HITCHCOCK and Music

[ronPrice]

HITCHCOCK and MUSIC

Jack Sullivan is director of American Studies and professor of English at Rider University, New Jersey, USA. He has written[SUP]1[/SUP] a long overdue tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's musical perspicacity. Sullivan demonstrates Hitchcock’s uncanny ability to manipulate audiences not only with his striking, frightening images but also his adroit use of music, of all kinds, to heighten suspense, atmosphere and drama. He also knew when to employ silences or musical rests to maximum effect. Some of his most distinguished composers, such as Arthur Benjamin, credited him with being far more serious about music than any other director.

Hitchcock was a cultured man. He had no formal music training yet was a fervent music-lover and keen concertgoer. Hitchcock came into my life, perhaps as early as 1954 with Dial “M” For Murder, and about the same time as the Baha'i Faith also came into my family's life when I was in my late childhood.-Ron Price with thanks to [SUP]1[/SUP]Ian Lace’s review at Music Web International of Hitchcock's music, Jack Sullivan, Yale University Press, 2006.

You’d been going strong, Alfred,
for thirty years before you came
into my life with Dial “M” For
Murder, with Psycho and The
Birds, their gripping music &
their memorable sounds, now
lost in my memory bank from
my childhood and teens when
the winter of my own life was
setting in early & new values[SUP]1[/SUP]
had begun to capture my mind
& imagination long ago, Alfred.

Over your long career[SUP]2[/SUP] you presided
over more musical styles than any
directors in history; ultimately you
changed how we thought about film
music, any film music--oh so clever.

And thanks, Jack, for your discussion
of Hitchcock’s music to influence the
atmosphere, characterization and even
storylines of his films.......Hitchcock’s
relationships with composers: Bernard
Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Maurice
Jarr and Franz Waxman--achievement,
a sign of genius; they changed the way
we watched-listened to movies-yessiree.

[SUP]1[/SUP] The Bahá'í Faith
[SUP]2 [/SUP] From his work on a film in 1921, The Lodger, to his last in 1976, Family Plot

Ron Price
14/8/'09 to 18/1/'15
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[Jerome]

Interesting post - thx Ron. And I learnt a new word - 'perspicacity' - will have to look that one up. You learn something every day.

[CRAZY-HORSE]

Interesting post - thx Ron. And I learnt a new word - 'perspicacity' - will have to look that one up. You learn something every day.

my dad always told me "son, the day you don't learn anything new,however trivial or menial, is the day you should give up on life"

I think that was a good statement,and one I live by

[Jerome]

Very good advice! I like the part in the movie 'Frankie and Johnny' where Al Pacino talks about learning a new word every day. Makes a lot of sense to me.

[ronPrice]

Thanks, folks, for your responses. Since the subject of learning has entered this thread I'll add a post below on that subject.-Ron
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LEARNING

Part 1:

In her Charles Haskins Lecture for 2001 entitled “A Life of Learning” Helen Vendler[SUP]1 [/SUP]outlines what her life of learning was like. Vendler is a leading American critic of poetry and has been a Professor at Harvard since 1981. She begins by describing “the most decisive episode of her learning.” Looking back over the years since my first memory in 1947, some 60 years, I think the most decisive learning experience I had was the dawning of an intellectual enthusiasm insensibly and sensibly from the age of 15 to 18.

Vendler describes what she calls “her eeriest learning experience.” The reading of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, first in 1984 and by degrees until 1992 when I had an immersion in her work was, perhaps, my eeriest learning episode. Finally, Vendler gives us her “most anguishing learning.” Mine was not an academic learning but was experiential-psycho-neurological and occurred first in 1963, then in 1965, again in 1968, 1979 and 1980 and was associated with my bi-polar disorder. -Ron Price with thanks to [SUP]1[/SUP]Helen Vendler, “A Life of Learning,” American Council of Learned Societies: Occasional Paper No.50.

Part 2:

I’ve always found it pretty full-on
this learning business, consuming
in one way or another right back to,
what, ’53, ’59, ’62?---idiosyncratic,
patchy at times, often exhausting,
always anxious in some degree.

It took another fifty years: ‘49-‘99
before the learning that came from
writing was given a full-steam-head.

I finally met myself in my poetry
after decades of meeting students,
teachers, more subjects than I could
count in more towns than I care to
remember. And then there were those
frustrations, fears, work, ambitions,
successes, failures which drained away
my energy. Slowly I learned to accept
my incapacities......not all was victory.

There was just too much keeping me from
writing poetry but, by 1992, the channels
were finally opening for my particular style,
for defining my particular style, linking style
to personality, to my inner life, inner being
and it was so peculiar, so stimulating, that I
was overcome by a desire to write and write
and read and read. All my later work stemmed
from a compulsion, an obsession, a thirst, a mild
intoxication to turn the past and the future into
words, into poems in the present, in some great
orgy of acquisitiveness.........And I cry inwardly:
“what I do is me: for that I came.”

Ron Price
14/3/'07 to 8/8/'15.