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Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann composed the score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and his shrieking string arrangement for the film's shower scene, achieved using only string instruments rather than a full orchestra, became one of the most instantly recognizable and frequently imitated pieces of horror film music ever written. His lengthy collaboration with Hitchcock across multiple films, including Vertigo and North by Northwest, established one of the most significant director-composer partnerships in film history before the two had a professional falling out over Hitchcock's rejection of Herrmann's score for Torn Curtain in 1966. Herrmann's score for 1941's Citizen Kane, his first film score, demonstrated an unusually sophisticated and structurally ambitious approach for a composer's debut work, directly supporting Orson Welles's own narratively unconventional filmmaking with correspondingly innovative musical structure. His combination of genuine compositional innovation, particularly his willingness to use unconventional instrumentation for specific emotional effect, and his significant influence on the subsequent generation of film composers, including direct acknowledgment from John Williams, has made Herrmann one of the most historically significant composers in the development of film scoring as a serious art form.
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John Williams
John Williams has composed the scores for some of the most commercially successful and widely recognized films in history, including Star Wars, Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the Indiana Jones and Harry Potter franchises, and his combined Academy Award nominations rank among the most of any individual in Oscars history. His two-note theme for Jaws, deceptively simple yet instantly conveying mounting dread, is widely cited as one of the most effective examples of a musical theme directly shaping audience emotional response, and Williams has stated the theme's simplicity was deliberately chosen to represent something primal and inescapable. Williams's continued collaboration with Steven Spielberg across more than four decades represents one of the longest and most commercially significant director-composer partnerships in film history, spanning nearly the entirety of both artists' major filmmaking careers. His combination of melodic, orchestrally grand compositions and his sheer commercial ubiquity across some of the highest-grossing films ever made has made Williams the film composer most universally recognized by mainstream audiences, and his scores remain among the most frequently performed pieces in orchestral pops concert programming worldwide.
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