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| Herrmann |
Taxi Driver: (Bernard Herrmann) The 1970's were a
time when cinema dwelled on disillusionment with society, introspective
examinations of psychosis, and extraordinary violence, and Martin
Scorsese's 1976 thriller
Taxi Driver is a neo-noir combination of
all those trends. Extremely well regarded and lauded as one of the top
films of its era, the film was a very low budget production for which
many of its main players took minimal pay in order for the movie to be
made. The setting is a grimy, destitute New York City, and its main
character is a struggling Vietnam veteran who cannot escape his mental
instability as he is desperately alone and hates what he sees in the
city around him. His moral compass is strong enough to make him an
antihero, but despite whatever good deeds he accomplishes, the pure
insanity with which is achieves that end reveals that his future will be
bleak even after this film's seemingly innocuous conclusion. A cab
driver, the veteran loathes watching the nightlife around him, and when
his date with a beautiful campaign worker goes understandably sour, he
starts traversing a path to self-destruction that includes compulsive
personal habits, acquisition of guns, and eventually a series of
attempted and successful killings. But the only successful murders he
accomplishes at the climax are of pimps and mafia, making him a hero who
saves a 12-year-old girl from prostitution. It's a brilliantly
disturbing film led by memorable performances from Robert De Niro and a
very young Jodie Foster, and another widely praised aspect of the movie
nominated for countless awards is Bernard Herrmann's score. Although
reemerging into the industry during the 1970's after an exile from
Hollywood in the prior decade, Herrmann was still extremely picky about
which films he would accept, especially those from upstart young
directors. He originally strongly resisted scoring
Taxi Driver,
claiming he was too busy with
Obsession, but the director
insisted until he prevailed. As usual, the composer dictated all
decisions about the music, and he recorded one last time in Los Angeles
and was received warmly by the musicians upon his return.
Although
Taxi Driver is an extremely well-respected
score, it's one that is challenging and even questionably applied at
times, butchered by Scorsese in the final cut. But it's a fascinating
study, as to be expected, and at the very least it represents an
intriguing change of pace for the composer at the sunset of his career.
The score is split between the brutal atmospheres for the man and the
city on one side and attractive blues for a seemingly nonexistent sense
of hope on the other. Although he had split with Hitchcock over jazz,
Herrmann finally explored a similar mode here, and it's quite good. It's
almost the equivalent of his version of Jerry Goldsmith's
The Russia
House in a long career, but obviously demented in this case as all
Herrmann works of this nature will be. The instrumentation in
Taxi
Driver isn't as skewed or limited as in some of this other 1970's
works. The most obvious player is the swooning alto saxophone for the
presence of the love interest, Betsy, and some semblance of hope in a
better future, this style joined by piano and horn twists of flair along
with subtle percussion and bass. Meanwhile, you've got the oppressive
alternative: the brass, snare, and timpani for the tormented,
militaristic side of the lead character. Four trumpets, four horns, four
trombones, and two tubas are joined by a percussion section including
snare, castanets, wood blocks, tambourines, tam-tam gong, and various
drums. The snare is a particularly vibrant contributor for a
militaristic character, as is a handful of vibraphone layers. For the
concept of insanity, Herrmann reprises his consistent model of applying
four clarinets, two bassoons, two contrabassoons, and two harps,
groaning or swirling around the drain as needed. The strings include an
emphasis on ten players in the deepest regions, jazz bass included,
along with violins and violas. An electric keyboard exists for a sense
of doomed urban romance, the composer seemingly compelled to add at
least one electric element to each of his works by this point. A
vibraphone heard backwards is used as a stinger for things that set off
the veteran, most famously in the final scene. That particular
last-minute, poignant use is not included on album, but its
forward-oriented alternative can be heard in "Hitting the Girl."
One of the distinctive aspects of Herrmann's approach to
Taxi Driver is his decision to use a mechanically consistent 4/4
meter that very basically plods along like the lead character. There's
nothing complicated about his intellect, so the composer treats him and
his psychosis with a very straight-forward march towards doom. His
structures are repeated over and over to represent a man stuck in his
routine and in his own head. There's a relentless quality to the music
that cannot be escaped, even when the bluesy elements slightly bleed
into the militaristic portions. All of the rhythmic formations suggest a
person trapped with no escape, and Herrmann never really lets the
listener off the hook, either, despite the alluring respites during the
soothing bluesy passages. The narrative of the score suffers mightily
from the filmmakers' splicing of these blues sequences into places they
were not intended by the composer, and the overall flow of the work
suffers apart from the film as a result. While intellectually engaging,
the "Main Title" cue is a frustratingly forced merging of two different
recordings, Herrmann's strictly darker cue as written badly chopped up
to include the blues passages. The straight blues of that theme is
inserted elsewhere artificially as well, and cue sheets show that
Herrmann had entirely different intentions for his themes in many of the
cues than what was ultimately recorded and used on screen. His work has
only one major theme that most listeners will recognize, but there are
actually three identities at war throughout. The praise you hear for the
score is often due to Betsy's theme, which is something of a misnomer in
that the idea also applies to the veteran's fleeting hopes for a better
life and a better outcome for society. This romantic theme that made the
score famous is spliced into the tormented material at 0:43 and 1:33
into "Main Title" in awkward ways. Early in the score, the militaristic
snare and cymbal slowly segue into the theme's chords with harp at the
forefront. Herrmann formally applies the sax version of the theme to
Betsy in "They Cannot Touch Her," the longest open development of the
idea for the jazz ensemble until the closing scene. A vibraphone and low
woodwind growl of the idea in "Phone Call" yields to a wholesale reprise
from the prior suite in "Betsy's Theme" as embedded in the longer
cue.
