“That being said, the organ is inherently mysterious. I think part of me wants to say that organs are scary in the same way snakes are scary - we’ve been conditioned to think this is scary,” said Horsley. She is the dean of the Greater Hartford chapter of the American Guild of Organists and the music director at Trinity Episcopal Church in Hartford. To help me break down why this is, I sat down with organist Michelle Horsley and asked for her thoughts. It seems like anything played in a minor key on a massive pipe organ automatically evokes a sense of tension or dread. The pipe organ is often regarded as the “king of musical instruments,” but it’s also the king of scary music. It's tempting to listen to the Psycho score and say, “Oh, what a brilliant and inspired decision to only write for strings as a parallel to shooting the film in black and white,’’ but the decision was actually dictated by the budget.This Friday evening, the Greater Hartford chapter of the American Guild of Organists will host its 30th annual “Pipescreams” event - a kind of spooky organ crawl and concert. And that's probably why the Psycho score is written only for string instruments. So the budget was much lower Herrmann didn't have as much money to pay for a large orchestra. ![]() ![]() It was originally planned to be an episode of Alfred Hitchcock’s TV show and not a feature film. The second time through they do the famous sliding-string sound to get that tearing or ripping effect.īut, like Halloween, there's a budgetary explanation for the Psycho score as well. So that shower scene is just two pitches. Herrmann's music is full of unprepared and resolved dissonances. It is arguably the first slasher film of its kind. Horror music has roots in the early days of film accompanying and even further into concert hall music and operas, but one key influence here is Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant score for Psycho. The Halloween score didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s another way to create something that sounds unstable or sounds like it needs to move. It’s dissonant, and the dissonances are not prepared or resolved. There are several scenes in Halloween that hold two notes for a long time. Horror film scores will hold pedal tones for an extremely long time sometimes for 30 seconds or 60 seconds. And normally, the pedal tone will eventually resolve into some sort of cadence that your ear is expecting. A pedal tone is a way to create a kind of suspense you're holding a note longer than you would expect it to be held. He uses pedal tones incredibly effectively. What other tricks does Carpenter use during the rest of the film? Of course, Halloween is more than just the infamous theme music. Halloween is about these shocks and surprises and so the music has shocks and surprises as well. And it works as a design principle for the whole way the film is going to work. He's cycling through patterns and efficiently reusing musical ideas.Ĭarpenter’s setting up an idea of surprise with the music. The theme is mostly three pitches that he repeats several times, and then he shifts it all down a half step. For Carpenter to do it all himself on the synthesizer would just be much cheaper. You're paying individual players and recording engineers and so forth. A typical feature film would have budgeted for an entire orchestra, which is quite expensive. It's an economical score at a very practical level because, as far as I can tell, it’s just synthesizers. How does that contribute to its staying power? ![]() ![]() It gives the theme a subtle way of sounding like the world is out of balance, that something is askew or not right. We're used to hearing music that has really even, steady pulses.Ī grouping of five is just something our ears aren't accustomed to. That's pretty unusual, at least for film music and for mainstream music. It's got five pulses instead of just a group of two or of three. The main thing is that it’s in 5/4 time, an asymmetrical meter. John Carpenter's famous theme for Halloween is distinctive for a couple of reasons. What makes the Halloween theme so unsettling?
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