In Psycho, Herrmann Stabs Before Mother Does

On this day 60 years ago, Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho was premiered at the DeMille Theater in New York City.

Among other things, this movie is famous for its chilling music by Bernard Herrmann and its shower scene, where an unrecognizable assailant stabs Marion Crane to death. Although Hitchcock did not want music for the shower scene, Herrmann wrote some anyway, which has since become one of the most recognizable musical passages of film music and even beyond.

In an interview published in this book, Herrmann suggested that the horrific acts in Hitchcock's film are anticipated by his opening music: "The point, however, is that after the main title nothing much happens in the picture, apparently, for 20 minutes or so. Appearances, of course, are deceiving, for in fact the drama starts immediately with the titles! The climax of Psycho is given to you by the music right at the moment the film begins. I am firmly convinced, and so is Hitchcock, that after the main titles you know that something terrible must happen. The main title sequence tells you so, and that is its function: to set the drama."

Back in 2009, I wrote an (fairly serious (?)) essay for a book on horror-movie music that supported Herrmann's point about the main title using some technical analysis of the prelude's voice leading. Here I provide a (less serious (?)) analysis of the voice leading of the music immediately after the main titles to do the same thing.

The most common way to label four voices ordered from high to low in register is to assign the highest as soprano, the second highest as alto, the third highest as tenor, and the lowest as bass. These four voices are often abbreviated using their first letter: s, a, t, and b. Four-voice music is often called SATB music. However, these voice-based designations can also be used for music that is not specifically for voices.

When the composer twice assigns some set of four distinct musical elements to these four voices, one can describe that which "transforms" one of these two assignments to the other. For example, below is shown measures 7-11 of Anton Bruckner's motet "Locus iste." The first halves of measures 7, 9, 10, and 11 each feature a G7 chord, which contains the notes G, B, D, and F. These notes are passed around from voice to voice. For example, from the G7 in m. 7 to the G7 in m. 10, the soprano's D goes to the tenor, the tenor's B goes to the bass, the bass's F goes to the soprano, and the alto's G stays in the alto. Mathematicians summarize this "passing around" of notes with parenthetical notation. In this case, (stb)(a) is shorthand for s --> t --> b --> s and a --> a.

The use of the word "stab" in the title of this blog post probably hints at where my analysis is going. There are twenty-four permutations for four elements. As Wolfram Mathworld reminds us: "There is a great deal of freedom in picking the representation of a cyclic decomposition since (1) the cycles are disjoint and can therefore be specified in any order, and (2) any rotation of a given cycle specifies the same cycle." For example, (stb)(a) could also be written as (a)(stb) or (tbs)(a). That being said, there is nonetheless only one of the twenty-four permutations that can be written as (stab).

Immediately after the main title (at 1:54 in the video below), the film proper begins with a panoramic shot of Phoenix, Arizona, followed by a long multi-shot zoom through the window of a hotel room where Marion Crane and her boyfriend are trysting.

Herrmann accompanies this footage with a cue called "The City," which begins with the two measures provided below. Much of this cue features four-note chords: in mm. 1-2, the downbeats present B°7 -- a fully-diminished seventh chord with the notes F, Ab, B and D -- while the other three beats present Fø7 -- a half-diminished seventh chord with the notes F, Ab, B, and Eb. The latter chord is especially appropriate for the amorous scene to follow, as it matches the so-called "Tristan chord," which is associated with desire in Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde and in Herrmann's score for Vertigo, released two years before Psycho.

Each string section is divided into two parts. Violins 1 and 2 play the complete four-part harmony, and violas and cellos play the same down an octave. Although instruments rather than voices perform this music, it is still reasonable to consider the four lines in violins 1 and 2 (or the four lines in violas and cellos) as -- arranged from highest to lowest -- soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. Although the chords have the same (or almost the same) pitch content, each voice does not play the same pitch throughout: rather, they descend through these chords. As they do, the notes in each chord are passed from voice to voice. The permutation for all four progressions from one "Tristan chord" to the next is indeed (stab). If one allows the Eb as a substitute for D -- or vice versa -- this permutation describes all seven progressions in these two measures.

And, by at least one person's count, Marion is stabbed (around) seven times in the shower scene.