Tortured on electric keyboard twice in "The .44 Magnum
is a Monster," the beckoning allure of Betsy's bluesy theme in
Taxi
Driver is forced against the score's descending violence motif in
"Sport and Iris" and slight on muted trumpets at the outset of "The $20
Bill." The idea is artificially inserted into "Target Practice" in
bluesy form with another very awkward splice, and brass carries it
boldly over thumping bass drum at 3:09 into "After the Carnage" as the
audience tries to comprehend the bloody climax of the tale. A full
rendition of the theme in "A Reluctant Hero/Betsy" is almost too dreamy
when heard in the picture, and this cue is likely partially responsible
for rampant speculation that the entire closing sequence of the movie is
actually a dream as the main character is dying. The director assures
that this is not the case, and the scene is simply meant to suggest that
while everything seems fine at that moment, the character is still
doomed in the future. To that end, the backwards vibraphone stinger that
Herrmann recommended later for De Niro's sudden alarmed look into his
rearview mirror during his final moment on screen is a great touch. His
character, the famed Travis Bickle, receives his own theme of violence
that battles Herrmann's motif for the dark city. The Travis violence
idea is a descending four or five-note identity sometimes reduced to
three notes of ominous intent, applied to suggest future violence. It
plods with the snare rhythms in "I Realize How Much She is Like the
Others" but reverses into an ascending formation for the start of his
combative regimen in "Getting Into Shape." The original descending
formation expands to its destined five-note form in "Gun Play," the
composer repeatedly cycling through this defeated phrase to denote
inevitability, and this tool continues in "Dear Father & Mother" and
"The Card." The prior, four-note descent in "Sport and Iris" is
countered by the ascending variant as counterpoint; the direct conflict
is finally in place between these two ideas in the work, the ascending
phrase replaced by Betsy's theme as the foil with sinister results. The
violence motif builds anticipation in "Assassination Attempt," resolves
the dissonant horror of "After the Carnage" momentarily, and dives into
a bleak future on low winds as the very last thing you hear in the score
during "End Credits," that performance reprised in the middle of the
cue's longer version, "God's Lonely Man."
The final recurring identity in
Taxi Driver is
Herrmann's dark city motif, rhythmically descending pairs of despair
that open "Main Title" with menace on brass, low winds, and snare before
returning at 1:19 and 1:48 suddenly with increasing percussive
interference. Softened slightly to adopt the bluesy rhythm in "Thank God
for the Rain," this material becomes more insistent on brass and
woodwinds in its endless pulses as the cue progresses. This slight snare
and cymbal rhythm leads to continued, lonely pulses of the motif on top
in subsequent moments. Although streamlined into a castanet and
harp-laden rhythm of trite angst in "You're Gonna Die in Hell," this cue
went unused in the final cut of the film, along with the scene it was
meant for. Herrmann uses this idea to strike tension on muted brass late
in "The .44 Magnum is a Monster" and reduces it to a propulsive,
octave-hopping rhythm in the bass under snare in "Listen You
Screwheads." It strikes as an interlude during the extreme seething of
"Sport and Iris," tugs around the margins of "Target Practice," and
joins the Travis material as the descent to violence is affirmed in
"Assassination Attempt," loudly pulsing in the middle of the cue for the
action of the scene. The dark city motif becomes a single dissonant
drone of loud intent in "After the Carnage," but it reprises its opening
credits position in "End Credits" for shots of the city at night.
Additional hits of the idea are heard in the alternate version of the
end credits in "God's Lonely Man," resolving into a disparately
major-key fanfare closing, which is really odd even when you consider
the composer's usual method of ending all his scores in such a way. The
overall package for
Taxi Driver can be split between the easy,
attractive blues and everything else. The learned Herrmann collector
will love the "everything else," but mainstream listeners will want the
five to ten minutes of Betsy's theme performances, including the album's
Dave Blume arrangements for contemporary jazz and light rock that
totally lose the Herrmann touch. On both the two variants of the
commercial soundtrack albums, the sound quality is significantly muffled
compared to what you hear in the film. While
Taxi Driver may not
be the closing opus that
Obsession turned out to be, it's a
fascinating coda to Herrmann's career. Following the final day of
sessions, he had dinner with his wife and retired to the hotel room
where he passed away, released from his assignment for this film and
from life itself.
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The insert of the 1986 Varèse Sarabande album contains
basic notes about the score. Those of the 1989 Arista and Alhambra
albums offer no such information. The 1998 Arista albums provide
detailed notes in an awkwardly unfolding insert poster, with the
"Spiegel Edition" contained within a cardboard slipcase.
