... his score for Torn Curtain (1966) on studio advice. His last score was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), and he died just hours after recording it. Bernard Herrmann is one of the most important film composers of the 20th century. He was one of the key figures in creating the genre of film music. He developed a musical language that was ideally suited to easily fitting to varying lengths of scene. On the other hand, made strong use of short repeated rhythmic phrases and ostinati. These could be readily repeated to fit the length of a scene and provided a feeling of onward motion appropriate to strong filmic story telling such as suspense and thriller films. Repeated rhythmic patterns were of course well known to the improvising pianists and organists of the silent film days - the 'vamp 'till ready' technique. They had also became an idiosyncratic element of the ...

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