of the ruby necklace. But the music turns around to romantic theme after her dressing.
The suspense music starts with a very strong and attentional horn note.

The first strong impressive horn sound is a stressed syllable before the image of the necklace. The melody is rather monotonous with several simple notes but is deep and low with strong power. The rhythm is very infectious, making audience think about the suspense and feel the tension. However for the romantic part when Judy finishes her dressing coming to muss and kiss with Ferguson, the music turns mainly to romance theme with violin. Horn theme also interweaves together in it in very low sound. The romantic music with violin is soft melody with coherent notes, to express the love and relief

mood.
The interaction between the sound and dialogue is extremely interesting. In the beginning of the scene, the soundtrack mainly focused on the dialogue between Ferguson and Judy. Their dialogue was a very boring daily conversation that could happen between any couple. Besides the dialogue, most of other sounds were noises. The Hermann wanted to use only the dialogue to create a ordinary phenomenon of the scene. However, we still could hear some noise made by Judy, like the sound of footstep, the sound made by necklace and the sound Judy made when she was dressing. All of the sound imperceptibly moved the audience's’ attention to Judy. After Ferguson noticed the old spanish necklace, the balance between music and dialogue had been changed. The music came in very loudly, and it covered Judy’s speech. That implied Ferguson started a flashback and could hear Judy anymore. Right after Ferguson’s flashback, the music’s volume went down. We could hear Judy’ voice again. Instant disappearing, Herrmann added another theme music here. He putted same attention on both two theme music. So audiences would notice that the confliction between Ferguson’s suspense and Judy’s romance.

The relation of sound track to visualization is definitely the most attractive part in this scene. Both of the suspense theme and romance theme music works for the visualization. For the first theme, the strong horn syllable note suddenly comes in before the image of the ruby necklace. Here the music is earlier than the image so audience feel tension and focus more on the next image after the strong note emerges. Also the suspense music fits really well in Ferguson’s flashback. Hitchcock uses very simple images of ruby necklace and of a woman sitting front of a painting to express the idea that Ferguson gets his memories and knows the fakery front of him now. The orchestra circulates several notes here to make audience dig into the image and feel the suspense.
For the romance theme, the soft violin solo music comes along when Judy walks to Ferguson and gives him a hug and kisses.

Personally I believe the second part of this scene is the most interesting part in interaction with sound and film. Because Vertigo is the first colorful film by Hitchcock, he made lots of attempts in color visualization. The whole room in this scene is fulfilled with cozy pink and pale green, which represent two characters Judy and Ferguson. Judy is in love with Ferguson so her heart is fulfilled with cozy pink, but Ferguson is obviously not. Sitting in the corner of the room, the pale green around the pink represents his pensive status. Maybe he is suspecting Judy for all the mysterious questions. In this scene the orchestra gets along well with the colors. The heavy and low horn interweaves with the soft violin in here perfectly, to express Judy’s and Ferguson’s mood and status separately when they are

kissing.

As the nominee of the best sound in the 1959 academy award, Vertigo has a great soundtrack. When Hitchcock and Herrmann worked together, the music the film became extremely dramatic. The music of Vertigo is like angel and evil. The angel is the romance violin and the evil is the suspense horn. However, in the plot, the romance angel represent a murder. And the suspense evil represent a former police detective. In this film, music made the confliction. The confliction made the movie became very intensive. In this movie, Herrmann not only worked the music as other same period Hollywood movie. Sometimes his music is more attractive than the film’s visual. He used his music to manipulate audience attention. I guess that is why the movie received countless academic compliment.