Miklos Rozsa - The Nightmare (The Lost Weekend: Original Motion Picture Score)
Rozsa’s score for The Lost Weekend featured the first use of a theremin in a Hollywood film. He chose the instrument because he thought its eerie, other-worldly sound captured the distorted perceptions of reality experienced by an alcoholic on a bender.
Bernard Herrmann - The Elevator/Magnetic Pull /Study/Conference /The Jewelry Store (The Day The Earth Stood Still: 20th Century Fox Film Scores)
Miklós Rózsa - Ski Run (Spellbound: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
“It was the theremin that made the score a sensation. Here was an instrument that seemed magic, both in its sound and the way that sound was created. One plays the theremin without ever touching it: the performer moves his or her hands above the object exactly like a magician, producing otherworldly sonorities that theremin lovers call ether music.
The theremin was heard as a “primal scream”, the first “coming together of science & music”. It was therefore perfect for Spellbound, where it invokes the science of psychiatry in the guise of what seems like supernatural spookery (or, depending on one’s point of view, the reverse).
-Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music
Bernard Herrmann - Prelude/Outer Space/Radar (The Day The Earth Stood Still: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
“[Herrmann’s score for the sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still] was another scoring milestone that anticipated the era of electronic music with its then unheard of instrumentation for electric violin, electric bass, two high and low electric theremins, four pianos, four harps and a ‘very strange section of about 30-odd brass.’…What the film needed was an extraterrestrial strangeness, a sense of the bizarre and unsettling; this Herrmann achieved through his wisely sparse electronic soundtrack.
If the music’s impact is lessened today, the reason is not the score itself but the host of inferior imitations its success spawned.”
-excerpted from A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann by Steven Smith
