Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra (ed. Mauceri) (1960)

Rated number 4 score on American Film Institute's 100 Years of Film Scores.

Sections
   Prelude
   The Madhouse
   The Murder
   The Water
   The Swamp
   The Stairs, The Knife and The Cellar
   Finale

Notes:
In 1968, eight years after Bernard Herrmann had completed his score to Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, the composer was living in London where he had gone, hoping to find greater respect for his music and more opportunities to conduct. It was then that he prepared performing editions of a number of his greatest film scores. Before this, the music remained unplayed and unplayable, since they were unpublished and existed only as a series of raw film cues.

The greatest creation of this period was his Psycho — A Narrative for String Orchestra. In this new work, he took multiple cues, re-ordered and recomposed them, changing hundreds of details, making internal cuts and repeats and linking the elements together so as to create a single concert work. It was not a suite, nor was it a sequence of short cues to accompany film clips: It was a concert work that was intended to free the music from the visual elements of the film. In this sense it is not unlike Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky, and Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica. Musical material from a film score had been adapted into a concert work.

Herrmann never performed the work live, though he did record it. In over thirty years the only orchestral material available for performance was the individual cues from which the Narrative was based. For some reason no one seemed to notice that what was being performed and recorded was not the work Herrmann had composed and recorded.

In 1999, in preparing for a Hitchcock Centennial concert in Los Angeles, the discrepancies between the published materials and the Herrmann's recording led me to suggest to John Waxman what I believed had happened: that the cues that had been photocopied for Herrmann for his use in composing the new work were then rented as if they constituted the work itself.

Contacting Mrs. Herrmann in London, we were able to get color photocopies of Herrmann's work on the old cues. By comparing those manuscripts with his recording, it was possible to reconstruct a new score, which is now published and can supplant the unedited cues that have been used all these years.

The world concert premiere of Psycho — A Narrative for String Orchestra took place at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on February 9, 2000 with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. The European premiere took place on January 19, 2001 with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. Both performances were under my direction.

John Mauceri
New York City
March 1, 2001

This second edition is based on more than a decade of performances and a further comparision of sources. Herrmann's bowings, many of which were not used in his recording, have been adjusted to better conform with his intentions as heard on that performance.
JM (September, 2013)